Too much snow to ride a bike - time to hit the slopes...
It's getting a little tricky to ride outside at the moment in the UK and it's making training a bit frustrating. It's snowing heavily in Scotland and now even England has had a solid dumping making it pretty sketchy on the roads. So to try and keep my fitness on form over the holiday break I decided to hit the slopes in Scotland for some good cross training as it really is looking like a stupid idea to ride a road bike outside unless you have a death wish or want to break the body....
I arrived in Aviemore (3 hours north of Edinburgh) to 2.5 foot of snow! And it was the most beautiful snow to ski in - totally powdery and lush. This is the biggest snow fall I have ever seen in Aviemore and apparently it hasn't snowed this full on in abouy 20 years. Driving through the main street it was a winter wonderland and the snow just kept on falling. People were digging their cars out just to get on the road.
I was well excited for some skiing after seeing the state of Aviemore and prepared myself for an epic day on the Cairngorms. I left the house looking like a marshmallow after hearing that it was -19 just a few days ago (always good to be prepared I thought, even if this was slightly over the top). My good mate Ross and I decided to hit the road early to avoid the tourist jam up on the Ski road, but there was so much snow that cars weren't even making it up the Ski road and there was a pretty big backlog by the time we arrived. Lucky for me, Ross is a local and was prepared for this type of commotion and after what felt like forever waiting we managed to make it up to Loch Morlich with a bit of time to get some skiing in. The downer was that it was definitely too late to make it up the Cairngorms so we ended up skiing around Glenmore Lodge for a while where the crew had a made a fairly 'fat' ski jump. After seeing Ross do a back flip I just had to try it out it, but after two runs down which had resulted in a nasty stack and a large dent in the landing I decided to call it quits as I had a feeling I was heading for broken bone territory which would have made me a bit distraught with the road season starting in April.
At 3pm we got the warning that if we didn't leave the lodge within half an hour we were at risk of getting snowed in, so it was a mad rush to get packed up and out there ASAP. I was shattered by 5pm. I guess it's going to take my body a while to get used to lugging skis and boots around. I had hoped that years of carrying bikes through airports, mountain bike tracks and on and off trains would make me bullet proof for a day on the slopes, but this obvioulsy isn't the case.
Check out the end of the gallery for lots of snow pics : )
