Category: skiing

Into the Snow

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.

Christmas Day

The day ended with four visits to the girls’ bedroom to rearrange various teddy bears who seemed to be wiggling out from under their (and Genevieve’s) blankets and two more visits to try to find a My Pretty Pony hair clip that had apparently fallen out of the toy’s plasticky locks and into Julia’s bed, but honestly the rest of the day was just great. The girls were thrilled by their “Santa gifts” this morning, and spent much of the day playing with one or several or all of their toys. Vivi and I did go outside to take advantage of the heavy, wet snow – nature’s Play-Doh! – and make a nice snowman (beside which Vivi and our next-door friend posed):
Christmas Day Snowman

Later, after we invited over for dinner some friends who were unable to travel in the bad weather, I did a bit of “skiing” in that snow, which was great for sucking my skis off the track. It was so warm out that I finished my ski without a hat or gloves on, which is a late-March or April stunt, not a Christmas Day one.

Dinner with those friends went very well: the food was delicious, the girls (our two and their two) played well together and enjoyed each other, and then before you knew it, bedtime was upon us. Only 364 more shopping days till Christmas!

Nightskiing Deserves a Quiet Night

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.**

Arb Ski Trails

* 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.

Skiing Real and Virtual

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.

Virtual: Over at my other blog, the Nordic Commentary Project, I’ve written two posts on this weekend’s racing at Rogla, Slovenia: previews of the sprints that were held on Saturday and of the distance races to be held on Sunday. The racing’s been good this season, and it’s getting more intense ahead of the weeklong Tour de Ski stage race over the New Year’s holiday.

Expectations Fulfilled

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.

Nordic Skiing Geekery

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.

Thanks for Thanksgiving

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)
  • 3: bottles of beer consumed (Leinenkugel’s Fireside Nut Brown Lager – delicious).
  • 2: mocha lattes consumed.
  • ∞: amount of pie I could have eaten.

Parenting

  • 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.

“Athletic” Goals, 2009-2010

Sunday, I’m running a 5k race on the trails of the River Bend Nature Center in Faribault, Minnesota – my first event in what I hope will be a fairly active year of training and racing. I’ve been pretty consistently training four to six times a week for a couple years now, so I hope this season – running from now through next February’s ski races – will be a good one, “athletically.”

Beyond what I’ve been doing for training (primarily hourlong runs, rollerskis, and skis, interspersed with shorter, harder sessions), I’m going to try to do at least one 2-hour session each month (probably running with poles or rollerskiing) and at least two intensity sessions in each 10-day period – more at certain points, and trying to do a lot of uphill and/or relatively long efforts, such as fast four minute uphill runs or skis.) In large part, adding these kinds of workouts is an attempt to avoid another race as bad as my horrible experience at the City of Lakes Loppet in February.

As for racing, I have five events in mind. If I can do even three of them, I’ll be happy. If I can do all five – especially the two ski races in February – I’ll be elated. And tired. And appreciative of Shannon’s needing to cover for me at home. Here is the list of goal races, along with the distance and a target time. (If anybody wants to front the money that would let me do the Marcialonga in Italy in January or the Vasaloppet in Sweden in March, I’ll be happy to do the training.)

Sunday, April 19, 2009
Maple Syrup Run at River Bend Nature Center in Faribault, Minnesota
5k – 22:00

Sunday, September 13, 2009
Defeat of Jesse James Days road races in Northfield, Minnesota
5k – 20:30 or 15k – 1:05:00

Saturday, October 17, 2009
Nerstrand Big Woods Run in Nerstrand, Minnesota
half marathon/21k – 2:00:00

Sunday, February 7, 2010
City of Lakes Loppet in Minneapolis, Minnesota
33k freestyle – 1:45 or 25k classic – no idea what would be possible or good!

Sunday, February 14, 2010
Mora Vasaloppet in Mora, Minnesota
58k skate or 42k classic – again, no idea what would be possible or good

Vivi or Marthe?

The young Norwegian skier Marthe Kristoffersen had a decent first year on the World Cup circuit, where she is mostly known for a very bad anchor leg in the relay at the World Championships and her penchant for skiing with her sleeves pushed up.

Marthe Kristoffersen
Marthe Kristoffersen

Like Marthe, Genevieve has quite a bit of Norwegian blood flowing in her veins, has never won a medal at the Nordic World Ski Championships, and likes to have her sleeves rolled up. Olympics 2028?

