I am slowly learning to deal with rain...I am still a first class weather complainer (who can blame me, I grew up in Utah), but now working on year 6 outside of the Utah sunshine, I have sorta come to terms with what the weather brings us. However, everything is bigger in AK, including storms.
We started into our intensity block for the year, meaning lots and lots and lots of hard, fast training. Think somewhere between 1-4 minutes as hard as you can go repeated over and over in every workout, usually up a big hill. In my junior days, I did a lot of this type of training so I don't actually mind it all that much, but now that I am a big bad senior, I have to do more. In other words, it never really gets easier, but it is without a doubt rewarding and I appreciate that. But back to the storm. After our first week of brutal training, we headed to the movies to watch Magic Mike (yes, we are poor skiers who have to go to the discount theatre to watch movies that everyone else saw months ago) for a few laughs, but when we came out the weather god was getting his laughs in too. The wind was just howling and the rain coming down sideways. As we drove home, road signs were whipping across the road, trees were falling right and left and anything not tethered down was airborne. Fortunately, we made it home without any mishaps and quickly decided we best move our cars to a lot with less trees than our driveway. On our walk home from the university parking lot, transformers around city were blowing up creating epic lights in the sky and then just like that, the power was gone. Luckily, we are the outdoorsy type that has headlamps within an arms reach. Our roof is flat so we could hear branches flying off the trees and ricocheting across our roof. It was very much terrifying and made it a little hard to get to sleep.
The following morning, we were supposed to get a couple of workouts in on our own, rollerskiing and biking. After a quick survey around the house, we realized either of these activities were going to be near impossible with the amount of debris around and the number of trees down. My new housemate and I set out for a run instead. It was a far cry from a run as we couldn't make it many steps before we had to climb over a down tree. I think there were more trees down than there are trees in all of Park City. It was really something.
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| I got this awesome headband because of my extreme fear of the wildlife |
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| If you didn't know better, you'd think this picture is sideways, nope there are that many trees down! |
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| Trees EVERYWHERE |
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| A few real big ones got ripped out of the ground |
We were very lucky as we were only without power for a night, but many were without it for 3-5 days!!! Turns out AK doesn't even have enough transformers lying around to replace them all so people had to wait until transformers from the lower 48 arrived. Needless to say we all survived.....just in time for round 2. Another storm is predicted to hit tonight. Costco was a zoo, people really want to be prepared this time around!
