A Grandeur Kind of Week

I'm done running.  For now, I'm a walker, but soon I'll be a skier again.  For those of us lucky enough to live next to the mountains, it seems now is the time to get in some vertical to gain sport specific fitness so we can go faster, farther, and longer once it starts snowing (edit: it started snowing again).  As far as I can tell, there are two ways to ski more in the backcountry (given a fixed amount of time); use lighter gear or get fitter.  Since I'm utterly geeked out on gear, I better put in some work.

Salt Lake City is surrounded by many small mountains that rise directly from the city.  With vertical gains of one to four thousand feet it's the perfect training ground to blast vertical fast before work.  Over the past week, I've gone up Grandeur Peak (3300 vertical) many many times (every day) to work on volume, intervals, and time trials.  I've probably seen a lot of you out there too.

Recently, the FKT for the west side of Grandeur was set at 39:41 by Wasatch newcomer John Tribbia. This was after an epic back and forth battle with Burke Swindlehurst where they both bettered each other's times from 41:xx to 40:09 to the current record.  Past comments indicated that 39 minutes used to be commonplace for Grandeur's west side "back in the day" by local high school kids.  I doubt that.  There is nothing commonplace about John's current time.

Inspired, on the 29th, I went up to make myself tired, managing to do so after 4 summit trips, some intervals, and a lot of quad bashing steep downhills.  I figured I'd crammed in a few days of training into one so that yesterday I could focus on this:

Meet Teague, born Oct 29th weighing 8 pounds 2 ounces and measuring "short", just like his uncle.