Lately a couple of people have asked me how my training for the trip is coming along, so I figured I would write a post about it. The truth is that I’ve been slacking off I know, I know, tisk tisk. In my defence, the holidays did consume a lot of my time, and it’s also been really frickin cold outside for the past month or two.

Okay, that’s enough with the excuses. It really isn’t as bad as I just made it out to be. I have been going to the gym regularly, just not as much as I would like to though. Ultimately I should be going five times a week.

But besides going to the gym, I have also been getting outside on the occasional nice day that we rarely see in Winterpeg. Last weekend I headed down to North Dakota and spent the day snowboarding. It turned out to be a pretty decent day and the ski hill wasn’t very busy, which was awesome because you didn’t have to wait in line for a long time just to get on the chair lift. For those of you who have never been skiing or snowboarding in Manitoba or North Dakota, this is a big deal as it can take less than one minute to get down most runs. When there are lines you end up spending most of your day waiting in lines and riding chair lifts. This is a perfect example of why we need to build more mountains in the prairies

Now if you remember back I had originally said that I wanted to ride my bike to work throughout the winter? Well that ended rather sooner than later. It turns out that the bike cage where I normally lock my bike up does not approve of cold weather. The lock for the cage froze and we’re unable to open the door. Boooo!!! Then to top it off, whoever is clearing the snow from the parking lot is piling the snow right in front of the door to the bike cage! I guess it was just not meant to be.

Oh well, I actually got out biking last weekend. I met up with a good friend of mine and we headed out for close to three hours on the bikes. We ended up riding on the Seine river and headed towards the Forks where we stopped to watch the snowboarders and drink some hot chocolate. After that we headed down the skating rink on the Assiniboine River.

That was last weekend, so what about this weekend? Well, this weekend was also pretty wicked. It was gorgeous outside! On Saturday I checked out the annual Banff Mountain Film Festival. I highly recommend this event to anyone who enjoys action sports and the good old outdoors.

On Sunday I finally got out and did some ice climbing at the St. Boniface ice tower, which is run by the St. Boniface section of the Alpine Club of Canada. What a blast! I will definitely be heading back to the ice tower this year. I’ve included some pictures from today.