April 7th, 2008
Last year I skied on April 1st on decent snow and thought it was a real treat. This year I skied yesterday at Waterville Valley; the entire center was groomed and open with near-midwinter conditions (just warmer). There were a surprising number of other diehards there as well. And while the center is closed the rumor is they will be grooming occasionally, thus the question marks in the title of this post. A little closer to home, Holderness has fixed their piston bully and have been making sure it works by grooming there as well. So I have a couple choices for getting out on my skinny skis again.
Of course I have a running race in six days, so that steals some time that could go in to skiing. I ran four days last week and have been starting to feel good; I need to look up my logs from 1996, the last time I ran a road race in April, to get some handle on how fast to go out. I am sure I can go through the mile in not much over five minutes but after that things might go downhill real fast.
Oh - on another note I am discovering that there is a substantial number of skier physics geeks. I got an e-mail asking me why I insisted on solving that hanging beam problem the way I did when there was a way that took much less algebra and similar computer time. So for all the engineers who read this column (and I know there are at least two of you), stay tuned, I will be talking math again in the next couple of days. Everyone else, please just don’t be scared away by that notion.
