Blowing & Drifting

Snowy enough that…

…you could barely see either Willis Hall

or the Carleton chapel on a walk to the campus center at midmorning,

you had to follow the Carleton grounds crew’s tractor back to the office,

you later saw both an icy kid’s sled and an enclosed snowblower from the front door of the library, and

you only got into your driveway at the end of the day because this monster had scraped out a path.

That was fun. Apart from a little transportation glitch* that led to the relatively minor problem of missing my start by a minute, the City of Lakes Loppet classic race could not have gone better. Okay, I might have skied faster – and will try, next year.

In brief, I started pretty well, maintained a solid pace throughout the race, did well on the uphills (thanks to a good wax job), and saved enough to be able to chase down a bunch of racers in the last 5k, which is mostly fast, flat skiing over a couple of lakes. I finished, officially, in 1:47:10, which is well under the guesstimate I extrapolated from training times and the previous two years’ races in the longer freestyle event. My finish was good for 74th out of the 233 male skiers – upper third, baby, and almost a half hour ahead of the average.

More than those particulars, I felt good through the whole race: decently strong, under control, and most importantly able to accelerate as needed. All those uphill double-pole interval workouts paid off! In addition to making me feel like I did a halfway good job training for the race, this good experience inclines me to think that with more and better training next year (and the luck to avoid getting sick the week before the race), I should be able to cut quite a bit of time off in next year’s race – only 360-some days away!

So, the race itself…

The transportation problems meant that I arrived at the race late, which in turn meant I had to skip any warmup except running up to the start pen. (I also didn’t have time to find and say “hi” to my e-friends. Bah!) I threw my bag into the pile that would be carried to the finish, found a way into the pen, slapped on my skis, fastened my pole straps, hit my stopwatch, and started skiing. If I’d made it into my assigned second wave, I’d have had roughly a third less traffic ahead of me, but the course was such that passing was easy, whether on the infrequent flats in the first half of the race or, better, on either the uphills or the downhills. I probably passed fifty people, altogether, simply because I descended in a tuck while they stood up, and half that many because I stepped through turns instead of snowplowing.

My wax job helped, too. The conditions were hardly sketchy – day-old but fine snow, air temps ranging from about 15° to 20°F – but I still had the right glide and kick waxes on my skis, and it was immensely heartening, especially in the first third of the race, on a hilly golf course, to kick better than a lot of people going uphill and to outglide almost everyone going downhill. Visual proof (as shot by a guy who skied the race with a camera mounted on his head!): that’s me on the left, bib #138:

City of Lakes Loppet Action Shot (by Rich Hoeg)

Anyhow, I picked off people like crazy over the first 5k, and more slowly but steadily over the next 5k. All that’s not to say there weren’t a couple unfortunate moments. Back-of-the-pack racers tend to be terrible descenders, and while I avoided several actual spills, I ended up crashing hard on my shoulder after a woman did a funky little 270° thingy – but didn’t actually fall! – ahead of me. I bounced back up and used the adrenaline to catch and drop her right away (the better to prevent another such mishap).

A little bit later, the course flattened and the traffic thinned out, and I got into a nice groove of just skiing along, mostly in a steady double-pole that I swapped every now and then for a few minutes of striding. There were still enough people in front that I could pick out particular racers to chase, which helped immensely with motivation and keeping my speed up. I don’t think anyone caught me from behind, except for one guy whom I passed but who caught me back a k or so later and wound up finishing just ahead of me.

The emptier trails also gave me a chance to refuel with a few hits from my water bottle and a delicious espresso energy gel. Gel? What gel? Where the hell were my gels? They weren’t dangling carbohydratally from my drink belt when I reached for them, about an hour into the race, so I can only assume that they fell off when I crashed. Oh well. I took some water at the aid stations and, with about twenty minutes to go, downed a few ounces of sweet, sweet Coca-Cola.

