My BP stands for Blogpost

Spencer sent this post into me the other day.  While not a workout accidentally turned hunting story, its still pretty epic:
 

Hi all you Polar Bears!

This is Spencer of the class of 2012. As briefly mentioned in previous posts, after 4 of skiing at Bowdoin I still wasn't ready go give up racing. Right now I live in Truckee, California and am training with Far West Nordic http://farwestnordic.org whose senior (or as I like to call it "pro") racing team is small but growing. I've been very lucky in the coaches I've been working with, Martin Benes, Ben Grassechi, Jeff Schloss, and Glen Jobe are great coaches and a lot of fun to be around. 

I plan race at West Yellowstone over Thanksgiving, senior nationals in Utah, most of the western supertour races if you ever find yourself at one of these events be sure to say hi. Also my ski club has the illustrious honor of hosting spring series the first week of April this year, but more to come on that later. The real reason I wrote this is to share an awesome bike ride I did last week.

In coping with the pretty significant increased volume of training I have been doing this summer, I've been using road biking as a way to get easy distance hours in and give my body an occasional break from running and rollerskiing. Unfortunately since I spend most of my time and money on skis, my road bike is "a little" dated. A little in this case means a 1985 steel frame trek I inherited from my grandfather. Since my bike isn't the fastest I have developed a preference for climbing over cruising flat mile after flat mile. I decided to make a loop out of some two of the best climbs in the area Martis Peak and Blackwood Canyon. I started from where I lived just north of Truckee and climbed out of the valley the town is in to Martis Peak, at 2,600 ft vertical climb.  Here is the view from the top of the north shore of Lake Tahoe. The peak on horizon far right is just above the top of the second climb. 

Then I cruised down along the north shore. At this point I got passed by a couple other pretty good road bikers who I resisted the urge to chase after. One thing that has been reinforced for me this summer is the importance of keeping workouts that are supposed to be level one in the right zone. It reluctantly let the bikers go reminding myself that I had passed a road biker during some roller ski intervals the day before. The second climb up Blackwood Canyon is really scenic and a little more gentle then Martis at 1,500 ft of vertical. 

On the way home I jumped in lake Tahoe to 1) soothe my legs and 2) to clean myself up for work. I found a great job working in the produce section of a local health food store and have since received all the slightly mushy organic produce I could eat. Here is a map and elevation profile of the bike I made on mapmyride.com, a pretty cool tool for tracking epic bike rides. All in all it was a 70 mile bike that took about 5 hours and had some awesome but hard earned views.