Saturday night:
Had another fun night at the youth centre. Everyone was looking a bit worse for wear after Friday night, so I took advantage of this and took a few photos:P We played several of my partially invented games including: name the simpsons character; pull out a random hair and compare (the length); and the coolman contest (aka whose saliva freezes first).

Sunday:
After a nice sleep in, I arranged to stay another two days (Friday and Saturday) in Baiersbronn. I was originally going to go back to Frankfurt and stay in the youth hostel, but I think I'll have more fun in Freudenstadt. After we'd wrapped up the negotiations, Mr Keck, my landlord, offered to wax my skis for me.

It was a lot simpler than I'd always thought it would be. This skiing book I'd once read mentioned something about having to choose the right wax for the current conditions and that if you get it wrong, then it's counter-productive (and often the conditions will change in the middle of the ski, so counter productivity would be quite likely). But most of the time you don't actually need to worry about that, because a universal wax works almost as well as the specific ones. He'd built this nifty little waxing table to hold the ski in place, while he ironed the wax across the surface. It turns out that he used to be a professional cross country skiier when he was my age, which is why he knew how to carry out the procedure so smoothly. He still skis a bit now, but he can't do more than an hour at a time because he had operations in his arms to remove a malignant tumor. It would be so heart breaking to have that kind of potential taken away by something you can do nothing against!

I took my newly waxed skis out for a spin that afternoon. It didn't make a huuge difference, but I was definitely gliding for longer without effort and this was on very soft snow. My skis definitely needed a wax in any case, because I've done several hundred kms on them already, and the synthetic undersurface needs 'nourishment' or else it gets ruined. I was starting to slow down after 30km, but then the skiiers from the Baiersbronn ski team that I saw in the first week came past and I latched on. This time, they wore out before I did, so I did the last 5k by myself, but it made it a lot easier skiing with other people. They probably hate me now though because after they stopped, I yelled out 'Thanks a lot!', which I think they interpreted as 'Sayonara suckers!', because they went out really fast and tried to catch me (but couldn't:P).

Monday:
Went for a very slow ski. Wasn't feeling very energetic.

Tuesday:
I wasn't feeling very good at all, but today I had a time trial scheduled, so I did a 5k warmup and then stopped for 10 minutes to steel myself for the effort ahead. Half way through my meditations, this old guy who I see every day on the slopes offered to put my backpack in his car. Without the extra burden, I felt a lot more ready to take on the time trial, and thrashed out the first lap like a mad thing. My technique was very inefficient, but I managed to go a bit faster than last week (8:17) on much slower snow. My first lap is always about 30 seconds slower than my average pace for the whole time trial, so I tried to maintain 8:45 laps. After 5 laps, I was well ahead of the pace, and was expecting to start slowing down, because that had happened every other time. But pleasingly, I was still feeling good and managed to extend the lead even further:) I finished in 1:09:22 (=1:16:30 HM), a 3 minute PB from last week, and I wasn't at all tired afterwards:) 30 seconds after I'd finished, my heart rate was already under 100bpm and I wasn't breathing audibly anymore:) Very good sign.

Afterwards, I was talking to Claus (the old guy) and he asked me if I was going to take part in the 'Coolman' winter triathlon (5k run, 9k mountain bike ride, 7k XC ski). Flushed from the ski, I said 'Yeah! That could be fun!'. I'd thought about doing it before today, but it's fairly expensive (75 euros) and I didn't have a mountain bike I could use (Claus offered to lend me his). He drove me back to his place, and I called the registration office. I was pretty excited about it, because the day I'd be competing in (for under 23 year olds) is run simultaneously with the world championship elite race, so I'd be in the running to be the winter triathlon world champion! Unfortunately when I spoke to the registrar, it turned out the registrations closed the week before:( We tried pulling a few strings through Claus's connections, but they couldn't do a late registration for me because I didn't have an ITU (international triathlon union) start pass, which I would've had to get in Australia. Ah well, I'm going to spectate this year and go back next year and hopefully take part:)

Claus and I were talking about other cross country skiing races (the Engadine ski marathon in Switzerland sounds really cool!), when he mentioned that Feldberg was the cross country skiing mecca in Germany. 'Feldberg..where's that?'
'It's near Freiburg, not too far away... Say, I haven't been to Feldberg in years, would you like to go tomorrow?'
Of course I did!

