Ice Climbing

Ice climbing was in fact utterly terrifying.  I'm glad I did it, but I think it may be one of those: ice climbing, check! types of things.  It turns out that you don't just put crampons on your regular boots (how cool is it that I wore crampons?) you have to rent boots and crampons.  The boots are plastic shell types, with a softer insert.  We wound up hiking about a mile and a half, uphill, in the snow, with a pack, in these pretty uncomfortable boots to get to the waterfall that we climbed.  I was pretty happy with my aerobic condition, because I did the hiking without any real problems, except that my feet were pretty uncomfortable.  The way out was super easy, and probably took about a third of the time.  It was really nice, the sun was setting and we could see the observatory over Mt. Washington.  But, between the hiking in uncomfortable boots and the climbing (which pretty much involved kicking ice with my feet, then hitting it with the axes) my legs were killing me!  So, I didn't run for a week after. Just went again today.

It's been cold still, and they are saying it will remain pretty cold through March.  So, I went back to the gym.  Still don't see any evidence of change there.  I did 30 min on the treadmill, starting slow at 5.5 mph, then bumped it up to 5.7, 5.8, 5.9 for about 15 min, and then 5.7 for about the last 10 minutes.  It was a little over 5K in the 35 min, but now I'm sure it always is on the treadmill.  At first my ankles and legs were really sore, but then it was like everything got back in the groove, and it was fine by the end of the run.