Cross-Training: AT Skiing

I would have gone to Alta today, but I don't think the snow is really there yet, so I went backcountry up Flagstaff/Days, etc. I started long after the rest of my group, so the first climb was catch-up time. 40 minutes of race-pace HR. After that, much easier for a total of two hours of climbing time.

Turned out the snow was great, although I did hit several rocks. I doubt Alta has enough snow to ski off-trail based on how thin it was out of bounds.

The HR thing brings up the whole question of cross-training, how do you quantify it, and how beneficial is it. I have a program I wrote that converts HR to TSS in an attempt to bring it all into one quantified training load. It works surprisingly well for bike rides, except for race conditions, where the HR-estimate yields substantially higher numbers than the wattage-based version.

After skiing I rode with Bp for almost 2 hours. My legs were pretty tired, but my HR was really high. To me this suggests something was more tired than my legs. So what does this mean in terms of training stress? Am I quantifying my legs, my lungs, my heart, something else?

There is obviously a lot of cross-over between biking and AT skiing. I say this because all the way up the mountain I was easily climbing past people. Then Bp and I ride, and he's riding real easy while I huff and puff behind -- tired from the skiing.

So I call it good without "tweaking" to bring the ski numbers down, knowing the compairson is a little bogus. I think it still provides some useful information.