This Way West

The start of another week and winter has made a full return to Colorado. Gone are the 60 degree days that January held for us. Hello biting cold, snow and ice. Usually I enjoy the winter as it opens up the snow sports activities and justifies blowing entire weekends in Aspen and Vail. With the huge snow dumps from last year this year promised to be great. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case, and when there is no snow in the mountains running in 60 degree weather in January makes up for it. But now winter is actually here and I am honestly disappointed. I feel tricked; lulled in to thinking that running in shorts should be a normal thing in January. This winter has been like the phenomenal looking girl that you bring home from the bar. She looked great when you were moving in, you had some good times after the bar closes but now you’ve woken up and realize that you were 12 beers deep, this girl’s looks definitely benefited from bad lighting and she keeps asking about when you are going to call her again. Let’s hope the next one turns out better.

The scenery on the commute home

The Feed

The Denver Bar Scene: 5280 Magazine has a feature up showcasing its choices for the 35 Best Bars in Denver. I haven’t gotten to explore too many of the bars up there so who knows how decent of a list this is, but it might provide you with some good spots for Valentine’s Day tomorrow. Or it might give you spots to avoid if you are single and saddened by the sight of overly giddy women and men managing to plaster an almost genuine smile on their faces as they calculate exactly how much their budget is being demolished by a holiday manufactured by corporations.

Ride the Rockies: Ride the Rockies is an annual event spread over 6 to 7 days in which cyclists (mostly recreational riders) pedal all over Colorado in part to raise money for non-profits but mostly to tell people that they biked all over Colorado. The route for this year has been announced.

Cycling and Coffee: Bicycling Magazine speared my heart and yanked it in with a post dealing with coffee companies with a cycling theme. What the hell is a “cycling themed coffee company”? Head over to the post to find out. Good stuff.

Teva Mountain Games and CDOT Idiocy: Vail has wrapped up the first edition of its Winter Teva Mountain Games event, featuring lots of snow based events (X-Country Snowshoe, Boot Run, Nordic Freestyle, Big Air) and even some dog based events (Avy Dogs and X-Country Snowshoe). You can find the results here.

From the Twitterverse reactions it sounds like the event was a good time and had a great turnout. The turnout was so great that the Colorado Department of Transportation decided that the “pace cars” it has been using to regulate the flow of cars and reduce traffic issues stood no chance against…traffic issues. Really CDOT? You spend who knows how much money this summer studying the effect of pace cars and you get one event that brings extra traffic and you shut it down. Great investment (and sorry we linked you to the Denver Post for that story. Get ready to have your computer blown up by some pop up ads). How is CDOT going to make the case, along with the city of Denver, that Colorado is ready for some Winter Olympics action? What the I-70 corridor needs is some progressive planning. Not novelty fixes like pace cars.

That is it for us. Enjoy the start of the week. Let’s hope that the mountains get some snow and you can forget the fact that the girl you brought home from the bar Saturday night will forever remind you of why you shouldn’t drink and prowl.

Cold and dark this morning. I’m glad that my biggest dilemma is choosing which bag to crack open before I head out to the trails.

The Feed

Coffee and Caffeine: The New York Times has an article up about the new single-serve coffee brewer fad and the actual economics of getting your coffee from pre-packaged pods. Shockingly, the convenience of getting a hot single serve cup of coffee is really bad for you wallet. The equivalent per pound price works out to about $50.00 per pound. Ouch for the wallet. And probably an even bigger ouch for the environment.

If you aren’t in to sucking back endless cups of coffee every morning, a Harvard professor has your alternative; a powder like form of caffeine that can be literally breathed in. I’m wondering if it can be used during a race. Better to breathe in caffeine than have to take down a goo that has been smashed against your hip for two hours.

Outdoor Apps: Two new apps are focusing on Colorado ski resorts. The more derivative (sorry Aspen, but EpicMix has been around for a while now) allows you to track your ski day at the Aspen resorts and reportedly will allow you to track your days at other resorts as well, using RFID technology. The app hasn’t been approved by iTunes yet so don’t start scrounging for it. When it does pop up we will put the link up.

The other app, for now called Freshy Map (really?) uses a combination of weather reports, web cams, road conditions and more to help guide you towards your best opportunity for powder. The best part about the app is that it seems to all for customization; allowing you to create alerts and definitions for what you consider a “powder” day.

