Zaskoda

I’m writing this post while sick. I think I pushed myself a little too hard. Day 35 was pretty tough on me. The following day (Sunday) I tried to recover. Near the end of the day, I noticed my throat was a tad sore. Hoping for the best, I still joined my coworkers for a Monday on Copper Mountain. I have to admit, the conditions were near epic. I would have hated myself for having missed it. We had 10+ inches of fresh snow and it snowed most of the day. The front of the mountain was fairly tracked out; but the back bowls were still amazing.

I felt the burn after the first run of the day. I knew I wasn’t up to par before we even started riding. Still, we took several runs down the front before heading to the back. Kris and Jason were eager to hike up over the ridge so Travis and I followed. As Travis filmed Kris and Jason dropping into the back bowl, I laid face first on the snow gasping for my life.

We broke for lunch and I had trouble getting warmed back up. I used the blow driers in the bathroom to help warm up. After some food and coffee, I was able to head out with Travis for one more run.

Once I got home, I squeezed in a hot bath and went straight to bed. I headed to work the next morning (yesterday) and tried my best to be productive. I didn’t feel all that bad and hoped the worst was behind me. This morning, I was hurting. I had a fever off and on all night. My eyes ached. My nose and throat felt raw and inflamed. I couldn’t stand for very long without getting light headed. I didn’t make it into the office today.

I’m feeling much better this evening – I hope I feel even better tomorrow morning. My 36th day was hard earned and I’m still paying. Still, it marks a very special base goal!!! I have officially doubled the total number of days I’ve gone snowboarding. My next goal is to hit 100 days total. My ultimate goal, as always, is 100 days this season. But right now, my goal is to get over being sick.

64 days left…

56 Days in 07/08

After swapping a couple of emails with the sponsors behind the trip, I’ve learned that I misreported some information on day 34. The main sponsors were Tuaca, Red Bull & Intrawest. Sweet Leaf merely provided their yummy tea.

More specifically

• Intrawest provided lift tickets
• Tuaca sponsored the bus and swag
• Red Bull gave us wings
• Our awesome bus driver’s name is BJ

Uncategorized

My buddy Adam came up from Dallas for what might be his last snowboard trip for a while. He’s got a baby on the way. I’ve never ridden with Adam, so I was intent on making sure I made it up to Copper mountain yesterday. It turned out to be a great day with lots of fresh snow. Copper had 5 fresh inches on the ground as we were driving up, and it continued to fall all day long.

It turned out to be one of the most abusive days of boarding I’ve had in a while. I’ve been riding the Arbor exclusively lately, and constantly adjusting my stance as I go. Because of the fresh powder and types of runs I thought we would be doing, I switched back to the longer Burton Custom for the day. I couldn’t seem to keep the board under me. I biffed it over and over. On my first run of the day, I splattered while trying to avoid a skier that cut me off while I was airborne. He apologized, but it didn’t do much to help the thumb I laid back in the process. Ouch. During our powder runs, I found myself constantly eating it. I couldn’t understand why. Knowing that I ate it on clean powder runs, you can imagine how much the bumps tore me up.

Later in the day, I examined my stance on the board. It was a lot different from how I’d been riding. I adjusted my bindings and it made a huge difference. It was a little too late, as I was already physically wiped out from crashing so much through the day.

I still had a ton of fun. We started things off on the moguls as we were riding with skiers. Then we dropped into the Enchanted Forest (holy crap, what an awesome run!). From there, we worked our way to one of the back bowls and spent most of the day. Near the end, we took some groomers down the front and hit the intermediate terrain park and a few tree runs in the process.

Due to a variety of factors, I was left without a ride home. I ended up hitching a ride at the top of the parking lot. The dude that picked me up was a local native named Luke. Turns out, he just started competing in slope style and used to compete in boarder cross. I’m hoping to get Russ back out here to shoot some video of this guy. Luke was kind enough to go out of his way and drop me off at my doorstep. Hell, he even helped me carry my gear up three flights of stairs – very nice guy.

Everything hurts today – it’s great. Legs, back, arms, neck, toe, thumb… it’s all trashed. I’ll be headed back out again tomorrow for day 36. It’s a special day, as it will be my base goal for the season. After tomorrow, I will have doubled my riding days since moving to Colorado last May. How cool is that? My next big milestone after tomorrow will be day 64 – which will give me a grand total of 100 days ever. And, of course, I’m still striving for the ultimate goal of 100 days this season. Wish me luck!

65 days left…

Uncategorized

It’s been some 5 months since my last update to this blog. I’ve been somewhat absorbed in the Gaia Community project. I hired on full time at Gaiam and started this project last June. After 9 months, we’ve given birth to a very healthy little community.

