Hello, everyone. Welcome to That Triathlon Life podcast. I'm Paula Finlay. I'm Eric Loggersstrom. I'm Nick Goldston. Happy New Year. It is January 1st, as we're recording this. We are so excited to be in 2025 now, fresh new year. Eric and I are professional triathletes. Nick is an amateur triathlete and a professional musician. And every week we answer your questions.

We do race recaps.

We talk about a little bit about what's going on in the triathlon world.

And yeah, but the biggest bulk of the show is answering questions from the listeners

and hopefully shedding some insight into all of our accumulated knowledge that we've built up in the sport over decades and decades

of racing and training.

Pain a scene. What is it like in Bend right now?

It's a bit cold.

It's a bit chilly. We've actually been at the Oregon Coast for the last five days, which has

been super nice. It's like wet out there, but not cold, so it doesn't snow or get icy.

But here in Bend, it's kind of hovering around zero.

So a little bit of snow, a little bit of ice. The air temperature is not that bad, but it's just a little bit yucky on the ground. Yeah, it makes it hard to get out on the trails and stuff because somebody walks on them. there's a little bit snow and then that becomes ice and then that kind of happens a couple days in a row

and all of a sudden you have like a pothole,

ice rink death. Somebody walks on them. There's a little bit of snow and then that becomes ice. And then that kind of happens a couple days in a row.

And all of a sudden you have like a pothole, ice rink death trail situation. And now we've got to run on the roads or the treadmill. Is there a name, like a colloquial name for that? Actually, I think there is. I just can't think of it off the top of my head. For what? For the like divity ice when it's you know like just all the footprints and bad for your ankles. Bad for your ankles. One word. Treacherous. There's a word for it.

And you guys swam today for the first time in a minute. Yeah. Well, we realized that Bos were swimming that

we actually didn't swim a single time in the pool over here in New Zealand because we would just

swim in the lake. The last time we sat in a pool was probably a month ago. Yeah. It's crazy. It's the

longest period of time I've taken off since COVID. And during COVID, how long had you taken off? Oh, I can't remember. It's all a blur. We were doing like stretch cords and like all that stuff that everyone was doing. But I don't know. For some reason, today felt worse than even in COVID when we'd sporadically swim. It felt real bad today. But that's fine. But you have been, you have been skiing. You guys have been going up to Mount Batchel and doing skiing stuff. And Eric, usually you do a splitboard, which is this kind of cool thing where you can ski uphill, but then it buckles together and then becomes a snowboard so you can snowboard downhill. But you actually skied up and down this time, which was the first time, right?

That's the first time I've skied since I was, you know, like six years old. I started out skiing,

skied about three times and then switched to snowboarding because it was so much cooler.

Of course. And now, since we do a little bit more touring, which yeah, like you said, is walking up and down, It's much less annoying to take my snowboard in half and put one half on each foot and then walk up the hill and then try to put it back together and do the whole thing versus skiing. It's just, it's like half as many steps to just walk up on the skis, take the skins off, ski back down on the skis. We have a pretty good relationship with Solomon, and they sent, well, we ordered some skis from them and some boots and got like a good setup for him. But on our first ski that we did, I titled my Strava Baby's first ski. Oh, God. People, people. Eric's first ski. And I didn't think anything of it at all. It I was like I was kind of funny because Eric is baby and then people started saying congratulations on my Strava and I was like are they congratulating us on like our first ski they think it's our first time skiing ever like I was so confused and then ited on me that people thought that I was pregnant.

...