Here's my secret to ITI training. Playing wagon airplane. Awesome workout.
Duration... 3 hrs, Weight... 25 lbs, Motion.... lift, up and down arms, Calories..... 23,000. A serious arm burn, lots of happy screaming.

After the wildly self-injurious 2008 ITI and minimally injurious 2009 ITI I am only now finally feeling pretty good on a bike. The feeling that biking is not just a sole means of pain. My main goal has been not to (re)injure myself before the next ITI. One way to do that is to sit on a couch till Feb but that's not really in my nature. I've been working on becoming more of a wanna-be-pseudo-biker-with-a-crap-bike. We'll see how it all pans out. Normally, I think it best to simply get out and do multi-day trips, gain serious altitude, be anoxic and have fun. But with a family everything is time management so I have these very high intensity, focused training sessions during the week balanced with a periodic full or half day completely geared bike trip on the weekend. It's been working well I think.

I get kind of bored, though, doing the same thing so I have two sort-of-outings planned for January that have been stewing in the recesses of my mind. The first is biking to White Mountain from Nome. It's 70 miles, on a trail. The trail is not well traveled yet so it would hold some good pushing and obstacles. It runs through my favorite windy bear (summer) infested blow hole of Topkok. The other is biking from Unalakleet to Shaktoolik. This I may do with some folks as part of my work travel. It's 70 miles roundtrip, obviously on a snow machine trail. Fun stuff, cross my fingers I can make it happen. Anyone interested let me know.