We began with nothing. Gaiam was grown as a catalog company that grew onto the Web via e-commerce. Like many other corporations, Gaiam knew there was huge value and potential in virtual communities and social media. The company Founder and SEO, Jirka Rysavy, started with little more than a vision and the domain name – Gaia.com. The first hire was the community ambassador, Jennifer. I was the second hire.

Today, 9 months later, we have a custom built software platform developed in Ruby on Rails. The platform is a social network at the core. Community members have a variety of standard methods for interacting ranging from blogs to forums. We currently have around 160,000 active community members and gigs of contributed content. Beyond the community (my personal focus) we also have a network of original, professionally produced multimedia content. Finally, we have a section of the site that is a fully customizable homepage with drag and drop widgets for content and webapps called MyGaia. The Gaia team is currently 21 members.

The Gaia community is unique in it’s character. Members of the community are conscious, pro-active individual looking to make positive changes in their own lives and in the world as a whole. This makes for one of the best vibes a virtual community can create. It’s wonderful!

So that begs the question – how did we build such a large and stable community so quickly? The answer is – we didn’t! We evaluated a staggering array of options. We even considered fully hosted and managed software platforms. However, we wanted the ability to provide custom features and we wanted to develop our infrastructure quickly. Thus, we decided to shoot for an in-house development team using a rapid development framework.

We then took a long hard look at all of the existing communities within our demographic. One community stood out above the rest. It was a little startup known as Zaadz. The deeper we looked, the more we realized that this team had taken the exact same path we were about to take, only they had more than a year lead time. Furthermore, the core community this group attracted was exactly the type of community we wanted to support. It was a match made in heaven.

In community development, the hardest part is the initial seed. Once you reach a certain size, a community suddenly takes off and your focus shifts from trying to grow the community to nurturing and managing the growth. Ironically, Zaadz literally means seed in Dutch. Zaadz grew and bloomed into Gaia.

Gaia is on her feet, but the journey has just begun. Jirka’s vision is massive and multifaceted. Even if it were appropriate for me to share it here, I don’t think I could summarize it in a single blog entry. It’s been an amazing learning experience and joy to work with this company. It’s also nice to look on this project as such a powerful success.

Uncategorized

I signed up for a snow trip drawing last time I was over at Lodos Bar and Grill. It was only after I dropped my name in the little box that I noticed it was a middle of the week trip and that you had to be present to win. I thought for sure it was all over. Early this week I got an email. Turns out, there were a few slots left on the bus. Woo hoo! I won… sorta. That still left the problem of it being a Wednesday. But, then I managed to get the required time off. Game on!

The prize was for me and a guest. My friend Sui was able to come with me. This worked out great, as I needed a lift to Lodos! Once we got there, we were greated by all kinds of awesome shwag. The event was sponsored by Sweet Leaf Tea, so there was much tea on hand. It’s a great product. It’s made from sugar cane, not corn syrup. It also proudly boasts an “organic” label on the side. Major kudos there. Best of all, it tastes damn good.

We had some other nifty items including discounts for lift tickets, cans of Red Bull, a huge Lodos chocolate brownie (and it was awesome!), a Lodos trucker hat, and Tuaca branded cap and shirt. Later in the day they handed out some Tuaca branded lip gloss – after I volunteered about 30 minutes to untangle the rat’s nest that the attached strings had become (boring story, really).

Beth (a snowboarder from Lodo’s) and Diana (a skier from Sweet Leaf) were awesome hosts for our trip. I also can’t express just how awesome our bus driver was. A pickup truck flipped in front of us, but our driver was able to maneuver around it swiftly and safely. There were plenty of folks stopping to give aid and that big bus had no business stopping there on the pass. He was so rock’n that we all pitched in for an extra tip at the end of the day.

Sui and I ran all over Winter Park. We played a bit in the park. We made our way back to Mary Jane and then to Parson’s bowl. I’ve tried to ride the bowl every single time I’ve been to Winter Park – and I finally got a chance. The tree runs back there are primo. We also got in some mogul runs. It was a full day. The conditions weren’t the best, with hard packed snow in most places. However, the weather was wonderful – we couldn’t have asked for better.

The ride home was pretty wild. What do you expect from a bunch of skiers and snowboarders who actually have a Wednesday off. At the end of the day, Beth and Diana hooked us up with some more of that delicious Sweet Leaf Tea, which I’ve been sharing at the office. Thanks again ladies, my coworkers are getting hooked. All in all, day 34 was a much welcomed surprise!

66 days left…

56 Days in 07/08

Recently I noticed a massive spike in my site traffic. Apparently, my Hardcore Fitness Training post from last November caught on over at Stumble Upon. I was shocked to see nearly 4,000 visitors in a single day. I generally don’t get traffic of that magnitude to my little blog.

