Sort of.
This weekend is Hockey Day (Weekend?) in Minnesota. In conjunction with this, the Minnesota Wild are holding an outdoor, open-to-the-public, free practice on the oval this morning. Since the practice was scheduled to happen right after our regular Sunday morning time trials, we got a front row seat to the preparation. The windows in the warming house were washed, the frozen vomit was hosed off the walkway, banners were put up and the blow-across-the-oval red pads were arranged into a hockey rink.
The scoreboard displayed the Wild insignia...
...and a giant inflatable Blizzard materialized in the infield.
That's a fellow masters skater cruising past the Blizzard. It's not every day you get to skate past a huge, inflatable confection.
As for the time trials, they were average for me. Thanks to a stiff breeze and freezing drizzle, the ice was very slow. You can see the Zamboni track here, and you can also see how the rest of the ice is frosted over with frozen drizzle. Oh, and you can see steam from the compressors blowing across the track.
I did two races, a 500 and a 1000. In the 500 I was paired with fellow masters skater 60's Boy. He's never beaten me in a 500, but he did today--I spent the whole race futilely trying to skate him down. Nice job, 60's Boy! I love to see older skaters improve (which is not to say that I wouldn't prefer to have beaten him ;-)
My 1000 went OK; slow (which I blamed, rightly or wrongly, on the conditions), but no huge die the second lap, and my technique felt good. The big news of the weekend is that I didn't get PVC's in either race. I had them during only one of my three practices this week, and before and after both races today--but none actually during the races. So that's an improvement.
Hmm, now I have a craving for ice cream. Wonder where that came from ...
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