Jessi Stensland - Adventures in Endurance Performance

Recap // Lake Tahoe All-Women Sports Camp

Had an absolutely glorious time up in Lake Tahoe in August as a part of the first All-Women Sports Camp.  It's a magical place and to have the opportunity to enjoy it with so many amazing women was an experience I won't forget.  For one, picture us all, standing on the edge of a sparkling Lake Tahoe as the sun rises, 30 paddle boards on the shoreline waiting patiently, 30 women waiting anxiously in awe and anticipation of an adventure on the open water together, just minutes away...

      

From swimming, cycling, running, mountain biking and stand up paddleboarding to classes on running technique, movement preparation, triathlon transition strategies, mindset, nutrition, bike fitting, bike maintenance and more...we stayed busy!  More info and photos of the event HERE.

 

Check out the video of the event.  Join us next time!!  

Stand Up Paddleboarding = Serenity + Strength

I'd heard about it years ago...but now I've got my own!  Have you stand up paddleboarded yet? 

For the record, I'm not a surfer and have never done any paddling.  I have always been a swimmer - sans equipment - in the water. I lived 12 years by the ocean in San Diego and the most I did was bodysurf for my triathlon training a few times. I will say I do love bodysurfing.

Stand up paddling caught my attention immediately when I first heard about it. It seems that from the moment it was born it was cool.  Over the years I've hopped on a board once or twice but in April I got my own. The Surftech Laird 11'6" as you can see to the left. 

There have been times when I've SUP'd in the ocean, fought the waves, had to fight for my balance - and then settle in and enjoy being surrounded by the entire ocean while just standing there.  Paddling hard for a few strokes, easy a for few strokes. Watching the stingrays and sand sharks underneath me.  Getting to cruise over, and appreciate, the beautiful flowing kelp beds, without having to swim through them.  All while the sun's setting...

There have been other times when we had a few boards and did short little impromptu races between two of us at a time around a nearby bouy. THAT was fun.  Competitive little buggers we all are.  

In June at the Teva Mountain Games I was AMAZED to see people on their SUPs in the raging river, making it look easy to balance, just cruising along.  There they held a surf cross competition 2 on 2, like the snowboard cross in the Olympic Games.  Wild!  That is something I can imagine doing - once I get my skillz down.

I've seen Greg Welch surfing waves with it.  And I've seen people using the unstable surface to challenge their stability and strength by doing overhead squats, planks, among other things,  including yoga! What a view for a core workout.

Of course there's always the long slow distance you can put on it too.  Friends of mine go out for hours at a time.  

STRENGTH + SERENITY

It's a perfect piece of equipment that combines the best of a both worlds.  For one its a total body workout that challenges body awareness, balance, coordination, stability and strength all of which come into play big time in swim, bike and run power production.  Great power transfer from the paddle to the pedal...in more ways than one.

For another, being out on the water, away from cars, computers and all the other craziness, simply feeds the soul.  It's peaceful, relaxing, social if you want it to be, serene and re-energizing.

Choose your own adventure.

Yesterday I took the board out with a couple of friends, Ryann Fraser and my roommate Morgan.  It was Morgan's first time on an SUP. She was a champ!  Take a peek inside our evening at the Boulder Reservoir during sunset in the video below.  LOVIN' IT - THANKS SURFTECH SUP for inspiring new adventures!

Why venture off-road?

Thank you Red Licorice Events for hosting me this weekend out in Texas...and for including me on your blog!  

Here's the post I wrote for them this week on my inspiration to venture off-road.  Its beauty, benefits and why my body can handle it no problem. It begins:

"I would have considered myself an off-road virgin…until this year. For 10 years I’d been racing triathlon on the road with the odd trail running race mixed in. It was about two years ago that I started to get curious about off-road multisport, went to watch a race and then borrowed a mountain bike and did the 2007 XTERRA World Championships in Maui. Still, 2008 passed by, and..." [more]

One Helluva Month // Big Bear Broken Face

From coaching hundreds of kids at the Superbowl NFL Experience with Under Armour, to shooting and editing my first tv commercial quality brand messaging videos for Saris Cycling Group, to venturing out to do a full moon snowshoe hike up at Big Bear Mountain with Team Sole only to stick around long enough to manage to break my face backcountry skiing for the first time the next day, to being embedded with the Jelly Belly Pro Cycling Team during the entire epic Amgen Tour of California producing behind the scenes videos of it all...

