It was a long morning. I had a 3hour OD (over distance) ski at Soldier Hollow. I'm pretty sure the loop is only 2km now after going around it many many times today. All of my teammates are racing tomorrow so they only skied for an hour so I had to watch them drive away in Tiny while I trudged on around and around and around.

It's a testement to how much I like to ski that I managed to finish this workout. If someone had told me to do a 3hr rollerski on a 2km loop, there's no way I would have considered it. If someone had asked me to run for 3hrs on a 2km loop, I would have laughed. But it's a precious patch of snow, so I skied on it. And I do realize that most of the country is without snow so I am lucky to have even 2k of trails.

At the start of my ski, the trail was bustling with activity. Everyone was doing a preview of the skate course for tomorrow and getting a nice short ski in. Unfortunately everyone was skating so I skied almost the entire way alone (except for a lap w/ Sara Studebaker, who was nice enough to slow down and chat). Then, people started leaving, and the trails drained of humanity. Eventually it was only Andrew Johnson, Lars Flora, Kris Freeman, and me. There were a few other skiers, and coach wax testing, but I suspect they had come out later. Then it was only Freeman & I and it got pretty boring since Freeman only passed me every couple of laps and other than that the scenery didn't change. At least I had my ipod.

Then even Freeman left. At first I was impressed that I skied longer than him but I quickly realized that
a) He was doing a "short" day-before-race-ski & I was doing my OD for the week, and
b) He probably started skiing at 7 so he could be done by noon and get some rest before the race sat am. You think I'm joking, don't you.