Injury Prevention: The New York Times has a piece up summarizing a Harvard study that reviewed data collected from the school’s distance running teams to analyze how a runner’s foot strike can affect injury rates (a foot strike being either heel-first or forefoot-first). The big takeaway from the study is that heel strikers had higher injury rates. The other takeaway; if your running form isn’t causing you injury, you don’t necessarily need to change it.

Men’s Journal has an article up outlining 6 “rules” for injury prevention, which basically boil down to not being completely oblivious to your body. The article does contain some good exercises to gauge overall body strength, but as most things Men’s Journal oriented, the article is designed to help the meat heads stay injury free. Disappointingly, the magazine has posted no rules for how to slam as much protein shake in to your body in the shortest period of time possible.

A Big Move: One of our favorite blogs, Sweat Science, has moved to Runner’s World where the author, Alex Hutchinson, will also have a regular monthly column called Fast Lane. Good news for Runner’s World readers. Alex’s stuff is fantastic and boils down some pretty hard science in to easily readable segments. The new web address is here along with his first post. Turns out that exercising in a polluted environment can actually reduce lung inflammation due to pollution. Good to know in case you decide that moving to China sounds fun.

I read a funny article the other day about the struggle of a cycling fan in dealing with the snobbery that seems to permeate the sport and its participants. The article posed a simple question: Why do those who love and embrace a sport believe that those who are not at their level are somehow “less” in their participation in that sport?

I had this argument with a friend yesterday, one who routinely runs ultra marathons and other ultra races. My friend’s co-worker was boasting about running a “marathon” in a few weeks which my friend (most likely with some irritation in her voice) pointed out was actually a 10K run. The co-worker’s response: “it’s all the same thing,” which sent my friend in to the rageasphere.

I understand my friend’s frustration, but does it matter? Shouldn’t we as athletes, skiers, snowboarders, runners, and riders be happy that someone is entering in to a world we love so much?  Should we think of the co-worker’s participation as somehow less just because she can’t tell the difference between a 10K and a marathon? Or should we embrace the fact that someone, in a country comprised of mostly obese people, has chosen, for at least one Saturday, to put down the Doritos and get some exercise? I vote the latter. Her participation is not less. She’ll just be confused when her  Tenkilomarathon ends after the 6.2 mark.

The Feed

The Grand Canyon, in a nice bit of fighting back against corporate influence, has banned the use of plastic bottles in the park. The ban is aimed at reducing the amount of litter that piles up in the Canyon during the year, with plastic bottles making up about 30 percent of the park’s waste.

The difference between “closed” and “cleared” in the Lance Armstrong case is becoming readily apparent; the World Anti-Doping Agency is requesting the investigative material from the federal investigation in to Armstrong in order to supplement its investigation in to doping in cycling. Go f*ck yourselves WADA. If WADA is so concerned about doping in the sport they could have conducted a concurrent investigation with the Federal government, potentially even sharing information and resources. Instead they sat back, waited, and now want the fruits of a wasted but expensive effort. Do the footwork yourselves or drop it.

Enough with cycling and doping. On to food. One of our favorites, Beast, is relocating to a different location. Beast is known for small and intimate communal dinners. Hopefully the new space will be able to replicate that intimacy on a larger scale.

A somewhat helpful article from Runner’s World containing tips about avoiding some common “training crimes.” I think the caveat with these types of articles is that not every runner is the same, not every person responds to training in a uniform manner and if you stick to a rigid training schedule your running is going to get really annoying, really fast.

The Golden Trails Blog has a piece up showcasing its choice for the Top 10 Trail Running Videos of the Year. I haven’t watched all of them yet but I’m voting the video showcasing Colorado runner Anton Krupicka as our favorite. And I swear to God if blogs don’t start mentioning Ted Mahon as one of the top competitors at the Hardrock 100 I’m going to freak out. Ted’s overall Hardrock finishes: 11th in 2009, 6th in 2010, 9th in 2011. How is he not considered a top competitor there? The dude is solid. Get with it.