...it was one helluva memorable month!

My Big Bear Broken Face story goes like this:

Drove up Sunday evening to join a group led by Paul Romero and Kathy Lundgren of Team Sole, both world class adventure racers and ski/snowboarders, for a hardcore full-moon backcountry snowshoe hike.  Immediately the epic-ness of the trip started.  It was snowing, pretty hard, so there wasn't much of a moon, and there were no trails to be found.  Truly all trailblazing in soft awesome powder in the middle of nowhere with people I'd only just met and hardly knew what they looked like.  Shared a hot toddy somewhere on the mountain and then regrouped for a home cooked meal back at their house which they graciously offered up to me, since it was a three hour drive from San Diego. 

Well it snowed so hard overnight that there was no getting down the mountain, in my Prius that is, the whole next day, which meant lots of play time to be had...and I knew it would be rad, because of Paul and Karen, but I had no idea how much so.  I must mention that Paul's son is Jordan Romero.  Amazing amazing 12-year old who is attempting to climb the Seven Summits of the World:  the highest peaks on each of the 7 continents.  He has summitted 5 so far including 20320' Denali most recently.

In short that day went like this:

Eat. Shovel the driveway. Shovel the road. Core workout on snowshoes with the shovels on our backs up and down the street lunging every which way.  40 minute snowshoe workout in the woods behind their house, with hill repeats and then some giggling as we leaped downhill in the deepest wide open powder i'd ever seen.  More shoveling...it was snowing that much.  Breakfast.  From their house we snowshoed 30 minutes or so up to the ski slopes (couldn't drive, too much snow.) Rented skis.  Skied for a couple hours, non-stop since there were no lines on the lifts, in lots of fresh powder (it was still snowing.)  Skied through trees between the ski slopes like I'd never done before (took me a couple of runs and a few fun crashes to work out my weight distribution in powder, which is much different than without.  Eventually I got the hang of it and had more and more fun.)  When the lifts closed, we grabbed our backpacks which had our snowshoes and boots and headed off to ski home backcountry to their house all of about 1km away.  That's when it got nuts. 

Since the trails were all snowed over we missed a turn and got into some really sketchy, too-many-trees-and-rocks-and-boulders-to-ski-in-a-continuous-path kind of stuff.  At some point before we realized we had to turn around and hike back up, I took a step that didn't go as planned and fell downward face first (sailor dive style) no hands (it must've happened too fast for them to react probably because i had the pack on and my feet were rooted to the ground in the skis) into a big boulder whose tip was jutting out of the thigh high snow.  Had helmet and goggles on, but hit square on my cheekbone.  I was catapulted up and over the boulder and landed below in in the snow.  Ouch.     My bone seemed intact but my face was split open and swelled up immediately.  Paul pulled me up and since I seemed to be ok (which I was, amazingly enough) we continued down the mountain for a bit, but then took off skis and hiked back up to find the trail.  We found it, and made our way back home hours later than planned, finishing that leg of the trip in some pretty gnarly backcountry stuff but in dark.   I snowplowed my way down in the tracks my friend had just made, didn't crash again which was a blessing. Got home, cleaned up the face. Went to eat an amazing Nepalese meal at the Himalayan.  Waited to get back to San Diego the next day to get my face looked at by a plastic surgeon to spare myself from a botch job of stitches at the ER, praying that 24hrs wasn't going to make a big difference.  Luckily I gave my friend, Active.com CEO, Dave Alberga a heads up as to what happened as I was driving home and he connected me with someone at Active whose brother, Dr. Karam, is a stellar facial plastic surgeon, just miles from my home.  THANK YOU!  When I walked in Dr. Karam said, "Is it broken?" and I answered, "No." He said, "How do you know?" I said, "Hmmm, you're right, I don't know!"  And luckily he prescribed a CT scan to confirm and it was, but only hairline fractures.  Looking back at photos I realized how obvious it was that it was broken!  I never really felt any pain either so that helped.  I don't think I had a concussion but someone pointed out the fact that if I never felt pain, that's a sign that I probably had one.  Either way, I was SUPER lucky. (More like blessed.  I know who my angels are.  Thanks you guys and gals!!!) It was stitched up beautifully and healed so quickly!  Looked like a bruiser all during the Tour of California let me tell ya.  All good though.

