Skiing at Altitude

So, on my day off I did the most amazing thing anyone can do in the spirit of a training day off and being on winter break, absolutely nothing!! It was wonderful. Unfortunately it did not help the extra soreness my legs had from my longest ride of the season (see previous post). But One thing that did, skiing.

The past week my brother has been in town visiting for his 21st birthday and since I live in Colorado and he goes to school in Vermont I thought, well I should show him some REAL skiing. Not to say that Vermont doesn't have some awesome stuff, but the east coast tends to be a little icier and less powdery than out here due to higher levels of humidity and lower altitudes. In this attempt to take him skiing I thought of all places to go let's not hit up a big resort or a small one at low altitude (e.g. Eldora) but let's hit the top of the mountain, Loveland Ski Area. Turns out it was awesome! Every time I go skiing again this year I am totally going there! Luckily the coaches (Sean and Susie, you guys are awesome!) scheduled in ski time with an hour of recovery when I got home. So I rented myself some skis (I've been a snowboarder since I was 12) so that I could finally learn how to do it, since it looked so cool, and gave my brother my snowboard and boots for the day. well to say the least skis are pretty tough, but my background of spending my young life (4 years old to 18 years old) cross country skiing with my dad helped and I was hitting the super steep blues and the woods trails in no time. Finally, after a good day of skiing I got home and hopped on the dreaded rollers. No one told me that skiing was good for leg strength because I was spinning bigger gears for recovery than I ever have before, it was pretty crazy. Unfortunately I don't have any roller pics, but here are some pices from the day at the mountain (I apologize for the quality I still don't have a camera suitable for riding/skiing/adventuring so I am using my blackberry, not bad but not great either).

Here is me at the top of Lift 2, it was way cold and windy up there but great powder to be had if you veered of the groomed trails like ten feet, ahhh the pleasures of being above alpine:
This is a view of the mountain from the top of Lift 1, you can kind of see where the top of Lift 2 is, much higher, we only rode lift 1 once, the trails over there were way too crowded:
this is my younger bro, can't see him well, with the bright yellow snowboard strapping in at the top of lift 1:
All in all it was an awesome day and I am determined to buy myself some skis for this year or next, depending on the finances, because skiing is awesome. By the way, I'd like to give a shout out for being awesome to Christy Sports in Boulder. I rented my skis from them and me not being the type of person to jump into things tentatively I got some awesome twin tipped backcountry/jibbing skis which they gave to me for the price of some entry level skis! Maybe at the end of the season they will sell some rentals to me for uber cheap, hmmm?