This week has been the first time I’ve adopted bike commuting during the winter months. After stalking the internet for deals on all things cold-weather cycling I have managed to put together enough gear to make the 10 mile trip to work manageable. Manageable. Not comfortable. I roll in to the office looking red in the cheeks and unable to do simple things like operate a door knob. But the ride is completely worth it. I get a nice little work out in first thing in the morning and I can now justify walking around the office in spandex.

The Feed

On the heels of the news from yesterday that Alberto Contador has been suspended and stripped of his 2010 Tour de France and 2011 Giro d’Italia titles, Bicycling.com has a piece up about the effect of Contador’s suspension on his cycling team, Saxo Bank. The article goes in to a fair amount of depth about what qualifications a team has to meet to reach the WorldTour level of the sport (among other things finances, ethics and “sporting value” are ranked based on some sort of point system). The article also takes a peek at the folly of building an entire cycling team around one individual.

Good news for fit people, bad news for couch potatoes: The New York Times Well blog has a review of a new study published last month in Nature looking at the relation of exercise and the body’s ability to remove garbage from inside our cells. The study seems to indicate that increasing exercise, or exercise in general, helps speed the body’s cell cleaning capacities up, potentially helping reduce the onset of diseases like diabetes and cancer. The abstract of the study is here.

Utah is getting a new ski resort. Maybe. Do not get excited. The new resort, Cherry Creek, will be a small fish in a huge pond; catering to families and local residents.

The World’s Best Ski Towns, according to Nat Geo Adventure. The usual suspects are on there, including Chamonix, Whistler, Jackson Hole, Aspen and Telluride. A bit of a surprise that Vail is not part of the 25 nor any town in Utah (how can you NOT name Salt Lake City as a great ski town?). The qualifications for the list require “ski heritage, amenities and culture” which explains why Vail is not on the list. Unless you count a huge population of post-college grads mingling with the Denver night life crowd in densely packed clubs with beer all over the floor as “culture.” Click on the large picture in the post to move through the towns.

A good video showcasing a new type of pack designed to allow skiers and snowboarders to escape an avalanche by deploying an airbag that keeps the rider above the slide. The video features the BCA Float 30 pack. The snowboarder is part of a group event called Coloradikal Backyard BBQ which puts on “big mountain shred sessions in backcountry locations.” As you can tell by the use of “Coloradikal”, this group is probably not composed of Mensa members. Or college graduates. Thanks for encouraging irresponsible use of the back country guys. Good on ya.

For the first Monday in a long time there is no football to look forward to on the weekend. Leaving college basketball, golf, and ill conceived snowboarding competitions to waste weekend hours with. This is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if training for something. The yo-yo of getting in long miles on Saturdays only to have that effort derailed by the local sports bar on Sundays is, for now, a thing of the past. On to the winter miles.

The Feed

Some big news in the cycling world over the weekend. First, the federal investigation looking in to “allegations of federal criminal conduct by members and associates of a cycling team owned in part by Lance Armstrong” has closed. This does not mean that Armstrong has been cleared of anything. I think the closure of the investigation is more indicative of the Prosecutors’ lack of solid, case winning evidence than anything else. When you are trying to take down a public figure with great lawyers and huge public support you have to have something more than cyclists pointing fingers. Unfortunately the government had to waste two years and millions of dollars to come to this conclusion.

The second big story is that Alberto Contador was stripped of his 2010 Tour de France title and 2011 Giro d’Italia title for doping. Meanwhile, Lance is back in his underground lair cackling maniacally.

On the political front, cities and other local governments are struggling with a new crop of activists that are protesting efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy based on the theory that such efforts are “part of a United Nations led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens towards cities.”  The activists, who have ties to the Tea Party, believe that such conservation actions are an effort to implement Agenda 21, a UN resolution designed to encourage countries to use fewer resources and restrict development to already developed areas. People of America; rest assured that you have a dedicated group of freedom loving activists who are fighting for your right to not have smart meters attached to your home that track data in order to save not only energy, but money, and to ensure that the pristine piece of open land that you loved hiking on as a child will soon be home to an Applebee’s, a Starbucks and some sort of dollar store.

For those of you watching weight for the summer running/cycling season; a study out of Sweden seems to demonstrate that lack of sleep creates increased “reward” association with food, resulting in a higher probability of eating more when you don’t get enough sleep. Check out the analysis at Sweat Science, and get some sleep this week.