EUGENIZATION.

Above: My long-suffering wife learns the joys of mountain biking and the virtues of waterproof camera cases.

Only five months to go until snowboarding season, sigh…

Well, there’s still fit fun to be had. One popular mode of crosstraining happens to be mountain biking, which my wife and her family members tried for the first time during our mini-vacation in New Hampshire last weekend.

As you can see, she took to it quite well.

There’s very little carryover from one form of training to another, except for strength training and to a smaller extent, cardiovascular training (where you get the physiological benefits, i.e., increased capillary density, improved oxygen transport, etc., but not the performance aspects - those are too sport-specific). So, I guess the whole idea of crosstraining is flawed at its base concept - oh well. Let’s look at it this way: It’s better than sitting around allowing the body to decondition in the off-season. It’s certainly better than letting those hard-won physiological changes to disappear, after you’d worked to hard to get them.

That being said, let’s all go out and enjoy some “recreation” this summer, call it “crosstraining”, and wait out those long months till the snow arrives again…