Fortunate

Yes, I am stuck in cold, dark Alaska, thousands of miles away from my boyfriend and family, frantically trying to write term papers before I start racing and fighting off a nasty cold that hit me hard this past weekend, feeling a little sorry for myself, but guess what?

THERE IS SNOW HERE!

So I have quickly gone from feeling sorry for myself to feeling very fortunate that I can ski when very few people in the world can right now. 

Some former teammates and my boyfriend traveled a few weeks ago to Muonio, Finland, which lies on the Arctic circle making it even darker than Anchorage and they have been dealing with this:

(patrick photo)

Rain, incredibly dirty snow that was saved from last year, and every other elite skier in Europe going around the same 3km loop all day long.

We had a team time trial up on Hatcher's Pass on Saturday. It was a brisk 8F with a nice wet wind blowing making for some burning lungs and nearly frostbitten appendages, but excellent skiing conditions. It felt great to go hard on snow and to practice racing in winter conditions, after all, West Yellowstone is not known for it balmy November temperatures. 

I came down with a bit of a nasty cold after that, always good to get that first winter cold out of the way as well, so I have been resting up and going on some snowy adventures around campus as well. It snowed a good foot overnight turning everything into a winter wonderland. All the 50+km of bike path here are groomed once the snow flies so you can ski just about anywhere in Anchorage! The picture up top is the bike path bridge over one of the main roads. 

This is what Anchorage considers a plowed road....This is one of the main drags across the whole city and it is slick as all get out. With the bike paths groomed I am very close to giving up my car for some commuter skis. I have never seen a city that regularly gets snow be so incredibly bad at removing it. It's quite humorous until you are trying to drive somewhere. 

Just over a week until our first set of races! 

Snow, Skiing, Halloween, Sunday Mornings

A Glimpse at my Weekend:
(click on a picture to enlarge it!)

One of the last rollerskis of the season! Rollerskiing in 20F temps on frozen leaves is not very fun!

The Cook Inlet in the background

Going Swimming!

Us with knee injuries have done a little swimming. Sadie used to swim competitively so she relies on swimming to workout quite a bit so I decided to jump in and try it with her. Swimming is HARD! She lapped me many times until I finally swam a mile. 

Alaska has a couple skiing secrets, well not really secrets, but they are secret because only people brave enough to venture up to Alaska get to experience them. The Eagle Glacier is the first of such amazing places and Hatcher's Pass is the second. Hatcher's Pass is just outside of Palmer, AK, north of Anchorage and is high enough in the mountains to get snow when no where else does. While in town the ground is well frozen, it is bare so we have been spending some time driving up there. 

This is about 9:00AM, the sun is just starting come up.

Hatcher's Pass is a former gold mining village so the trails go right through the village and around all the buildings.

The main drag

The actual mine and associated structures

Making my way up the big hill. There is only about 3k, but a lot of vertical

Looking down on the village

After our interval workout, the sun came over the mountains! Getting on snow for the first time has never felt better for me. I think all the skiing on the glacier really did the trick. I am feeling much more fit this year!

Sadie and I got some new shades from Rudy Project, nice and bright!

 After a nice 3 hour skate ski up at Hatcher's, we scrambled to put together some Halloween costumes.

Sadie and her boyfriend, Waldo

Sadie and I were a "crime scene" complete with handcuffs, pistol, police badge, and magnifying glass

Sundays are our day off so we always have a big family breakfast. This morning, I woke up earlier than Sadie and commenced on a Halloween breakfast

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I made a pumpkin mold and used it to make some Pumpkin chocolate chip pancakes complete with an M&M stem and a tasty topping of yogurt, candy corn, and Sophie's VT maple syrup!

I looked out the window this morning to find this!! It snowed a couple inches of some really slick snow that compacted into a nice slippery sheet on the road. 

Alaska does not salt or plow roads, they just sprinkle some gravel and call it good. I have never experienced such a small amount of snow (about an inch) cause the roads to go from perfect to miserable and I did spend 4 years in New England. I think I will be investing in studded snow tires tomorrow. It is supposed to stay cold so I'm afraid the roads are going to look like this until April.......Hopefully it snows a little more so we can ski in town!

To top off the weekend, Sadie's boyfriend treated us to some grab for letting him crash at our house for a bit! YUM!

