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.
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.
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.
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.
January is a good time to enjoy nordic ski racing. On the “doing” side of things, I found out today that the Northfield High School nordic ski team is holding their annual fundraising race on Saturday, so I’m going to ski in that event, a little 5km around the Upper Arb. And yesterday I switched from competing in the 25km classic-technique race in the City of Lakes Loppet festival next month to the 32km freestyle-technique race, which should be an easier and better race for me, though longer. One of these years – maybe next year, when Vivi’s four and Julia’s six – I can actually do more than one long race in a season. There’s certainly no shortage of great events here in the Upper Midwest, whether a little north of the Twin Cities, a bit further away in the western end or the center of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or in the middle of Wisconsin.
On the “watching” side of things, I hope I can go to cheer at the NHS nordic ski team’s meet in the Arb on Thursday. I’m still enjoying the drama of the just-concluded Tour de Ski, and regular World Cup racing resumes this weekend in Estonia, proceeds to Russia, and then comes to this hemisphere for pre-Olympic races in Canada. The “Marathon Cup” race series, which parallels the World Cup and shares some of its top racers, is now underway as well, and includes its usual twin peaks: the 70km Marcialonga ski marathon in northern Italy on January 31 and the 90km Vasaloppet in southern Sweden on March 7 – just after the Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, which open on February 12 – four weeks from today. Medal events in nordic skiing start on the second day, with ski jumping and a women’s biathlon race, and continue right through the last day (February 28), when the men’s 50km “marathon” race will be contested. I can’t wait.
Today was the last day of the Tour de Ski, a multi-stage cross-country ski race that’s held in Europe just after the new year. Modelled to some degree on the Tour de France and shorter cycling stage races, the TdS has become a pretty big deal in the world of elite cross-country skiing – which isn’t saying much for most Americans (though a surprising number of people do follow elite skiing), but which means that in Europe, the Tour airs uninterrupted on many national TV channels and attracts thousands of spectators.
Up until today, this year’s Tour had been pretty good, with quite a few interesting and exciting races, a good dose of drama, and almost-daily changes on the men’s and women’s leaderboards. Today, though, the Tour had what might have been its best day ever. The Tour always ends – as it did today – with a “final climb” stage in which racers ski for about four miles through a scenic valley in northern Italy, then ski about two more miles up the slopes of a downhill ski resort. That’s it here, on the right edge of this course profile:
Course Profile of the Tour de Ski's "Final Climb" Up the Alpe Cermis
Yeah, the climb is brutal, regularly taking the best skiers in the world about twenty minutes to finish. (These are athletes who can ski 50km – 31 miles – of hilly terrain in about two hours.) And this year, this “final climb” stage saw excellent battles to see who would be the men’s and women’s Tour de Ski champions.
The women’s race was as good as any athletic contest I’ve seen in years, with a late attack by the second-placed skier, the young Polish skier Justyna Kowalcyzk, to pass the leader, the ebullient Slovenian Petra Majdic, and thereby win the TdS championship. But the men’s race was ten times better, pitting the brash young Norwegian Petter Northug – by consensus, the best skier in the world – against the older veteran, Lukas Bauer of the Czech Republic. Northug is a great tactician and a deadly sprinter, so pretty much everyone – including me – thought that he would toy with Bauer and then accelerate away for the win, which would be the most prominent single accomplishment of his short but already great career. To say Bauer was an underdog would be an understatement.
Bauer had other ideas. He first caught up to Northug, who was skiing extremely hard through the initial flat sections, and then remorselessly attacked as they hit the climb. Bauer steadily expanded his narrow lead until, by the top of the mountain, he had crushed Northug by a minute and sixteen seconds – a gigantic gap. His come-from-behind victory and TdS championship was incredible enough to make me say – as I did on Twitter – that “Lukas Bauer is my hero,” but then, rather than celebrating in really any way at all, he stood at the finish line with his skis and poles and greeted other racers – including Northug – as they labored over the line.
Lukas Bauer
The suspense of the race was great, of course, and it’s fun to see how really good skiers ski, but it was really Bauer’s behavior at the finish line that reminded me why I spend quite a bit of time following relatively obscure sports like cycling and really obscure sports like XC skiing. When the action is great, it’s as inspiring as anything else in life.
And on top of all that, I had a nice hard ski workout of my own today.
At the risk of using up my entire yearly quota of good parenting ideas in the first third of January, this morning I suggested that we all go to Carleton’s fabulous Recreation Center for some exercise – Shannon could run while I played with the girls. Amazingly, it was a complete success. Not only was the Rec pretty quiet, but the girls loved it, first kicking a ball all over creation, then doing a short lap with Mama,
then throwing racquetballs in one of the r-ball courts (they’re enclosed! the ball always comes right back!) and finally, watching a karate class. Excellent fun.
