New Experiences

Something new today - I decided at 7am this morning after my ORE Board retreat/worksession was cancelled, to enter a 42 kilometer cross-country skate race called the Alley Loop in Crested Butte. Start was a 10am, so i didn't have much time to wax, eat, dress and find a costume, but the upside of the deal was that i had little time to get nervous or worry about my sea level vegas/LA/utah trade show whiskey training. The first two laps were not too bad, but the reality that i had only gone X-country skate skiing once this season definately hit home once my hands started to blister and the trail started to alternate between fuzzy and clear. My goal was to finish the race, and hopefully before the four hour cuttoff time. My rhythm started to get better on the third lap and the cheering and cow bells of each of town alley sections was a good distraction to the pain. I heard more than once, "Is that Alison?" (Needless to say, i'm not quite known as a nordie). Enter the beginning of the 4th lap, and i had some dreary moments, but the reassurance that this was the final loop helped pull me through. Towards the end, i passed a woman who blew by me earlier, and I started to get fired up and charged the final big hills, almost closing in on a few more folks at the end. I ended up finishing a respectable 3:20 or so. We are now off to the big air contest on our main street for the winter carnival.
Skiing was excellent the past few days on the mountain - deep powder!!! Nice change from the florescent lights of the shows to say the least. Teocalli Bowl and Third Bowl were skiing the deepest, as the wind blew all the snow over to the north east. Skied yesterday with Ethan Mueller, the son of the new CB owners and Chris Salomon, a writer doing a story on CB and our new funky mayor, Alan Bernholtz for Men's Journal. I also have been working hard on my ORE (Office for Resource Efficiency) Non-profit. We had some exciting new developments at our board meeting on Thursday - Western State College is moving forward with the first LEED certified green building in our county. This may sound like basic news, but when we at ORE started meeting with Western State, they had not even heard about LEED or green building. Crested Butte Mountain resort has also signed on as a new partner, and we have an exciting list of green projects for the ski area for the upcoming year. I also arranged to have a speaker present to CBMR about New Urbanism, and it looks like now they are going to plan the entire new North Village around this concept (pedestrian friendly, small lots, mixed use, mixed zoning, affordable housing - in general, like an old school european village).
Tomorrow I plan on skiing more powder, and then heading to Boulder to be at the birth of my sisters twins. I've never been a catcher before, or gotten to see a birth, so I can't wait for another new experience.