I love to run, bike and ski.

I could probably avoid boredom employing any one of those activities 365 days a year. Alas, we have these things called seasons, which inherently point to one modality’s primacy. Variation is the spice of the sporting life, but the refreshing change-of-pace requires this annoying in-between period: ‘shoulder season.’

Colder weather, falling snow — and melting snow — all interrupt our daily workout routine in the late fall and early spring.

How do we get through it?

One option is to wait. If you arrived at this article, however, the thought of wasting steadily accrued fitness is unthinkable. Your hard-earned Birkie wave 3 distinction depends (as does justification for that entry fee) on you stacking those physiological bricks every day. Not only do you need to be ready to pounce when the first snowstorm arrives, you also can’t risk missing out on a surprise weeklong patch of warm weather, known in Colorado as ‘second fall.’

You could turn to treadmills. Let’s face it though: 99% of the reason we do these things is to enjoy the great outdoors! Staring at a shelf of old bottles of motor oil through my Ercolina Trainer, hamster-wheeling through highlights of the 2017 Vasaloppet or listening to Stephen A. Smith rant while running on a conveyor belt adds stress to my life.

It seems as though the only way through is to stuff our bike-shirt pockets with an extra pair of gloves, run — headlamp and all — through the slush or drive to high-altitude mining district roads and lay down first tracks on top of the hunting communities’ car-grooming operations.

Even with my skieologian monicker, I’ll admit that while this warm fall has wonderfully prolonged traditional dirt-related desires and prevented my reliance on indoor training devices, it’s also made me a bit sluggish in getting fired up for winter.

That all changed a couple of days ago.

After an afternoon chock full of phone calls, transcriptions, writing and editing, all I really wanted at 3 o’clock was to log a long, satisfying bike ride. My oldest daughter, Novi, was playing in the living room when I came out of the office to game plan. Her younger sister, Ella, was about to wake up from her nap and my wife was rushing to finish the tasks she always tries to accomplish during the waning moments of child-free freedom.

“Novi, do you want to come skiing with Daddy?” I kneeled down to ask. My extremely verbal daughter, who, a minute ago had been typing “a story on the Olympics” on one of my broken keyboards while making imaginary phone calls (I wonder where she got that urge from), outlined a laundry list of items she’d hoped to do in her make believe world…and then, somewhat reluctantly agreed to come with.

I packed up our skis, buckled her in and drove off to Turquoise Lake Road’s shady southwest climb. The trip would serve as a bit of a recon mission to scout my dependable early-season snow spot. Of course, the main desire of my heart was time with Novi.

While such an imperative goal may sound obvious, for me it isn’t always naturally a given. Being that one topic of discussion on this site lately has been the relationship between high-performance training/racing and fatherhood, I’ll willingly take the opportunity to talk about my own personal struggle in this area.

Sacrificing sessions — for anything — isn’t something I’m good at. I’m admittedly self-centered when it comes to my workouts, bitter when they’re shortened and ungrateful if they lack Instagram-worthy perfection. I’m downright irritable if they don’t happen at all. I know this is probably hard to imagine, but I have the tendency to unreasonably languish in a puddle of self-pity and stew unjustifiably in a dark mental storm — which I share with the people who live with me — if my second workout is ‘interrupted’ after ‘only’ 20-kilometers. Disgraceful, I know.

Before Novi arrived in 2021, my wife jokingly handed me a book titled, “Baby Barbells: The Dad’s Guide to Fitness and Fathering.” I think she recognized the growing alarm in my eyes as her baby bump grew into a ticking time bomb, ready to blow up all of my grand athletic adventures. I took Novi’s arrival in stride, sort of, adjusting routines to maintain my hours. Often I wandered alone into the dark woods during dinner with freshly waxed skis full of guilt. Eventually, I embraced my ‘dad-strength’ and incorporated parenting advantages.

