I know that for really fit and fast skiers, the men and women who win citizens’ races and better, 50 kilometers is a serious but not frighteningly tough distance to ski, either as training or in a race.
On the other hand, this middle-of-the-pack racer found 50 kilometers to be an awfully long way to ski – and simultaneously a fun way to spend the better part of an afternoon. Conditions were fantastic, for starters: the weather was ideal – beautifully sunny, pretty much windless, just about 20°F – and the trails were in very good shape – good classic tracks everywhere (solid and glazing over the course of the afternoon).
More than all that, I had juuust enough fitness to do the full 50 kilometers. I decided to try to double pole the whole thing, and happily the first 30km were pretty easy. I was consciously keeping my speed down and letting the slippery tracks do a lot of the work. The next 10km were substantially tougher, since my core muscles were weakening rapidly. Eating and drinking regularly helped slow down the onset of real fatigue.
The last 10km – even though I downed about 20oz of flat Coke and a caffeinated gel – were positively brutal. Every double pole made my shoulders feel like they were being squeezed in a vise. I climbed the last hill – a steep 200m ramp near the start of the last lap – at the slowest possible speed, just one missed pole-plant away from actually going backwards. But knowing the trails (and seeing the data on my watch) helped me break that last lap up into manageable segments, which steadily ticked by. I was pretty happy to hit 50km, at 3:33 into the ski – and even happier to glide into the “finish” a little bit later.*
In sum, though, my little Oakebeiner experiment was a great way to enjoy a beautiful winter’s day, and – I hope – valuable preparation for an actual marathon ski race. We’re only 352 days away from the 42km Mora Vasaloppet marathon in northern Minnesota!
Right now, though, I’m sitting on the sofa, soaking up the really incredible soreness of pretty much every muscle group above the waist (even my jaw is sore – wha?) and wondering just how I’ll feel tomorrow. I’d better keep the bottle of ibuprofen handy.
the final tallies time: 3:34:47 distance: 50.21 km (31.1 miles) pace: 4:17/kilometer (thanks to marginally better fitness and much faster tracks, this is actually almost exactly the same pace at which I skied the 24km City of Lakes Loppet earlier in the month!) average heart rate: 145 beats per minute nominal calories burned: 3,703 kcal
In today’s nordic combined event at the Olympics, Americans Bill Demong and Johnny Spillane raced extremely well, working together to take over the race and then, with just one Austrian skier in tow, to launch a vicious attack that brought them to the finish line for a gold and silver. A GOLD AND A SILVER! IN A NORDIC SKI RACE! Amazing.
For nordic skiers in the US and other snowy regions of the world, late winter means ski marathons – long races that focus the fitness built up all fall and winter into some tough competition. The biggest ski marathon of them all, the 90 kilometer (56 mile) Vasaloppet, takes place in a couple weeks in Sweden; the biggest ski marathon in North America, the famed Birkebeiner (50km/31 miles in the freestyle technique or 54km/33.5 miles in the classic), will be run this Sunday in northern Wisconsin.
Though I want to ski both of those races (and others) someday, this ain’t the year.
Instead, I’m going to take advantage of our great snow and good weather and my underused stash of vacation days to ski my own classic-technique “marathon” in Carleton’s Lower Arboretum on Friday. I can get to the magical 50km mark by doing seven laps of my favorite 7.5km loop, which hits a few easy hills and covers lots of flat terrain in three of the Arb’s main ecosystems: tallgrass prairie, upland forest, and oak savanna.
This “Oakebeiner” won’t be a race, much less the Birkie or the Vasaloppet, but by golly it’ll be good enough for this winter – not least because I’ll ski past this beautiful tree fourteen times:
(If any Northfielders want to join me, they will be able to find me in the Lower Arb from about 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. on Friday. I’ll be using the trailhead at the West Gym parking lot as the start/end of each lap.)
The four girls who wait for the bus each morning – my kindergartner, two neighbors who are in first grade, and the preschooler hanger-on – have discovered that the big old snowbank at the stop makes an excellent slide, and that sliding makes the long, cold wait for Bus #14 less cold and long.