That elixir did wonders. I had started feeling just a little peaked around then – maybe 1:20 into the race – and found I didn’t have the oomph to close down the gaps to a couple guys who were maybe 30 seconds up the trail and visibly skiing no faster than I was. But within a couple minutes of sucking down the Coke, I felt good enough that I could pretend to hammered my double-pole for two minutes, bringing me up to and then past both of those guys. As I went through, rather enjoying the slippery lake ice underneath me, I realized that we were already approaching the finish line. Herringboning up the rise off the lake, I saw that two other guys whom I’d written off were right there, just starting the straightaway to the finish, which is a gentle but long uphill. The snow here is always deep, sugary goop, but my DP continued to work, and I passed both of them well before the line – satisfyingly capping off a pretty decent race.

What’ll be even more satisfying next year is going ten or fifteen minutes faster, which would put me in the top fifty or so. It’s pretty obvious how do do that – more long skis of 2:30 or more, more longer intervals of 4 minutes or more, and better classic technique. It’ll be fun trying to improve on my time and place next year!

* The transportation glitch was simple, but annoying: too few shuttle buses running between the remote parking lot and the race start (which is too compact a place to have enough parking). The last two years, I’ve parked and walked right onto a bus. This year, I waited for a good twenty minutes, and finally boarded about 25 minutes before my race was supposed to start. This meant I had no time to spare for a warmup – or to stop at the Porta Potties – and that I even missed my wave, and thus started a minute later than my assigned time. Thank god I’d waxed the night before…

I wish I could do a race every two or three months. Everything about the experience – choosing an event, training for it, anticipating the race as it approaches, doing the race-eve prep, enjoying the race-day atmosphere, and of course actually racing – is fun, so much fun that I would like to do it four or six times a year.

Alas, right now I cannot, so I am especially savoring the run-up to the City of Lakes Loppet classic race tomorrow. Not only will I probably get to meet two skiers I only know through social media, but everything should be just about perfect for the race: we’ve had new snow on an excellent base, the race organizer have done their usual superlative work, and it appears that we’re going to get good weather – or even some racetime snow, just to mix things up.

The classic race has its largest-ever field, so the organizers are going to start us in three waves of about 120 people each. Somehow (clearly not knowing I’d never kickwaxed a classic ski before December), they seeded me in the second wave, a perfect position since it means the fastest racers will be long gone before I even start and since it will put me in with a lot of skiers whose speed and skills should be a decent match to my own. Skiing in a group is a lot more fun, and a lot faster, than skiing alone.

Anyhow, I’m bouncing off the walls with expectation, and looking forward to skiing a solid race and enjoying the time on the course.

The girls have been going to classes at the Northfield Gymnastics Club for a long time, pretty much as long as we’ve been here. It’s been fun to see their development – both natural, as they grow up, and acquired, as they learn from their coaches – through the various classes. Tonight was the last night of their current session, and they were wound up for it – tearing around like crazy and doing everything as energetically as I’ve ever seen. A few shots to support this point:

As I looked over my workout log the other day, I realized that the ski sessions I really enjoyed this winter – the ones that I noted with superlatives in the log or remember very clearly – almost all occurred in some sort of precipitation. The best of them, for instance, was a long ski after dark on Christmas Eve, just as the Christmas Blizzard of Ought-Nine hit Northfield. I skied (on very, very familar trails) in a near white-out, got drenched from the outside in and the inside out, and loved it. It’s one of the very few times I’ve skied in Northfield after which I had to scrape off the car before driving home.

Tonight’s ski, my last semi-lengthy one before Sunday’s race, wasn’t quite that good, but thanks to the weird sleet-snow-rain falling from the sky, it was pretty good – relaxing, fun, just slightly tough in a couple key spots. And the best part was seeing all that precipitation in the beam of my headlamp. The glistening little spots of light make everything seem so much faster – like the scene in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon accelerates and all the stars blur.

1. Genevieve has been playing constantly with a tiny dog from one of her Little People playsets. She’s named him “Woofy Woofy” and spends a good chunk of each day feeding him(toy food from the girls’ kitchen, putting to sleep on one of the girls’ chairs, and especially hiding him in the couch cushions, then rediscovering him.

2. For her part, Julia has been enamored since Christmas with Pinky Pie, a My Little Pony which she carefully grooms, puts to sleep in a special “stable” made from of a toy bin and blankets in their room, and of course carries around nonstop.