Some of the comments left both in my blog and in the review of my post warned that I was losing the weight too quickly to be healthy. In most cases, these comments said I would almost surely regain the weight once I started eating again. It’s been over four months and I have not sustained significant weight gain. I also have not been ill this entire season and I’ve had relatively good strength endurance while snowboarding. Coming off of my one hardcore week, I did the following:

• Slowly increased my calorie intake. This was easy because my stomach shrank a bit.
• Continued to eat a veggie heavy diet.
• Continued to exercise regularly. I snowboard nearly every weekend and hit the gym irregularly.
• Monitored my weight and made adjustments if I began to slide. Sometimes I would eat unhealthy and start to gain. If this happened, I spent about a week focused on eating as healthy as possible.

There are no real “tricks” going on. I’m not counting calories anymore. I’m not working out a whole lot outside of snowboarding. Keep in mind, snowboarding can be a huge calorie burn. A friend of mine tracked her heart rate on the mountain and noticed that 55% of the time she was in the “fat burn” zone (it’s just below “cardio gain” zone). Consider that some days of boarding last 6 to 8 hours.

The one thing I’m not doing is gaining any significant muscle mass. Sometimes I will lift free weights at the house; however, I’ve not been dedicating enough regularity to really modify the shape of my body significantly. My current goal is to simply maintain the gains I’ve made during the season. I do intend to focus more on personal training some time in the future.

As a side note, I’m shocked at how popular my last post turned out to be. It’s inspiring to see my post affecting so many people!

Health and Fitness

I’m behind schedule but still pushing towards my goals. Today I’m 1/3 of the way towards my supreme goal of 100 days this season. I’m also a mere 3 days away from my base goal of doubling my total days spent riding. Things are rolling along nicely.

Today I headed up to Breckenridge with Laura and met up for a little while with Russ. During the morning, Laura and I made our way to the Imperial lift – the highest lift at Breckenridge and the highest chair in North America. After the lift dropped us off at 12,840 feet – we continued to hike another few hundred feet to the very top of the peak. We dropped in from over 13,000 feet and rode all the way to base camp at the bottom of Peak 9. The drop at the top was very steep and full of fresh powder. The powder didn’t last very long, but it felt amazing.

In the attached photo, I was attempting to flex my arm (my “gun” show). My hands were frozen completely numb at that point and my glove wasn’t even all the way on. When my fingers finally did start to thaw, they hurt for a while. They still feel kind of funky. While the view was amazing from the top, I sure was happy to make my way down!

Later that afternoon, we met up with Russ and played a while in the park. We wanted to catch some jumps on film, but the weather wasn’t cooperating. When the sun would shine, it was perfect. However, for the better part of the day, the sun insisted on hiding behind clouds leaving the terrain looking flat and featureless. It also left us feeling considerably colder. I did manage to get a small grab in on one of the jumps. Honestly, it was more like a tap. Still, it’s a sign of my slow but steady park progression!

67 days left…

56 Days in 07/08

My buddy Russ came up a little while back and we shot video on one of the days he was here. The above clip was his edit from the one day of riding. I thought he did a hell of a great job cutting the video to the music. His equipment is top notch too, making for some really clean footage. It’s too bad I didn’t get more of him in the park. Maybe next time.

Trip Video Montages, Videos

Wow… (thanks for the link Velzy)

Videos

My surf teacher, as I like to call her here, came up to visit me for a couple of weeks. This past weekend we drove up to Dillon and stayed with Jayne and Jason during their last weekend here.

Saturday, we went for a snowmobile ride at High Country Tours. Our tour guide, Mike, was just plain awesome. He was all about safety – but later he started showing off on the sled and took us on some really neat runs. We had a blast. Ya know, it really doesn’t take much to get those things up on one ski!

Saturday evening we hit Keystone for some night riding. As Velzy got up on her board for the first time in more than a year, I was well prepared to carefully watch and instruct her. I’d mustered up all my patience and wanted to show her what a wonderful teacher I could be. I had nothing to offer – she rode like a frack’n champ.

Sunday we headed out to Breckenridge and rode the day away. It was a bit crowded at the main lifts, but we wandered over to peak 7 and found a relatively empty lift servicing a wide variety of mostly blue runs. Once again, I was impressed with Velzy’s riding ability. She said she felt something click in her head during her Costa Rica surf trip. I think all the Yoga she’s been doing lately helped too! I know it helps me.

Finally, on Monday we headed back up to Keystone for the day. We spent a long time in the park playing on jumps and the pipe. I did some more 180’s both on the flat ground and coming off of little lips. Velzy was playing on all kinds of little kickers and finally hit some of the larger jumps in the Incubator park. She also took some runs down the half pipe carving up on the walls. I was shocked to say the least. Later in the day on one of our last runs – maybe it was the very last run – I decide to bomb a hill flat out. At the bottom of the run I spun around getting ready to wait on everyone to catch up. Sure enough, right behind me was Velzy.

My favorite thing, hands down, was seeing the stoke in that little girl’s eyes. Just priceless!

56 Days in 07/08