Lost dog, found dog.

I love skate skiing, I'm not that great at it but it doesn't stop me from loving it. There are times though that I hate it and last night became one of those times. My plan to step away from the bike had me in the car with two pairs of skis, two dogs and about two hours of daylight to play with. The plan, roughly an hour of skate followed up with an hour of classic to make my body feel better from the hour of skating. The place of play would be Mountainview.

Headed out on the golf course trail feeling that I nailed the glide wax pretty good. Waxing can compensate for technique some times and with good glide meant the two dogs were in chase. The story begins with the two dogs, of course one being the Molly Monster, the fastest broken legged dog around and her partner in crime today would be Ash (Mom's dog). Ash loves the adventures to new trails and areas with me. So much that he sometimes thinks he knows where he is going before we actually get there. This is where the story starts.

Classic is a great pace for the dogs to chase, fast paced walk for them, skate on the other hand has them running. Molly decided to be smart and keep pace like she normally would, Ash on the other hand was to busy checking out all the good smells and would play catch up. This seemed ok at first a glance back every few minutes would see him catching up or in some cases ahead of us. He started to guess where we were going. All was well until I turned right. Yep those right turns are what seems to screw up Nascar drivers and it also messed up the dog. He was in chase up to the upper feild trails. Everything's good at this point. I'm still skiing with good technique even with the abusive climb up top.

For some reason Ash decided that he wanted to see what was in thebush, bolts ahead then turns into the trees. Not worried, he comes out and startes to follow again, look back again still there as I head into another trail. Look back again, nothing. I wasn't stressed at this point because it's just what he does. I was expecting him to show up a few minutes later either way ahead or running full speed to catch up. HMMMM nothing. As I make the loop back to where he lasted was, hmmmm still nothing. Looking around, a couple name calls, nothing. My animal tracking skills are limited butcould tell there were no extra tracks to be seen. No cougar or bear tracks, good thing. A few more calls and I was heading back in the direction I came.

Now Ash has a notorious history of thiskind of thing, he also has a homing device that sends him back to start. There has been more than one ocasion that I returned to the car and he's sitting there with his tail wagging. So I returned to the car, nothing. Instead of changing up skis like I planned I stuck to the idea that I can cover a lot more ground in less time on the skates, I found myself trying to track his foot prints, of course since Mountainview allows dogs on the trails during the week this made me not fully sure if i'm following the right ones. Passed the Chalet, nothing, heading up the back side of the resort, nothing, back to where I was earlier on the upper feild trails, nothing. Hmmm not feeling good about this, my body also started to not feel good as I pushed the pace higher than I should have been and of course I wasn't thinking about things like offset, one skate, two skate etc etc. I went into body crusie control with my focus on finding this dam dog in the 25 km of trails.

With daylight fading quickly I returned to the car yet again with the body feeling a little trashed, still no dog. I start wondering what I'm going to say to Mom. I had one last shot, I returned to the Chalet, the sound of my car must have tweaked the bastard because he came trotting out of the chalet, tail wagging, happy as a pig in shit. Me, mildly pissed off, body aching. My body was not impressed with me and my left side lower back was now tight from skiing the same way for 20 plus km at a pace beyond what it should be. I did end up with a great tempo work out. Ash has lost his play with Matt ticket for a little while. Back to the reason I love skate skiing and sometimes I hate it. If I do just the right amount of it, I love it. When I step over the limit it hurts and I hate it. I currently hate it and will be playing with the classics today.