Building up to Yellowstone: Max Speeds on Bragg Hill

“Why are we still rollerskiing?” Dev seems to ask as he cruises by me on Rt. 17 with a Budweiser can stuck on his road tip. It’s a pretty good question: here it is November 15th and the promise of an early winter seems to be fading with every successive 60-degree day.

While we’re still out here, though, we’re going to make the most of it and have fun any way we can, whether that fun comes from cleaning up road trash with ski poles, or exploring a new route back to school from the top of Bragg…

This time of year is always the hardest: the daylight fades in mid-afternoon and we jealously hear daily updates from the alpine team, who have been busy shredding the gnar in Vail for more than a week. Meanwhile, our skis are freshly ground (an in-house operation orchestrated by Todd Carroll, the alpine ski guru) and ready for West Yellowstone next week.

Until then, we’re going to keep getting after it, and what better way than to take out some rage on the pavement. We once again took to the big hill out back for our max speed workout. 6, 8, 12, 6, 8, 12, 6, 8, 12.

It’s always nice to be able to ski together as a team. We traded leads up to Battlegrounds and back to warmup.

Ryley leads the pack: Heidi, Dev, Justin, and Hans.

“Carpe skiem” is a pretty sweet motto.

After skiing midway up Bragg, the warmup is over and everything moves pretty fast until the end of the workout. These four skied neck and neck for most of the speeds.

We had some sibling speeds going early in this workout: Heidi and Hans with game faces on!

Pausing for a laugh after pole-planting frustration.

Dev almost goes down in back, after Justin had almost gone down out of the start: this was a race to the yellow sign, our marker for the top of the workout.