3. Family friends recently gave us some hand-me-down clothes for Vivi, and she is besotted with a pair of red track pants. They’re lined, so they’re extremely warm, but they also make an interesting “swishswish” sound as she walks – so much so that she alters her gait to make the legs of the pants rub as much and as loudly as possible.

4. Both girls have revived a weird game of pretending that the last few bites of food at any meal is actually gum. The chew that mouthful up endlessly and murmur in a weird voice, “Look – I have gum.” Julia also pauses dramatically, opens her mouth, blows out, and then asks, “Did you see that big bubble?”

5. Genevieve insists on going out to the bus stop with me and Julia every day, no matter the weather, mostly to soak up the big-girl antics of Julia and the two first graders who also wait with us. Lately, Vivi has started getting in line when the other girls are getting on the bus, too. So far, she hasn’t actually walked up to the bus door – and she always turns away when the bus driver waves to her.

6. Genevieve is pretty much the only person in the house who really likes our grumpy old cat, Sabine, and she really likes her. She’ll interrupt her playing to go find Sabine, whom she calls “little buddy,” and just about goes over the moon if the cat deigns to sniff her face when she leans in. “Dabean gave me a kitsh!” (She also loves loves loves our friends’ cat, Juno.)

7. Many nights, Julia makes a point of going to the window to wish upon a star – which is sometimes an actual star but has also been the light on a nearby radio tower and even the wing lights on a descending airplane. She tries not to reveal what she’s wishing each night, but eventually she reveals that she’s wishing we could go to Disneyworld.

8. If she’s in an even passably good mood, Genevieve is probably singing a made-up song about whatever she’s doing – playing, reading a book, going to the bathroom, eating a snack. The songs – which I really have to try to record – are about 60% actual words and 40% crazy made-up nonsense – though Vivi also makes a point to find rhymes, some of which are positively inspired.

9. The girls continue their habit of eating in parallel: eating the same items at the same time, and pausing as needed for one to catch up with the other. This morning, I told them something, and they froze in identical poses as they listened: both were lifting their milk cups with their left hands and holding their slices of toast in their right hands. It was an eerie effect.

10. A few weeks ago, Genevieve invented the phrase “beebee baba” as nonsense to fill in any sentence or question. “What’re you doing, Viver?” “Oh, nuffin. Just beebee baba.” Now both girls are gleefully using the phrase at all times. They have entire conversations in which the only “words” are variants on “beebee baba.”

It’s early February, so I am getting psyched up for the City of Lakes Loppet, which will be run in Minneapolis on Sunday the 8th. This year – after some waffling – I decided to do the “Hoigaard’s Classic” race, which is run over a 24km (15 mile) course and uses the slower but (I think) more elegant and tougher “classic” ski technique, versus the regular Loppet, which I skied in 2008 and 2009 and is run in the the faster freestyle or skating style.

I figure that the classic-style race will be a nice challenge since I really haven’t done much classic skiing over the past couple years. Thanks to our early and reliable snow and fantastic grooming in Carleton’s Arb, I’ve now done plenty of technique drills, quite a few long classic-technique sessions, and hours and hours of workouts in the third main ski technique, double poling. I hope that all this training will combine with the full field (about 360 racers – a fraction of the Freestyle Loppet, but a big race nonetheless) and what might be the best weather and course conditions in years to make the race on Sunday less than the straight-up sufferfest of last year. I mean, it will hurt, for sure, but I hope I can enjoy the event too, and even race it. Passing people is fun.