 Rollerskiing is most certainly done with here so I hope it continues to snow so we can ski in town this week. There are hundreds of kilometers of groomed trails in Anchorage and I have only skied the race courses so I am excited to check out some new trails!

Lastly, I have figured out my race season for the first part of the season and have updated it on the schedule tab above. I am excited to say the Brennan's will be having a full attendance at Thanksgiving for the first time in a while as my mom, dad, and brother will be joining me in West Yellowstone!!! Check it out and come see a race! 

Eastward

I completed my first pilgrimage to Dartmouth as an Alumni. I jumped into a few workouts with the team and it sure felt like I never even left. I loved it! I never thought I would miss the east as much as I do so this trip was really wonderful. I got to see lots of friends, some family, and spend some time with my boyfriend. It was a whirlwind of a trip and not nearly long enough to go everywhere I wanted to, but here are some highlights!

My first day there, I went for a run and just took off running on the lush, soft, and leaf covered trails in Putney, VT. I felt amazing running with so little impact and not having to worry about bears, moose, or bums. It was incredible! At one point, a few white tailed deer came leaping through the woods and I thought they were dogs because they were so small compared the AK moose I am accustomed to worrying about. That afternoon I headed up to Dartmouth to do some intervals with the team and it was a classic rainy and humid New England day. It was the first time I have worked out in shorts in months. I was just relishing the sweat pouring off me and the splash from the giant puddles we had to ski through.

Next, I headed north to Craftsbury, VT where Patrick lives and trains most of the year. It is incredibly isolated there, not even a chance of cell service, but I was content to spend time with my friends and do some fun, new training. After Patrick got a trip full of rain when traveling to AK, he must have ordered up some equally wonderful weather for me to experience during my trip. It was dreary New England weather the whole time, so my hopes of grabbing some Vitamin D were quickly foiled. I got to see all the work Patrick has been doing on the trails there all summer. He has worked to widen them all to 9 meters, which is huge. They looked really nice and I hope they get some good snow so I can experience them this winter as well.

Class of 2011 XC Women

Catching up with former teammates

We moved on to my friend Hannah's farm house just north of Hanover for an alumni get together and got to catch up with all my former teammates!

Then it was HOMECOMING! Homecoming is my 2nd favorite event at Dartmouth after Winter Carnival, of course. We started they off having breakfast with our former coach which is always a treat. We then participated in the Time Trial with the team. It was great, we had about 30 of us out rollerskiing in florescent shirts. Homecoming is marked my a enormous bonfire on the Green in which the freshman are supposed to run the same number of laps as their class year. So this year's freshman had to run 115 laps as the class of 2015.

The top of the fire burning bright

The class of 2015 and their captains preparing for their laps!

I then spent one last night in Putney visiting Patrick's parents and then drove to Boston with a friend who is now living there. She graciously put me up for the night so I could catch an early and LONG flight back to AK. It is about 2 hours longer traveling west against the jet stream. I had my fair share of homework to keep me occupied after neglecting it for the duration of my journey. 

There is no snow in Anchorage, but quite a bit up in the mountains so there might be some skiing to be had......

No Bears Today

But we did see a Lynx!!!! Lynx are very shy and are difficult to spot so I was very excited to see one today. I thought it was just a stump but my teammate saw the pointed ears and informed me it was actually a Lynx. We gave it space and walked around, but it didn't budge, it was perfectly still waiting for some breakfast to come by. I once again did not have a camera with me so I found some pictures online to show those of you that don't know what a lynx looks like.

For those of you the knew Boulder, I think he was part lynx. Although he looks rather relaxed here, he could easily be found looking just like the lynx above. It is also rutting season for the moose as they are coming down from the mountains for the winter so they are EVERYWHERE in small groups and are a little on edge......makes for some exciting training.