 

Learned that I'm able to push my limits to find my limits.  Pretty cool.  I'd rather risk it than never know, ya know? 

Also learned that the face heals amazingly fast...with the help of great nutrition and high metabolism I'm sure. Thank goodness. That first picture is the day of my stitches and the second is 10 days later.  Got them out  by Garmin Team doc Shannon morning of Stage 4. Easy peasy. 

The adventure continues, but now its going to be about proper performance training for a while...off-road, i'll be back :)

Epic Adventure :: Just Outside LA??

We definitely made the most of our afternoon hike (which was more of a scramble-climb-boulder-run-and-hike.)  Didn't leave the house until 1pm, started the hike at 2:15pm and made it back to the car just as darkness set in at 5pm (so early!)  The internet is an amazing thing.  This being new for me (finding great/hard/seasonal hikes in the area) it has come in very handy!  Casey, The Modern Hiker, pointed us in the direction of a small stretch of the San Gabriels that we never would've otherwise found.

Check out these photos:

I can't believe it took me this long to appreciate what was so close to home and even longer to take advantage of it!  This hike happened to start at 4500ft and the summit was 6000ft.  We took off on the trail running and ohmigosh was out of breath before I knew it.  I was glad when I remembered we were at altitude and not just unfit.   Made me want to trek out there more regularly.  Never a good feeling to think that many of my competitors (those that live/train at altitude) would feel fine on a run like this. 

THE ADVENTURE

We got to a point where we decided to venture off the trail.  Which led to a few holy $%&# moments, most during the stretch you see me on in that first photo.  The rock was mostly loose, which was the problem.  Lance had ventured up a different way and was able to capture it on camera, while admitting later he was laughing at me for not moving for at least 5min at one point.  Haha.  I was trying to laugh at it then, and we were joking that it wouldn't end up being as funny if these were the last photos that were ever taken of me if I died!  It takes a lot for me to feel scared, so it was interesting for me to feel the way I did.  I didn't like it. :)  I'll remember to take into consideration what might, and what might not, be in store for me above my eye level next time I decide to start scrambling up a rock face.

Spanish bayonets (think very large porcupine-like plant, photo left) which are otherwise intimidating-definitely-want-to-stay-away-from kind of plants, became my friends.  They were the only thing solid enough in the ground that I could pull myself upward with once i reached the brush above the rocks.  I just stuck my hand down into their center, trying hard to be steady enough not to get stuck (which happened a few times) and grabbed on.  It worked.

After spending a few minutes at the summit enjoying the moment and guzzling water, we decided to head back a different way.  After a while though we realized we were heading toward another peak, and not toward our car. And since the sun was setting, we figured that wasn't the greatest idea, so we re-summited, which I was stoked about since I had seen many photo ops on the way down but didn't have my camera in hand.  Of course we hadn't realized how far down we'd come and it seemed like a much longer way back up, but was totally worth it.  I was in point-and-shoot heaven, with the light of the sunset right in the direction of where we were hiking.  Amazing light and colors.  The whole time feeling more like we were in the mountains of New Mexico, not 20 minutes outside of Los Angeles !

We also agreed it was WELL worth it to head back that way once we saw what was in  store on the descent that was originally suggested by  Casey.   It was a steep, loose rock single track trail, lined with spanish bayonets, that, if coordinated well, you could actually "ski" down, standing on two feet, and otherwise, sit and luge.  It was awesome.  We spent a moment at the bottom watching the last bit of the sunset before running back down the hill, super fast, with the most amazing red sunsetting sky and the perfect cool tempurature:  so my cold cheeks felt the cool air but my hands were warm.  We never saw a soul the whole way.

We made it back to the car at dark, exactly 5:00pm.  We were worked, refreshed, stoked to be alive, hungry for a yummy meal and a beer, and wondering how we were going to top this one...

...but sure that we could.

Hoping life doesn't get too busy in-season to continue venturing.  I don't plan on it.

The adventures of an endurance athlete continue...