Rare orchids in GNP this past Sunday.  Photo, and plant sleuthing, by M.

I just finished another really good hill interval workout, and am drinking a Mighty Arrow while waiting for chicken to cook (seared, then baked in BBQ sauce, hot sauce, and root beer).  My resting pulse right now, and the way my legs feel, get me thinking I’ve been doing things right in the last two months.  But only time will tell.

This weekend is the last big training traverse before the classic.  The weekend after that a friend is getting married in Whitefish, and the weekend after that is the weekend before I fly up.  I’ll do some hard stuff on those weekends, but things designed more to sharpen the edge than to place the final few bricks.  Our peculiar spring (now summer) keeps making trip planning complex.  Rivers are high, enough that making packrafting an integral part of a trip freaks me out a bit.  Yet for all that snow melt, we haven’t had a sustained period of warm days and cool nights for over two weeks, and the recent wet slides I saw the weekend before last give me pause when I think about crossing certain passes.  Good mental training, and hauling all the extra snow gear and doing all that postholing has built a great power base, but it’s still a bit hard to embrace.  I must remember that the training is the meal, and the race merely the after-meal coffee.

On a largely unrelated note, I took a slow moment at work this afternoon (what would the internet be without them?) to examine my all-time post view stats (since switching to wordpress last fall).  The results are encouraging.  Of course gear reviews dominate the top 10 (the Marquette BC has been a popular subject, as has the Crossleather), but the number one post is my trip report from three weeks ago.  The second most popular is this meditation of the purpose of gear and outdoor adventure in our lives.  The former took off thanks to a bunch of secondary and tertiary traffic on twitter and a shockingly wide array of blogs, while the later resonated and got a lot of traffic from BPL.  All of that, and the intelligent discussion which ensued, is thanks to you readers.  So thank you all, very much.

Lastly, I’d like to recommend my new favorite pair of shorts.  I have the storm color, which is very nice, and can be seen in action here.   Yes, they are assiniely expensive.  And yet, like most things Patagonia, the great fabric and superlative design and fit make the price quite worthwhile once you have them on.  They’re comfy, tough, dry very fast, and just fit great.  For your information.