Early Saturday morning, Brooks and I headed up to the Eldora Nordic Center just 30 minutes outside of Boulder to participate in the Rocky Mountain Orienteering Club's Ski-O. Battling 30-40mph sustained winds and below zero wind chills, we strapped on our skate skis, grabbed our maps, and headed out on a timed orienteering course.
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Eldora's terrain is famous for its steep up and down hills, making you feel like you're often navigating your skate skis over alpine terrain! However, it's a fun place to go and get a great workout while still enjoying the great wintery outdoors. Mainly based upon trail navigation, the course contained 16 checkpoints and stiff headwinds (you can see me finding one of the checkpoints). Trying to balance big gloves, maps, and punchcards, we quickly realized the wind and cold were going to significantly slow our pace. Brooks found a system that worked, and teamed with his experienced skiing, tore up the course.Brooks blazed the course with crazy speed and finished in 1hr 12min, good enough for 3rd place. I followed up, a bit behind, finishing in 1hr 45min and 8th place. A successful day all around, considering I was able to convince myself that blowing snow was fun and get out of the car in the first place. But, as always, once you're out it's tons of fun, and we got in some great off-season orienteering competition to build on our skills for next year.
-Tiffanie
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