The best five things in January:

1. Article I read: John Ed Bradley, “Hang ‘em High,” Sports Illustrated (December 21, 2009)

Statistics suggest that this is the golden age of NFL punting. During the first 12 weeks of the season, the average punt went 44.3 yards, a half yard farther than the record set last year. Punters were on pace to drop 868 balls inside their opponents’ 20-yard lines, 103 more than the league mark set in 2007. And the Raiders’ Shane Lechler was on course to equal or break the season record of 51.40 yards per punt set 69 years ago by Sammy Baugh. Yet among fans, the punter may be the least appreciated man in the game. Even when he does his job well, placing the ball as close as possible to the opponent’s goal line, he exits the field to tepid applause. More often than not, when he faces scrutiny, it is unwelcome, coming after a fumbled snap or a badly kicked ball that lands out-of-bounds just yards past the line of scrimmage…

But punters’ recent successes, rather than their disappointments, should be examined before somebody at a year-end banquet hands a punter a trophy engraved with MOST VALUABLE PLAYER. Punters (yes, punters!) have become what coaches call difference makers, and the difference they’re making has observers of the game wondering if the punter is a defensive weapon every bit the equal of a shutdown cover corner or a run-stuffing middle linebacker.

2. Book I finished: Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground (1970)

Highsmith, "Ripley Under Ground"

3. Photo I saw, shot by Doug Bratland at Carleton, January 19, 2010

Arb Trees (by Doug Bratlander)

4. Video I saw:

5. Music I enjoyed (part of an inspired three-song shuffle that started with Uncle Tupelo, “Before I Break” and continued with Local H, “High-Fiving MF”)

Julia decided to play “work” this morning. First, she decided on her title – “the president of work” – and how many “food breaks” she needed: three, these being morning snack hour, lunch, and afternoon snack hour. With those matters addressed, she turned to writing some emails. It seems that “the people who work for me aren’t sending emails, event though that’s their job.” With a heavy sigh, she sat down at the toy computer. After a few minutes of typing, she stopped to go to a meeting, which only took a few minutes. Then she got back to the email, reporting, “I have to write some emails to the people who have a lot of money but won’t give it to the people who don’t have enough stuff to eat and wear.”

This seems to indicate that she’s either a grantwriter, or a Ponzi schemer.

This afternoon, while Julia was at a classmate’s birthday party and Shannon was doing the grocery shopping, I spent two and a half hours with Genevieve. This is remarkable, since I probably haven’t spent more than ten hours alone with her in her entire life : virtually every moment that we’re together, we’re with Julia – which is just as it should be.

But ladies and gentlemen, let me report that this is a different child without Big Sister in the room. She was gentle, patient, and playful – all traits which glimmer when it’s the three of us (or, rarely, the four of us), but which are usually more hidden than not. I can’t remember a longer time in which she didn’t have at least one screaming fit.

Instead, we had a blast. We did puzzles (including a 24-piece world-map puzzle that took at least a half hour to complete, mostly because we had to stop to discuss all the interesting things on the map), had a short snack break, played with her Thomas the Tank Engine toys, and then “watched videos” – which actually entailed my snuggling on the sofa and “watching Batman, Spidewman, Tomis da Twain, an’ Bobda Builda.” Note that the TV was not actually on - even though Vivi was using the remote control like a sports fan with ADD. We laughed at “Spidewman” (“he crazy!”), jumped in fright at Batman’s “bad guys,” and enjoyed Tomis and Bobda Builda. Remarkably, Vivi discovered that all four of the shows were “Saves da Day” – Batman Saves the Day, Spiderman Saves the Day, etc.

What a good afternoon.

School here in Northfield was canceled on Friday, so we let the girls stay up a little later than usual on Thursday night. When they finally straggled to bed, they hardly participated in the whole book-prayer-songs routine and uncharacteristically fell silent even before I left the room. I hoped that this meant that they’d go to sleep quickly and actually sleep past their usual wake-up time the next morning, but twenty minutes later, I heard some out-loud talking, which escalated, before I even reached the door to the girls’ room, into full-blown yelling. Julia: “But it’s myyyyyyyyyy bunnnnnnyyyyyyyy!” Genevieve: “No, you can’t have it! It not your bunny, it my bunny! I have it foh-evah!”

“Girls! What are you yelling about when you should be asleep?” I asked. Talking over one another, they explained that Vivi had gone to bed with Julia’s “favorite friend,” a pink bunny that she actually hasn’t probably touched in months. In a tone of voice that she knows drives her Julia nuttier than the Planters factory, Vivi affirmed that Julia could neither sleep with this bunny nor “evah” have it again – “not even in da moaning!” Julia burst into tears – that overwrought, fake kind that kindergartners must learn between storytime and art centers.