I welcomed the Olympic Winter Games by knocking off early and going out for a long ski in Carleton’s Lower Arb. Conditions were magnificent: 20°F, no wind, cloudless blue sky, brilliant sunshine, and brand-new classic tracks everywhere. Fantastic. I love running on these same trails in the summer, but there’s nothing better than skiing on them.
Over the couple days since the City of Lakes race, the event photos have filtered onto the internet, and, not unrelatedly, I’ve mused up fifteen observations about the race:
I could look photos of ski-race starting lines all day. Something about all those skis in tidy, multicolored rows…
City of Lakes Loppet Classic Start (by David Owen)
A lot of people in my race were wearing the high-cuffed boots that are usually used for skating, the other XC ski technique. Given the soreness of my ankles and shins on Monday, I might see the point…
I will certainly ski faster next year if I can master the ability to run uphill on my skis. The one guy whom I really wanted to catch (besides all the other people who finished ahead of me, I mean) got away mostly because he ran all the uphills, which gave him just enough of a gap that I couldn’t catch him by the finish line. In short, running > striding > herringboning
I will probably ski faster next year if I have a big old beard.
Gaudy suit or no, my form didn’t look horrendous, either at the start or here, very late in the race.
On the Lake
As you come up behind another skier, it can be quite hard to tell if it’s a man or a woman: most lycra-clad asses look the same. I stopped guessing after a few minutes of trying and being 180° wrong more than a few times.
Next year, I have to stick my gels into the zippered pocket on my drinkbelt to avoid having them fall off again.
Next year, I should invest in some cork grips for my pole. The plastic grips get awfully slick when your glove is wet or snowy.
Cowbells being run by spectators are a great, great sound, especially at the top of a hill.
Flat, cold Coca-Cola is a great, great taste, especially when you’re depleted.
The City of Lakes Loppet events must be one of the very few ski races in North America (or the world) during which you can see a downtown skyline.
Interval workouts kinda suck, but in a good way, especially when they pay off in the race.
Among all the reasons that I like skiing, I think that the uppermost is the ease with which it allows me to slip into “the Zone” or a “flow” state – that blessed but rare condition of being totally, satisfyingly, untiringly focused on The Thing You’re Doing. I can occasionally get into this state while running or cycling, and very, very rarely at other times (writing proposals at work, playing with the girls), but skiing is the king’s highway into it. Twenty minutes of skiing (not coincidentally, the period of time needed for my fingers to warm back up from the initial chill) drops me right into the mental and physical place where I am just doing it: thinking about how to ski a little better, enjoying the feeling of gliding along (or of working up a hill), looking for a better line through the next corner… All the usual clutter-thought disappears for the duration of the ski. And racing – at least, the few times I can do it each year – accelerates all of this in the best ways. I don’t think I thought about anything except skiing faster during the entire time between the starting gun (a little black powder cannon!) and crossing the finishing line.
Speaking of crossing the line, next year I’ll have to take more care to notice where the finishing line actually is – I thought it was further than it was, and skied right into some young volunteer who was just trying to take my timing chip. Sorry, kid!
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…
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:
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.
A couple months ago, Shannon and I hit on bribing persuading Genevieve to be a little less frustrating at bedtime by offering her – and Julia, of course – the chance to go with me Saturday morning for bagels at the downtown coffeeshop. The scheme has worked well enough that today’s outing was our third straight.
Not only is $6 for breakfast for three a pretty good deal ($8 if I need a latte), the breakfast works out to $1.20 for each quiet bedtime, or roughly ten zillion dollars less than each is worth. Pennypinching aside, the girls love the breakfast and the tradition, and we all have a great time.
I spent Monday and Tuesday madly catching up work, so when I saw that the weather was beautiful today, I decided to trade my usual view (computer monitor, assorted paperwork, a cup of coffee) for this one and partake of the fantastic skiing in the Upper Arb.
I came across this photo through a tweet on the priceless “Crazy WTF” Twitter stream. The trunk-mounted sign is, indeed, WTF, in the deepest, craziest way imaginable. (Click through for the full-sized image.)
