Variety is the spice of life, but as everyone knows, Minnesotans don’t like most spices.
Every time I hit my Weather Underground bookmark to check the forecast, I feel like I’m rolling the dice. When the page actually loads, I see I’ve crapped out again. Goddamn weather.
Friday, I biked to work on ice-and-snow-free roads for the first time since before Christmas. Today, I went absolutely nuts and rode home without first donning my waterproof/windproof nylon pants. The Fates missed a chance to get me good, failing to soak my clothes by forcing me to ride through a three-inch mud puddle and soaking. You suck, Fates! Now please send some snow. Any time now.
*”Swinter” was coined today (as far as I know) by a staffer at Carleton. It’s apt.
I’m sad to see all the snow vanish in one 36-hour span of warmth, wind, and rain. Monday morning, our backyard was almost covered in snow – to be sure, a thin layer, worn through in a few spots, but still more present than not. By dusk tonight, only a narrow strip of snow remained, and it’s likely to disappear tonight if this rain keeps up. Thus ends the ski season – or at least this part of it. I hope there’s a second winter coming, and soon, but the forecast doesn’t give me much hope.
Honestly, I’m not asking for much here: just some reasonable weather for February (and March!) in Minnesota – enough snow for a little more skiing, to make another snowman with the girls, maybe do a bit of sledding. Is that too much to ask?
In my hurry to write up my race, I failed to mention a bizarre incident on the drive up to Minneapolis.
Tooling down Highway 19 west of Northfield, I saw a ring-necked pheasant hen zoom low over the road and land in the field just a few feet off the right shoulder. As I marveled at the size of the bird, WHAM! – another pheasant (or so I assume) hit my car’s antenna, bending a nice right angle into it and setting it whanging insanely back and forth. But for a few inches, the bird would have crashed directly into the driver’s side window. And me.
As it was, I have no idea if the bird was okay. Pheasant are big, but hitting a car aerial can’t be good for bird’s beak or wing or body.
Today’s City of Lakes Loppet took place in warm sunshine under robin’s-egg blue skies. The springlike weather was pretty much the best part of the event, because my race was pretty much a disaster. It was fun in a “the worst day skiing is better than the best day lying around” sort of way, but otherwise, it was a sufferfest. I didn’t so just spelunk in the “pain cave” that racers talk about; I was there so long I practically evolved into one of those eyeless transparent cavern-dwelling fish they show in National Geographic.
And I skied about as fast as one of those fish would. I simply couldn’t go, and for no other reason than the most straightforward one: I didn’t train enough or correctly. (I also missed my wax, but the Swedish national ski team’s wax servicemen couldn’t have saved me today, and I dressed too warmly, but I could have taken off a layer before the race started.)
In more detail: the first half of the City of Lakes Loppet course (which you can see in its entirety here) is very hilly, a relentless rollercoaster of lots of short, sharp “walls” covered (this year) by the deep granular snow that skiers call “sugar” but which is not sweet to ski through. After going up and down the 1,000 hills (plus or minus) between the start and the five kilometer mark, my legs were already screaming, and they never recovered.
On the flats, much later in the course, I was able to pole quite well – indicating that my doublepoling sessions to build upper-body and core strength weren’t for naught – but my legs would not cooperate, and instead alternated between achingly stiff and painfully wobbly. Not a good combination, unless you’re looking to watch people pass you in droves, and neither latch on nor pass anyone back.
The final result wasn’t pretty: a finishing time of 2:10:49, “good” for 450th of 840 racers (putting me in the bottom half), 44th of 83 in my age division (ditto), and 397th of 678 men (ditto ditto).
So I’m chalking this race up to “an important lesson, painfully learned.” Next year, I’ll hit this City of Lakes – and who knows: maybe more than one race in a season! – after many, many more uphill workouts, and a least a dozen sessions of at least 25 or 30km. If I do, CoLL 2010 will be a bigger personal success than 2009 was.
Minutiae of some slight interest:
This morning, the girls and I took advantage of the 30-something temperatures by walking over to the playground in the park up the street. Owing to the snow and our route, the round trip took about 90 minutes, and featured a crossing of the pond at the end of our block. Since being on the ice was a novelty to both girls, it took us a good half hour just to get from one side of the pond to the other.
Once we reached the playground, the girls happily did all the usual things – sliding, climbing, swinging, et cetera. We also played “restaurant” at a little spot underneath the play structure, and the girls were thrilled to be able to actually have some snow. It was clean, honest!
Cold weather forced the cancellation of the race which I anticipated doing on Saturday. I know, I know: canceling a ski race due to cold weather? Yeah. It even happens to the pros.
But I partly made up for this gap in my last week of preparation for next Sunday’s City of Lakes Loppet by skiing a nice out-and-back loop in the Lower Arb. The conditions were great, and I had a ridiculous amount of fun, but the best part of it was how great the Arb looks on a sunny winter day.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
I’ve been using Facebook and Twitter to blather about the pleasure of skiing in the Arb at night, but tonight’s workout was especially dense with all the various aspects of this pleasure. I highly recommend trying to visit the Arb on one of these gorgeous winter nights, and I offer three reasons for making the effort.
The first and best aspect of a nighttime trip is the solitude. Over this and last winter, I’ve probably skied 100 nighttime hours in the Arb, and I bet I haven’t encountered five other people. This is a relief and a blessing, and not just for a misanthrope or a parent whose ears are ringing with kid sounds. I’m pretty certain, for instance, that I was the only human being in the Lower Arb last Friday night: there were no cars at any of the trailheads, there were no fresh tracks on the trails, and of course I met absolutely no one. Where else, even in exurban Rice County, can you be so easily and effortlessly alone?