Genevieve, Getting Down to Business

Spring Skiing

I’m too trashed by all that sunshine and outdoor time to do more today than simply mention that the cross-country skiing World Cup is coming to a head this weekend with a huge series of races in Falun, Sweden – the wonderfully named “Svenska Skidspelen” or “Swedish Ski Games.” Along with a friend, I’m capitalizing on my interest in this ridiculously obscure, Europe-centered endurance sport (ROECES) to blog the racing to death over at the Nordic Commentary Project. Check it out, if at all inclined.

Along with my co-blogger at NCP, we’re running a sort of low-rent fantasy-sport scheme predicated on predicting the top five racers in all the events this weekend. I’ll brag a bit by saying that I’m (ever more narrowly) winning, having made more accurate predictions (and fewer inaccurate ones) than the other participants. Yes indeedy, my knowledge of this ROECES cannot be matched, yet, by my three competitors. (Proof: I’m putting all the results of our little contest up on a public Google spreadsheet.)

Competing as the “Northfield Nine,” I’m also not doing too badly in a fuller sort of fantasy-skiing contest being run by SkiTrax, “North America’s Nordic Skiing Magazine.” Currently, I’m in fourth place out of 1o9 entrants – which puts me in line to win a pair of $500 ski boots that wouldn’t fit my skis. As a white elephant goes, this is marginally better than the prize I won in a similar contest run by SkiTrax earlier this season: free attendance at a three-day ski training camp at a resort in British Columbia. I’d love to go, but the prize didn’t include the cost of travel to BC or lodging there. Oh well. At least the prize validated my otherwise-useless knowledge of the ROECES.

As the Snow Ends

I took the day “off” today to recover from the harried trip to D.C., to spend some time with the girls, and to give Shannon a bit of a break. I say “off” because eleven hours with the girls – as delightful as they are – isn’t exactly restorative.

But the girls did take a good long nap, during which I snuck off to the Lower Arb for what might be the last ski of the season. Though last week’s snow is already thin in many spots, all of the trails were skiable, even over the wet sticky snow. Trying to glide was basically a war with surface tension: I could actually hear my skis adhering to the moisture in the snow, then popping loose. This made movement slow and laborious.

On the other hand, going so slowly made it easier to notice that there are already tiny little buds on some trees and a certain green hue to the fields. As much as I hate to admit it, spring is on the way.

Greatest Commute Ever

Watching the blizzard on Thursday, I was seized by a renewed desire to ski to work. The notion originated in a blog post by Alex, an e-quaintance (and a fast skier) who roller-skied to work in Boston last summer.

The idea really took hold earlier this winter, though, when I realized that my house isn’t too far from the Northfield golf course, which runs close to the Arb, which abuts campus, which contains my office.* Then the snow melted, leaving me to my wheeled devices.

Until today. Yesterday’s “Snowmaggedon” made the ski commute feasible again (as a commenter noted), so I worked out the timing and did it. Owing to an, shall we say, indirect route, I had to budget quite a bit of time, but  I reached the Carleton Rec Center (where, for perspirational reasons, the commute ended) after a solid 55 minutes of skiing.

My route (about 4.2km/2.6 miles altogther) took me out my backyard, along a street, across part of the Northfield Golf Club‘s course, and then through Carleton’s Upper Arboretum. I climbed up and over eight snow berms, sank to my hips in one deceptive drift on the golf course, and made four road crossings, one of which included a satisfyingly odd look from a passing motorist.

It was, in a word, fantastic. Under a brilliant sun and sky, the pure white snow was untracked except by a few critters – deer, rabbits, squirrels, and either a Yeti or a snowshoer. The whole thing was great, but the best moment came as I skied down an incline on the golf course fairway: behind me, the sun suddenly emerged from a cloud, lighting up everything around me and casting my dark black shadow down the hill. Amazing. The view back up the slope wasn’t terrible, either. (Click through for other photos, including one shot by a nice young woman who agreed to take a picture of the dude in the weird hat.)

Down the Fairway I

* My other oddball goal for the winter is to do a 50km ski session in the Lower Arb. It’s harder than it seems, since the trails only let you create 8km or 9km loops. Anyone for a few laps?

Want

The other day, led by Google to the blog of a Danish athlete who is training for the big Vasaloppet race in Sweden, I came across this photo:

Thoraxtrainer
Thoraxtrainer

I duly dug up the website of the pictured device, the “Thoraxtrainer,” which has been designed by Jonas Thor Olsen, a Danish cross-country skier notable for finishing way down the results sheet in pretty much every major race of the World Cup – but who nonetheless races every damn race. Tough guy, and apparently smart, to develop this poling machine, which looks pretty cool.

So naturally, I want one. At current exchange rates, it costs about $6,000. Not too bad, but maybe I should just finally build a rollerboard for those wet days when I don’t want to rollerski or run.