Matt’s Take

Hey all-Here’s my story:After the long trip over that you’ve all read about by now and a great night in a tiny bed, we all went skiing.  There’s a fair amount of snow here (and more coming all the time) but they only had a 3.8k loop open on snow they had saved from last year.  It was great.  We skied for 2 hours, skating.  It was cold and clear and it was skiing.  I didn’t feel too good but I had figured it was probably jetlag.  It wasn’t.  By that night, I had come down with a cold.  Runny nose, little bit of a sore throat, headache, that sort of stuff.  That keeps me at a clean 50% success rate for traveling and getting sick.  So here I was, all the way over (and up) here, and too sick to ski.  First, I started eating as many vitamin C’s, D’s, and multivitamins as I could absorb.  Like, so much vitamin C that I could practically see the CVS logos in my urine when I peed it out.  I sat out the afternoon run, then the ski thursday morning, the run and strength thursday afternoon.  I did go for a walk thursday afternoon which was nice but made me wish I could ski even more.  I know nobody’s going to feel bad for me being in Finland and on snow in late October, but this was worse than not being near snow at all.  I started feeling better Friday morning, but figured if I would ski at all it would be the afternoon 1 hour classic ski, not the morning 2 hour skate.  So I sat out again.  Actually, I lied out, on my bed, wishing I would get better.  Maybe it’s because we’re so close to Santa up here, but my wish came true quicker than I thought.  By the afternoon, I was ready to classic ski.  And the next morning (this morning), I felt good enough to go again.  And this afternoon, I felt better still.  So I did miss a few sessions in there, but I’m back now, and even more thankful to be able to ski before halloween.Aside from the sickness, everything else has been good or interesting.  The food is a little funky, but really, liver paste and pickles on bread tastes pretty good.  And cooking all our meals on a stovetop is a challenge, but one that we’re up to.  And the whole bathroom floor doubling as the shower floor really isn’t that bad.  And the dry sauna in every house for training clothes has been downright nice.The only other interesting tidbit from here has been a new pair of skate boots that felt tight when I tried them on at home but turned out to be a little too tight.  I wore them the first day for two hours and by the end my right big toenail had turned black.  I’m pretty sure that’s a bad thing, so I’m working on ways to fix it.  I tried putting the boots in the clothes sauna and putting them on, I tried skiing without insoles.  Still working on the perfect fix.  Maybe it’s a bigger pair of boots.  But right now that’s not really an option so I’m getting creative.That’s all from me.  Keep your eyes peeled for a blog post from Dylan coming soon entitled: “Positive Hand Gestures: Which One’s Best?  A study of the thumbs up, hook-em horns, surf’s up, and a-ok signs” *

*This may never happen.  In fact, it almost definitely won’t.