Training Report

Team ARFE-SmartWool: Still Frigid!
This week, Kristoffer and Erin Nielsen fill us in on their rigorous training schedule...is it match for the rigorous far northeast weather?
Interesting week of weather we've had up here in North Haverhill, New Hampshire. Last week consisted of mornings with negative temps between -10F and -15F. Because of our busy schedule we tend to train in the early mornings. If we have a longer workout in our schedule then we'll put in the hours after work, however.
On bitterly cold mornings, waking up only to go immediately outside for a run is the last thing one wants to do so Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we stayed indoors and did bike workouts on our CycleOps spin bikes. These workouts consist of mostly long steady, power intervals closely monitored by heart-rate data. To make time go by a little quicker most days we can be caught watching pre-tivo'd episodes of Mythbusters, or this week's game of our La Liga favorites, Barcelona (spanish soccer).
Saturday, was a complete flip on the weather charts offering temps in the 40s with clear skies and a warm sun. We did an early run loop outside down our road 6 kilometers and then a longer, harder leg back to the house on a snow covered rail trail.
Sunday was our rest day catching up on sleep and general couch time. Yesterday, Monday, we needed a longer run workout, to make up for the lack of running from last week. We came home from work at around 6:30pm and packed up our packs with some food and Gatorade and hit then road. We ran from our house, on a 7.4 kilometer gradual accent to the trailhead of Black Mt. We then let Loki, our German Shorthair, off his leash to run wild, and headed on a 3 kilometer, steep accent up the southern side to the summit at roughly 1200 meters. This is a steep and challenging run for any mountain runner. The run back down was awesomely fun, cruising down the snow pack and skiing on our shoes whenever we could. Downhill running is something we enjoy immensely and excel at. Once at the bottom again we ran the same road back for a total workout time of 2:57 and total elevation gain of over 2000 meters.