Our horrible cold snap was interrupted today, providing the incentive to go skiing tonight. The tracks are worn out and rutted, but any skiing is better than no skiing. Just as I finished, tracing the northern and western edge of the oak savanna at the center of the main part of the Arb, the snow started to fall, almost imperceptibly at first (a flake every few seconds) but intensifying to a steady stream. I hope it freshens up the trails and the rest of town: things were looking pretty dingy today. Just before the snow started, I did one good long interval, the sort of hard effort that makes your heart pound and your stomach consider making an exit. It’s a purifying experience, and really takes the edge off the cold.
Perfect. The only things I could hear while skiing tonight were my breath, my skis gliding, and my poles clicking.* It was a gorgeous night on the snow.**
* Admittedly, I’m half deaf, I left my hearing aids at home, and I wore a too-thick toque.
** This photo hardly does justice to how bright it actually is: the snow picks up my headlamp’s beam, the stars, ambient light from streetlights and campus buildings… The trails glow.
Real: I had a nice 50-minute ski around the Upper Arb trails today in very nice conditions. We could use a few inches of snow to freshen things up, but the tracks are in pretty good shape and there were lots of people out enjoying them.
As I huffed and puffed around the Carleton Arb this morning, I thought about how funny skiing is as a sport, in that you have to wait months and months to be able to actually do it – to ski, and not just prepare to ski. This year, thanks to Tuesday’s blizzard, I was able to go from biking and running to skiing in basically one day, skipping the painful cold-but-snowless phase we’ve had in previous years.
Being able to get back on snow again makes me very happy, of course, but my happiness is amplified by finding (again) that skiing is just as much fun as I remembered and hoped. With only three sessions on snow so far, I’m having the usual bad technique & low strength problems that plague skiers early in every winter (unless they were more gung-ho than me about rollerskiing and/or weight training), but the cycling has helped my legs stay decently strong, and the motions of skiing still simply feel right. On top of that, Carleton has arranged with the Northfield high school ski team to have some very committed Northfield parents groom the ski trails in the Arb, which means that we can ski on real tracks all winter – a fantastic boon to anyone who skis or wants to ski. I dunno if skiing is technically the most fun you can have outdoors, but it’s up there. I can’t wait to get out there again tomorrow night.
Though this blog is the focal point of my long-form web-based narcissism, I do have another blog that, come winter, gets a fair amount of my mental energy: the Nordic Commentary Project, which is a small (two-man) effort to provide top-level cross-country skiing with something beyond straight reporting. You know – analysis. Prognostication. Commentary, even.
Why, just this evening I wrote 1,000 words on who might – or rather, won’t – win one of the key races at the Olympics in February. It’s geeky, but by golly I tried to correctly use those crazy Swedish and Norwegian letters with the little circles and the slashed-out O’s and stuff. And what’s more I think I’m right about my guesswork! But I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to put 50 Norwegian krone down on the long odds against my prediction.
Until this morning, I’d only biked in any kind of snow when I had to commute in the white stuff. But having a nice bike has changed my mind about biking in the snow, and since today was a brilliant winter day – about 20°F with a slight wind and sharp yellow sunlight – I hit the Arb trails. It was a lot of fun,* both because the Arb is especially pretty in the wintertime and because it was interesting to negotiate well-known trails when they’re snowy and icy. I did more fishtailing than a school of mackerel.
On top of that, I twice rode past the Arb crew and various Northfielders, cutting down some unneeded evergreens to serve as Christmas trees. There were lots of happy kids! I’ll be out riding in the Arb until or unless we get some serious snow soon.
* I did determine that I need to wear better gloves and socks, though. Because you don’t really move your fingers or toes while biking – or at least because I don’t, much – my fingers and toes were much more numb after these 45 minutes than they get after an hour’s skiing in colder temperatures.
That was quite a Thanksgiving break. The four days off were very well spent. The numbers, by category…
Weather
0: inches of snow over the four days.
40: average daytime temperature, in degrees Fahrenheit.
Eating
3: complete turkey-and-fixings meals (dinners on Thanksgiving and the next two nights: turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberries, rolls, green beans, pie).
12: pounds of mashed potatoes which I consumed (approximate)
6: hours playing outdoors with the girls, including one trip to feed breadcrumbs to the geese, one “river walk” downtown, and a lot of other activity.
1: abortive trips to a playground (a contraption that was like a kiddie ropes course – far too difficult for the girls).
21-19: score of the soccer game in which the Three Girls team (my daughters and their neighbor friend) beat me on Sunday night. (I suspect the match was fixed.)
zillion: approximate number of words that I either spelled aloud or helped the girls spell for this or that art project – or just because they wanted to know how to spell, say, “banshee.”
4: nights that the girls chose the sex-ed book Amazing You!for their bedtime story.
Recreation
4: great workouts (one each day – bike, rollerski, bike, rollerski).
2: crazy stories in the media: the Tiger Woods “car accident” and the idiots who crashed the White House state dinner.
2: World Cup cross-country ski races watched over the internet.
1: times I slapped my forehead after seeing that only 2 seconds kept Kris Freeman from third place in the 15km race in Finland on Sunday.
4: Richard Stark novels read.
32: hours of sleep – easily setting a parenthood record for most shuteye in a four-day period.
