Sorry if I haven’t written in a while - New Hampton just had finals week, so my life has been a hectic series of review sessions, exams, grading, and comment writing. And for those curious about the resolution of my last post, I did indeed get a paper which rambled on for two pages of Star Wars rehash with about two lines of relevant math, and let’s just say he didn’t exactly get an A for his effort.

With school over for a couple of weeks, I had the opportunity to race in the reincarnation of a wonderful ski race, the Ski to the Clouds. I believe this was started sometime in the 1990s when someone decided that if they run and bike up Mount Washington (often braving dangerous weather in the middle of summer) why not have a ski race up it. So, for a few years, they did. And then they didn’t for a while, as organizational efforts were shifted to the Great Glen to Bretton Woods Adventure. When the latter event (an epic, but wonderful race) folded due to the headaches involved in putting it on, the Ski to the Clouds was reborn.

So anyway, I was in math class today, and one of my students asked me if I liked Star Wars. When I replied in the affirmative, he asked if I would rather be Darth Vader or the Emperor. I thought a bit and then replied “Darth Vader.” “Well, then I’d better rewrite part of my paper,” was his reply. The paper is supposed to be a description of an algorithm for graphing an arbitrary rational function. It will be interesting (or possibly just pathetic) to see how this connects with interstellar war. If it is interesting enough I will let my readers know…

So yeah. I finished 29th at the Birke. It’s hard to be too excited about that, though not having much time to train and never having been much of a 50 km skater it is hard to be too disappointed either.

I know that the Birke was a couple days ago, but I am not writing about it yet. Much of the good story of my Birke is in the getting there, and so I need to tell that story first. It begins with a miscalculation.

I’ve got it too! I know I am stealing Dave’s title but I really was going to use it myself. Like Dave, I have skied only one complete Birke; unlike him, I haven’t done any shortened versions. We both skied it in 1999, one year after we both graduated Bates. Dave was 19th, I was 20th, though he had a much better race (till the last couple Ks anyway) than I did and I never even saw him once.

After five days off, I finally got to ski again today. We timed our arrival perfectly; with the recent rain and the warm weather the track was concrete when we got there, but a groomer came along in five minutes and I had perfect corduroy; it was even powdery enough that I was able to classic ski on hard wax (with just two stops to rewax). I skied an hour and a half, pulling Iris in the Chariot, and felt great and strong and happy to be alive and healthy and in the great outdoors.

So my prediction came true. I was too sick to ski for a couple days (and yesterday New Hampton School called classes so that those of us who were sick could get better instead of infecting more students and faculty; had I been healthy I could have skied for hours…) and then today it rained. Hard, heavy, warm rain on top of eight inches of snow. No skiing, even if it were safe to drive somewhere, which is wasn’t. Oh well, tomorrow should be better!

If I was smart, I wouldn’t have raced in Lake Placid. But I’m not. My wife and daughter are both sick, and it has seemed only a matter of time till I got a cold as well. It came on Friday night, before the Lake Placid Loppet. I got a good night’s sleep before the race though, and felt okay in the morning, so I figured I would go for it and race anyway.

This will be a short post so as to avoid actually using the words I censored from the title and thus alienating my sponsors and ending my career as a blogger. I had about the most frustrating race of my life today. I led the Craftsbury Marathon from the start to 46 km, lost the lead for about a kilometer of downhill, took it back, and opened a gap, and then got beat 20 meters from the finish line.

I won my first race this year today.