Pumpkin, Leaves, Frost- I think fall is here

So Alaska seems to be about a month ahead in the fall and a month behind in the spring of the seasons I am accustomed to in the lower 48. Fall is fall though and it seems to be a spectacular season just about everywhere. I was starting to worry after the month plus of rain that I experienced in August. I wasn't sure it was ever going to stop. Turns out, fall is a very nice time of year here. The rain stopped, the colors changes, the leaves are falling, and the temperatures (and light) are dropping rapidly. There are really only Birch trees here for deciduous trees so yellow is the predominant fall color. Some of the lower lying mossy plants turn a vibrant red so it is great to get up into the mountains above the trees to see the beautiful red color as well. The leaves are nothing compared to those I experienced in New England, but were still a welcome change. I love fall and one of the things I love most is pumpkin! Fortunately, Costco had pumpkin for its fall special so Sadie and I stocked up and have been baking pumpkin everything. We started with my personal favorite, pumpkin pancakes! Pumpkins are apparently a rarity in AK as doorstep decorations because the pesky moose love them as much as I do so I will have to settle for the canned version. School, classroom observations, training, and planing for winter have all put a damper on my summer time adventures. But honestly, after a grizzly encounter, just about everything seems dull.....So I leave you with some images of fall here in AK:

The view of the mountains from the trails at APU

Look, there's fresh snow up there!!!!

Where's the trail?

Nothing like new shoes and lots of leaves for some nice cushioning while running!

Headed out for a rollerski after the first frost, it's only 32F out on September 26, brrrrrrrrr

The leaves make for some hairy rollerskiing, and this is after they swept the trail...

Sadie making her way up the hill on a beautiful, brisk, fall day. With it regularly being below freezing all morning, I think winter is not far away. I have been told we will be skiing up on Hatcher Pass in the next couple weeks! In the mean time we are just focusing on some hard fall training and making the best of the slippery, frozen, leaf covered rollerski paths. 'Till next time.

GRRRR GRRRIIZZZZZZ

Wednesdays are our recovery days so we are encouraged to go on some adventures with our friends. Sadie and I, both recovery from knee injuries, have been building up our running strength and were looking forward to heading out on a Wednesday Adventure. We decided to go up a valley to Rabbit Lake. I had done half of this run before but didn't make it to the lake and Sadie had never been up there. The trail starts by heading uphill through some low lying bushes for a couple of miles and then opens up into a big alpine meadow. When we reached the meadow, it was blowing really hard. We were barely moving trying to push through the strength of the wind. Eventually, we made it to the lake, but because we were so cold we didn't spend a lot of time up there, just turned around and began our journey down valley. Glad that we could finally hear each other talk with the wind at our back, we were chatting up a storm. We came over a knoll and I stopped dead as I was starring right into the face of a big brown bear! He took one looked at us and turned to run behind a bush. This only made things worse as Sadie and I could no longer tell which direction he was travelling and if we were in danger. Sadie was utterly panicked and scrambled to get the safety of our can of bear spray. I was feeling rather confident after my pleasant encounter with Patrick so I calmly asked if Sadie had her phone so we could take a picture, but Sadie was having none of it. So we walked across the other side of the valley where we could see the bear. He seemed uninterested in us and started running up the other side of the valley. However, as we continued down the valley, he too continued down valley, on the opposite side. This made me nervous as I was unsure if bears had a stalking of herding method of killing their prey so we tried to pick up the pace a little and managed to put some distance on the bear. When we reached the bushes, we stopped to take one last look back and it appeared as if we had put enough distance between us that we were safe so we just ran as fast as we could back to the car. By the time we got back to the house, I realized that indeed that was no little black bear, that was a big grizzly bear and I suddenly became much more frightened. I will admit, I had horrible bear nightmares all night and have not been too psyched about running in the mountains since. I can now say I have seen a griz, face to face and would be content to leave it at that! I wish I had a picture for proof, but my story will have to do.

Fast and Female

Fast and Female is a really awesome organization started by Olympic Gold Medalist Chandra Crawford. After winning the gold, her life changed quite a bit and she felt she needed to do something to give back and to give more girls the opportunity to have this life changing experience. She started with just cross-country events in Canada but has since expanded to many different sports as well as into the United States. I have helped out with a couple of events and they have been really amazing things. Liz Stephen, a U.S. ski team member who lives in Park City a good chunk of the year has organized an event for October 8th. It will feature many many winter sports and will have Olympians from all of them. This event will also have a parent seminar that will have experts talking about sports psychology, injury prevention, and nutrition for developing female athletes. It is open to girls 9-19 and all abilities, even if you have never step foot on snow we will take you. Please, if you can help get the word out about the event, I would be very grateful. Here is the link to register! http://www.fastandfemale.com/default.asp?lang=&mode=eventdetails&id=89 Please click the poster below to enlarge it. You can print it out, give it any girl you know!