skiing Archives | Page 6 of 6 | Blowing & Drifting

Nerdcitement

The cross-country skiing World Cup, the sport’s highest level of competition, begins its season on Saturday with races in Gaellivare, Sweden, far above the Arctic Circle.

The XC World Cup is is my favorite sport to follow, for lots of reasons. Foremost among these reasons is that I love to ski, and I have been lucky enough to be able to ski quite a bit here in Northfield, after many years away while living in relatively less snowy and/or skiable places. XC skiing is a great sport – fun, challenging, interesting. On this point, I can’t wait to ski in the City of Lakes Loppet on February 1.

A second reason that I love the WC is that the competition itself is engrossing, thanks to a wide variety of race formats (everything from 1500 meter sprints to 50 kilometer marathons, from individual time trials to 8km hillclimbs), numerous beautiful venues all over Europe (and even in Asia and North America), and the fact that the skiing itself is surpassingly beautiful to watch – the perfect mix of power and grace. This (poorly scored) video of the great German skier Tobias Angerer does a good job showing the sport:

But yadda yadda. One of the two real reasons that the World Cup is fun to follow nowadays is that a fan can actually watch the races online, either live or delay. Universal Sports, an arm of NBC, is “airing” many of the WC races this winter, for free, starting with this weekend’s races in Sweden. My favorite obscure endurance sport, shown free and on-demand over my computer? Sign me up.

The second real reason that the World Cup is fun to follow is that a genius web friend has developed a fantasy league for those of us who – unlike your common-as-dirt baseball and football fans – have heretofore not had a make-believe competition in which to utilize our insanely narrow and deep knowledge of the sport. I’m practically itching to get my (faux) team together and go nerdily head to head against other ski-racing fans. I’ll note in closing that I won the damn league last year, so now I have some credibility and a reputation to defend. Bring on the snow!

The Snow Sticketh

This is snow from Sunday, still lingering in south- and east-facing corners of campus. With, oh, 20 more inches on top of this one-flake-deep base, I should be good for skiing.

Thought Snow

It is officially snowing here in Northfield. Light flurries began promptly at eleven a.m. and have continued since then, occasionally intensifying to pretty heavy blowing. The ground’s too warm to let any of it accumulate, though.

Still Thinking Snow

The crisp early-October morning weather is heightening my eagerness for some snow, so I was excited to hear Mark Seeley, a U of Minnesota climatologist and state celebrity, say last Friday on Minnesota Public Radio that the Twin Cities have received measurable snowfall in forty Octobers since 1884, most recently in 2002. October snow is actually pretty late for some parts of the continent, of course. On August 31, the Canadian cross-country skier Devon Kershaw blogged about significant snowfall in the Rockies, and a couple of ski teams in Alaska actually did a bit of snow skiing in September. And this weekend, the forecast for Spearfish, South Dakota, is nicely white:

As my post last weekend showed, here in southern Minnesota it’s still rollerski season. My workout hardly compared, in topographical or physical demands, to the incredible-sounding (and amazing-looking) “Climb to the Castle” uphill race on Monday in northern New York. Then again, it was still better than using this cool but pretty weird cool invention: a synthetic surface so much like snow that you can ski on it.

When I get rich figuring out how to profit on the Wall Street collapse, I’ll use my third million dollars to install this on my woodland estate in northern Minnesota. (The first million will go in the bank, the second to buy the property and build a modest 9 BR, 8 bath shack in one corner of the lot.)

Amber Waves of Grain

With fall now incipient, I restarted my rollerskiing regimen this weekend with my usual route on the country roads around our place. The weather was agreeable, the roadkilled animals were few, the traffic was very light, and the scenery was amazing. I almost crashed admiring this view (the “Kane Avenue High Point” on my rollerskiing map):

Not bad at all.