Second, and relatedly, the Arb is spectacularly beautiful at night. Even the Rec Center is awfully pretty, viewed from a distant ridgeline. The skeletal outlines of individual trees are especially gorgeous: you haven’t really experienced the Arb until you’ve studied the lone oaks on the Hillside Prairie, ink black against the blue-black of the sky, or passed through the towering evergreens in plantation out by Canada Avenue. And don’t even get me started on the glinting sparkle of the snow below and the stars above, much less the lit-from-within radiance of clouds.
Third, venturing into the Arb in the dark isn’t only good for your body, it’s fun for your brain, which is constantly discovering the wonderful strangeness of features that are mundane in the light. Have that oak’s branches always reached so low? Has the path always bent around these trees? Has this hill always had this flat spot halfway up? Good snow cover deepens this phenomenon of rediscovery and re-viewing, as does moving in a new way – snowshoeing or skiing rather than walking.
Lest being out on the prairie or in the woods at night sound scary, let me argue that it’s not. The cold is nothing that the right clothing can’t handle, and there are very few sections of trail that get much wind, even on an otherwise gusty night. Unless you’re out there in a whiteout blizzard, you can almost always orient yourself to the skyglow of the campus or of Northfield proper – or to car traffic, which you can often see or hear. And beyond all that, the entire Arb, Upper and Lower, is crisscrossed with trails and studded with signs, making it is relatively easy to stay – literally – on track.
In short, it’s well worth the time to venture into the Arb on some night this winter. I don’t think you’ll regret it.
I’ve been biking to work for three years now, which probably means I was due for today’s crash, my first. I had just turned off a street in our subdivision to go down a short, steep slope that leads to the road into town, and I could tell that the car behind me was following really close, even though there was a stop sign just ahead.
In reflexively turning my head every so slightly to check the distance between my rear wheel and his front fender, I must have tweaked my front wheel a tiny bit, because it suddenly expressed a strong preference for a horizontal orientation. Somehow flying both forward and down, I found myself skidding on my hands and knees for a few feet, tangled up in my pedals but avoiding a bump on the head. The driver stopped, but only because I was lying in the road: s/he didn’t get out to ask if I was okay or anything, and in fact inched around me as soon as I was standing up again, no doubt cursing the idiot trying to bike in the snow.
Here’s the tippy velocipede a few minutes later, after I pedaled very carefully to work. It’s actually easier to lock the bike when it’s up on 18 inches of snow.
Thanks to the combination of good bedtimes for the girls, decent snow cover, and (relatively) warm temperatures, tonight I could finally ski my all-time favorite trail in the Lower Arb, which runs from the trailhead on Highway 19 near the West Gym out along the river to Canada Avenue. Year round, it’s the perfect length (a 6.8km/4.2 mile round trip) for either a short out-and-back workout or a longer session – out-and-back more than once or out, then back along other trails elsewhere in the Arb.
Blah blah blah, the real reason I like this route is that it’s so beautiful, especially in the winter, especially in the dark, and especially tonight. There was the huff-huff of breathing and the sssssh-sssssh of the skis, but there was also the snow falling continuously, shadowy trees looming above, the bare-looking oak savannah, the iced-over river, a trail shared by raggedy ski tracks and footprints and cut across by animal tracks, a few open spots where the wind happily blasted me, a few glimpses of glinty eyes off in the underbrush… Even the train whistles in the distance contributed to the experience of effort and solitude.
Those brilliant blue skies contributed to our frighteningly cold temperatures, but they sure made the steam plant’s plumes look pretty:
Turns out that crazy forecast yesterday was right: we have been getting snow all day here in Northfield. With any luck, I can get out in it tonight. All day I’ve been admiring the way Skinner Chapel, at the south edge of campus, is disappearing and reappearing in the flurries..
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Today was pretty much a perfect winter day. While the girls napped, I got hit the renewed Arb trail for an hour’s skiing on trails so blindingly white that I had to squint behind my sunglasses:
After nap, the four of us went to a little neighborhood rink so that Shannon could help Julia start to learn to ice skate. I’ll leave for Shannon that story and the photos, but say that while they had a great time slipping and sliding, Vivi and I explored the area, and she crawled through a rather long blue-white tunnel dug into a massive snowbank. Brave girl, she!
After the thaw and sleet last weekend, our backyard became too icy for walking.
Sliding from Christopher Tassava on Vimeo.
Today, there is exactly one month until the City of Lakes Loppet ski race in Minneapolis. I skied – and enjoyed – the CoLL last year, enough that I asked for the entry fee (and some discretionary time for training) as my Christmas gift last week.
My goal for the 2009 race is simple: go faster than last year, when I finished in 1:48. If I can cut ten minutes off my time, I’ll be pleased. Doing that should be good enough to move into places that will be the high 200s overall (last year, I finished in 322nd place overally, 297th among men) and maybe high teens in my age group (where I was 26th).
Compared to last year, I’m substantially more fit, though I’ve had much less time on snow. I hope to fix the latter problem in the next month by skiing on anything this side of crushed ice.
Also in my favor is that last year’s time will move me up to a earlier, faster wave – perhaps the fourth or even the third, up from the final, sixth wave last year. Being moved up a few waves will put me alongside faster skiers from whom I hope I can “get a tow,” as they say. We’ll see in 30 days…