What a(n)ICE day!!!

The theme for today is ICE. Pretty much everything (major) I did today (Saturday) had something to do with ice or a derivative of ice.. I guess it makes sense given where I'll be heading in 48 hours.

My alarm/Blackberry went off at 5:30am, but it took six "snooze whacks" to finally get myself out of bed and downstairs. My wife and I have a deal that I can go for as long a run as I want on Saturday mornings, provided I'm home in time to make pancakes for the kids (our Saturday morning ritual). With an hour less time to run, I filled the remaining hour with some "quality" miles and got home at the exact moment my daughter wandered downstairs wondering where her pancakes were.. Timing is everything!

I had to be quick with the pancakes (Trader Joes whole wheat pancake mix, tablespoon of vanilla, almond meal, flax seed meal, one egg, and water) because today I had a date with Fenton's deep freeze.

The deep freeze "training" is somewhat of a double-edged sword. Because the temperatures at the Pole WILL be negative 30ish, if things don't go so well in the -20(ish) environment at Fenton's, there could be problems. It's somewhat of a psychological gamble - if it goes poorly, man I'm going to have some baggage (mental baggage).. If it goes well, WATCH OUT!!!!

Fenton's has been an East Bay fixture since the 1920s. They make all of their ice cream at the shop using machinery that is about as old as Fenton's. Luckily for me (and something I learned from the Director of Operations, Sam), the only way to make REAL ice cream is to use a deep freezer. Ice cream comes out of the machines somewhat liquidy and only takes on the ice cream "form" after sitting for several hours in the deep freeze. Personally I was overjoyed to find out that they do it "the right way", because anything else and I'd be driving 40 miles to the nearest deep freeze instead of 2 miles. Thank you Fenton's!!!!

When I got to Fenton's, I clearly stood out. I was dressed head to toe in black, with a duffle bag full of gear that made me look more like one of those two guys who robbed a Bank of America back in '97, than a marathoner in training. It was a good move to put the gear on AFTER arriving or I may well have been shot.

The manager on duty (a nice guy named Josh) cleared an aisle for me in the freezer (keep in mind, it is usually FULL of ice cream and in I went. The deep freeze itself measures about a 10'x15'. There is a door on either end and a little "peep window" that people on one end can look through without having to open the door. My immediate reaction was "this ain't so bad". The only thing that wasn't working so well was my iPOD. It was on, but I couldn't hear any sound. My thought at the time was that the volume wasn't up enough to drown out the fans (which were very loud) and if you've ever tried to turn up the volume of an iPOD with gloves on, you know that the touchpad doesn't respond very well to pressure that isn't human flesh. Two little things I learned from this episode are that under no circumstances - NEVER ... EVER... should I take my outer mittens off.. Even for a minute. It took nearly 5 minutes for my hands to recover from the 30 seconds I had the glove off to fumble with my iPOD volume switch.. The second thing I learned was that sound from an iPOD flows to your ears much easier when you actually remember to put the ear phones in your ears instead of having them dangling inside your jacket.

Brief Summary
1 - Never take the mittens off..

2 - Headphones must be in ears to hear music..

Before going in to the freezer, I asked Josh for a small cup of water. It wasn't for me to drink, but to see how fast "things" freeze. Without talking about it too much, within 5 minutes, the top of the water had frozen over such that when I held the cup upside down, none of the water underneath was able to spill out. By the time I exited the freezer 36 minutes later, the entire cup was frozen.

So what did I learn from the experience? Well, aside from the two things I talked about above, the glasses I was planning on wearing did fog up. They have since been replaced. I also upgraded the gloves I'm wearing under my mittens to a set that are a) warmer and b) have a special thumb material that works with iPODS (what will they think of next?!). I also learned that you really don't need to have a lot on to weather conditions WAY below zero, but WHAT you have on makes all the difference. My core never felt cold in any way. My legs also never felt cold (good thing, since I had about $1,000 worth of gear covering those areas). My face was also fine (two face masks and a wool beanie) outside of the goggle fogging issue. Moving to the extremities - I found that if my hands were doing anything other than simply hanging out in the mittens , there was some level of discomfort. My hope is that the new base layer I picked up at REI yesterday (with a gift card my in-laws gave me for Christmas) will solve that. My feet didn't ever feel cold, but after all was said and done, they were probably the last part of my body to truly feel warm again.

The whole experience was a HUGE confidence booster for me. It showed that my gear is going to work the way I expected it to (at leat in the confines of a freezer it does) and that negative 20 really isn't all that bad..

When I got home, the next thing on my list was to take my son to Berkeley Iceland for the LAST PUBLIC free skate of the facility's 66 year history. Unfortunately the rink has been up for sale for the past year and no buyer came forward so they're closing it down for good. My son has been taking lessons there, so we thought it would be nice to get in one last skate and say goodbye to a pretty amazing facility.
So that was the second of three "ice" experiences.

So as not to drag this on too long, the last of my three ice experiences was the new Will Ferrell movie "Blades of Glory ".. A most excellent end to a rather chilly day!

Tomorrow - packing day...

P.S. Get your time estimates in and win a Suunto T3 sports watch!!!! I'm feeling GOOD!!!