I realized I could practice my threshold V1 sub-technique — the granny gear for cross-country skiing — at a relatively mild 4% grade, just as long as I was pulling both kids. A bonus: my speed matched my wife’s skate skiing tempo! The only bummer was that the time it took us to harness everything (and everyone) for the workout date far exceeded the ski itself. Plus, kids screaming about cold hands doesn’t lend itself to romantic conversation, per se.

Every once in awhile, I’ll pull the kids up the Mineral Belt on my bike or push them in the stroller on a run. Matt Carpenter recently told me that was one of his secret training weapons; pushing his daughter pushed his breathing into a hard zone at a slow pace, thereby limiting the musculoskeletal damage from say, another run up and down Pikes Peak at break-neck speed.

Thus, while I’ve been sanctified through the added responsibility of fatherhood, I’m still in need of growth in this area.

As Novi and I crested the hill, I scanned the road. To my dismay, I could see old, icy car tracks bleeding directly into the pavement, a clear indication that there was not enough snow to ski. Not giving up, I turned to the even more protected gravel patch leading to the Abe Lee fishing access and saw just enough white powder (ok, more like crusted over crystals) to lay down a few tracks.

I hopped out and gently set Novi’s skis down, carefully keeping her bindings free from any stray, sticky grains of slop. I lifted her out of the car seat and lowered her from my helicopter arms to clip her in. Then I trudged around and quickly corralled my gear, confident my embracing of the dad role meant I would not miss the absence of those Fischer reps at World Cup races who wack iced-up snow off the bottom of Klaebo’s boots.

Klaebo might have 1,097,987 career wins and perfect hair, I thought, but he doesn’t have a beautiful daughter to take care of and introduce the joy of skiing to.

Novi stood in her skis, gleefully waiting for me to strap on her poles, which she proudly spray-painted pink last year in honor of her favorite skier — the aforementioned Norwegian — and once she had them secured, faced the trail with eager optimism.

Slowly, we slid side-by-side in someone’s tire tracks. I praised her. We talked. She stopped once, amazed by the sound of wind rushing through the trees. I pointed out a huge rock and a squirrel, mostly to keep her engaged. At one point, unable to contain myself and desiring to demonstrate what the sport could be, I sped off with a powerful stride, kicking and gliding three times the distance we’d covered in a pair of pushes.

“Dad. … Dad!” I heard Novi cry out in loneliness. I turned around and watched her concerned face — an expression genuinely seeming to say, “were you thinking of skiing all the way home without me? — slowly morph into a curious smile. I kick double-poled back and watched her mesmerization grow.

“You can push off your poles like this,” I stated as I demonstrated — and hopefully indoctrinated — to her a passionate double-pole. She looked side to side as if she’d forgotten her perfect pink poles were still attached to her pink gloves. Her gaze dipped down down beyond her royal purple (a favorite color for both of us) snow pants as she softly tested out her dad’s advice, unwilling to fully commit to my technique suggestion.

“Just ski by me, right in that track,” she said, pointing to the tire tread I’d abandoned moments earlier.

“Ok,” I happily replied.

“We should probably turn around soon and go back to the car,” Novi added before clarifying in her 3-year-old style: “We should ski back to the car and then go home, ok?”

“Let’s make it to that puddle,” I said, pointing to a pothole about 50 meters away.

“Ok,” she said, submitting to the first of likely many workout-extending negotiations from her father.

We moved fairly quickly to the pothole, stopping again to listen to the wind. When we reached it, Novi’s smile betrayed the fact that she’d forgotten about the agreement.

“We should probably head back to the car,” I said, graciously honoring our turnaround.

Once we got back, Novi unclipped herself and handed me her skis. Then I buckled her up and kissed her on the forehead.

A 15-minute workout — a 100-yard shoulder-season ski — had never been so perfect.

Fatherhood will put a man through a lot, but it’s a tremendous job. The best job in the world — even better than playing basketball.

Derek Fisher, 5-time NBA champion