Talking more loudly than was perhaps really needed, I insisted that in fact they would trade control of the bunny in the morning, at which time Vivi could, if needed, comfort herself then with an identical bunny toy which we also own but which has somehow lost the teeny-tiny pink bow sewn to its chest. This bow, it emerged, was a crucial bit of leporine flair, the thing that distinguished the desirable bunny from the one that might as well be stew meat. Somehow – probably because they were so tired – the girls agreed to revisit the issue in the morning and to let sleeping rabbits lie. A few minutes later, they were well and truly asleep.

Come 6:45 this morning, when they woke up (a whopping 15 minutes past the time they usually get up: so much for “sleeping in”), I headed into their room to say good morning. Instead of returning that greeting, Julia blurted, “It’s my time with the bunny, and Vivi won’t give it to me!” and Vivi shouted back, “No! I gonna have it all day, Jooia! You can’t have bunny even foh one second!”

So much for the nighttime peace deal.

Luckily, their desire to have breakfast was greater than their desire to debate bunny ownership, so this hairy hare issue fell away.

Until bedtime tonight, at which moment Vivi was again firmly clutching the rabbit. Having, I’m sure, not thought for one second about the toy all day, Julia now chose to “need it,” and we instantly verged on another meltdown. But then Julia reminded herself that she was already in bed with her other favorite animal, a My Little Pony that’s all hard plastic and coarse hair. Not too cuddly, but apparently better than a bunny.

This poor tree behind my office building at Carleton needs a 4×4 post to hold up one of its overextended branches. If I could do a fist tap with this tree, I would.

One of my favorite things about working on a college campus is the everydayness of the weirdness: the cross-country team screaming out the names of the buildings they’re passing, streakers, “beard auctions,” cryptic chalk messages on the sidewalks, kids playing Quidditch on the soccer fields, oversized plastic letters in the trees out front of my building. You can’t spell “another day of work” without W-T-F.

Though there are numerous ways to tell that Julia and Genevieve are girls, their shared penchant for using rainbow colors and motifs in their art is one indicator. Even when Vivi is pretending to be her alter ego, “Big Boy,” she colors with Roy G. Biv, as in this picture, about which she said, “It’s fow you, Daddy, because it says ‘By Vivi’ because ‘Vivi’ is shorta den ‘Genevieve,’ an it says, ‘To Dad’ but I wote ‘Dad’ foist, den ‘to,’ by de gwass.” I love the red halo hair.

Butterfly Before

Butterfly After

Thanks to a good nap this afternoon, Genevieve was in a great mood all evening long: laughing, joking, running around doing busy-busy things. The usually-stressful descent to bedtime was actually pleasant, and was all set to end with a “betend” birthday party hosted by Vivi for herself.

On her way to get a blanket with which to wrap the presents she was giving herself, though, the poor girl pinched the meat of her left thumb in the &%(#!@ folding doors on her closet. Much screaming ensued – and rightfully. The whole thumb turned purple and pink within a few minutes, except for the inch-long ridge of skin that had actually been pinched, which stayed disgustingly white. Vivi cried and cried, so hard that tears were actually jumping off her face. She snuggled first with me and then with her Mama, but refused to dunk her finger in a Dixie cup of cold water. “Noooo, I doan wanna! Ita hurt too much!”

Facing this emergency, Julia swung right into action. She was already wearing a kerchief (don’t ask), so she was dressed to be a nurse and thus ready to use our toy medical kit to check Vivi out: stethoscope, otoscope, blood-pressure cuff, angle mirror… Shannon and I had to caution her a couple times about grabbing Vivi’s swollen thumb, but she listened to us and switched to kissing the patient instead.

After the 20 minutes of wailing had died down, Vivi agreed to head right to bed, where she held onto a little “Strawberry Shortcake” picture that Julia had given her as a get-well present. “Ima save dis foh-evah!” she told me seriously, looking at the Hello Kitty bandaid on her thumb. “I wov it SO, SO much. Tank you, Jooiah!”

Poor dear. That thumb’s gonna look like hell tomorrow morning.