Wednesday:
Woke up at 6am (to my alarm) with quite a bad cold. It had shown itself on Monday, but I was hoping it would vanish before it really started, because the whole time I'd been in germany I'd only had one cold and that was because I'd drunk soy milk the day before (wreaks havoc with my immune system). Friday night probably had the same effect.

Claus picked me up at 8am, and we made the quite long journey to Feldberg. It's about 2 hours, so almost exactly the same feel as going to Lake Mountain from Melbourne hehe. We talked a bit during the journey, but I find him quite hard to understand because he's fairly sloppy with his german and he often doesn't talk very clearly.

We found a park, and as we got out, Claus remarked 'Gee we've chosen the only park, which is completely covered with ice. No wonder no-one else parked there. I think we'll probably have to push the car off the ice afterwards.'
'Oops. Oh well, maybe the sun will melt it a bit.'

Since Claus hadn't been there for 16 years, and there was no signage for how to get to the cross country trails (it's mainly a downhill resort), we asked this guy at a ski hire place for directions.
'Oh you have to walk for half an hour before you get to the trails.'
'Really? Last time, I only had to walk for about 2 minutes before I could strap on my skis.'
'Definitely!'
We didn't quite believe him, so we asked at the next place.
'The trail starts just over there, 2 minutes away.'
I like that place better:P

So we strapped on our skis and made our way up. I wasn't feeling that great, so I stayed with Claus for the first 10 minutes, even though he goes very slowly. Eventually I'd had enough and went off on my own. It was really nice being able to go for 5km and not have to repeat the same terrain a few times. We wanted to go to Herzogenhorn, which is a plateau a few hundred metres above the rest of the resort. It was very nice up there:). I didn't feel like doing serious training, so instead of tucking into an aerodynamic pose on the downhills, I practised my telemark turns and as a result, fell over quite a few times:P There was this one downhill, which was like the descent for a ski jumping contest. It was probably about 100m to the bottom, 30% grade, and I slotted into the tracks, tucked in, and whizzed down at about 60kph! Super fun:D

Claus only did about half an hour of skiing and then went to the lodge and ate lunch. I was out for maybe 2 hours, and then it started getting windy and cold, so I was glad when he emerged and waved at me. Going back down to the resort was heaps of fun. That 5km uphill became 5km of downhill. A very gentle slope, but because it was so long, you could build up heaps of speed:D Most people took off their skis and walked down (quite a few on the groomed trail, which is my pet hate!!!), but I skiied down. I took a tumble or two after going for one too many telemark turns, but picked myself up and went on. I finished ages before Claus, so I went down one of the proper downhill slopes. I always love the looks downhill skiiers give you, when you do a telemark turn and your heel rises off the ski:P

Getting out of the parking spot took a bit of time, but we didn't have to push luckily:) I was a bit worried at one point when the wheels spun for a few seconds; and at another point when Claus came 1mm close to scraping a huge gouge in a new volvo, but it worked out ok in the end. The trip back was a bit quicker because Claus took advantage of the lack of speed limits on the autobahn and pushed the speedo up to 150kph. I was more than a bit worried at this because it was raining quite heavily, and the car didn't feel like it was used to that kind of speed haha.

Claus dropped me back at my place and I quickly got changed and caught a train to Freudenstadt to catch up with some friends from the youth centre. They showed me a few of the historical monuments that I'd missed and then we went to a cafe and ordered some very opulent drinks that hardly seemed appropriate at this time of year (eg. ice coffees and milkshakes) haha. After that we went to this pub that offered 1 euro drinks of every variety on Wednesday nights.
It was allright, but I was feeling pretty tired and sick, so I didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to.

Thursday:
Woke up feeling worse than yesterday despite all the zinc supplements I've been taking. Went for a pre-ski jog, but felt so lethargic afterwards that I decided to limit my exercise to that. I'm spending the day in Freudenstadt. Martin, Tracey (from the youth centre) and I are going to see American Gangster (in german) at this cool cinema in the Kurhaus tonight.

Until next time!