So, it’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog—even longer, in fact, than it has been since Reese updated his blog. It appears that I am joining the long list of delinquent FasterSkier bloggers.

My lifestyle has undergone some serious changes over the last couple months, since I moved to New York City and started at Columbia. For example, instead of typing this post in my underwear and a t-shirt, as I would have done in the past, I am now typing it in my underwear and a collared shirt and a tie, something I would have punched myself in the face for doing just a few months ago. (For the record, did you know that a collared shirt and tie on top and underwear on bottom is perfectly sufficient for conducting video skype interviews? Just sayin’.)

Other ways things have changed: I have become a hardened New Yorker. How? Well, mainly, I got mugged. Fo real. No joke. I am now more badass than Andy Newell and Kikkan Randall combined.

So, as part of school here, I cover this neighborhood in the north Bronx called Norwood, which, I concede, is a place where you might not want to leave your valuable rubies and emeralds unattended on a park bench for more than a few minutes at a time. However, it is not a place where people regularly fear for their health and well-being.

A few weeks ago, I’m walking around on my beat, minding my own business, checking out some basketball courts under construction in a busy park in BROAD DAYLIGHT while wearing a backpack and collared shirt. In retrospect, I had not actually drawn a logo in block letters on my collared shirt that said “please mug me, as I am from a rural area of Maine where people smile at each other when passing on the street,” but I think that that is how two area youth may have interpreted it anyway.

So, yeah. I finish up looking at these basketball courts and try to leave the park so that I can go, of all places, to the police precinct, where I am trying to make friends with the cops. (Yes, I know, irony: I am about to get mugged while I am on my way to the police precinct.) Sample conversation between me and the NYPD:
Me: Can you tell me about any of the unusuals that have happened here over the last few days? (Translation: I just used the word unusuals, which makes me a hardened police reporter who knows what he’s talking about—will you please give me information that you’re not authorized to give me even though I am wearing a shirt that says “please mug me, as I am from a rural area of Maine where people smile at each other when passing on the street”?)

NYPD Officer: No. (Or some variation on this theme.)

Anyways, back to the story of me getting mugged. I am trying to leave this stupid park. But instead of finding the exit, I run into this fenced-off construction area, and there’s a guy walking the other way who says that I can’t go through there. So I’m like, okay, and I turn around, and then there is another gentleman who is walking towards me who decides that, instead of returning my friendly nod, that he will heed the instructions on my shirt and take the opportunity to lunge towards me and punch me in the throat.

Keep in mind that this is all unfolding with like one dude watching from behind a fence but apparently minding his own business, and then a handful of other people within a hundred meters or so, pleasantly enjoying their day in the park. Just another day in the Bronx. Anyways, I humbly offer the contents of my wallet and backpack to these dudes, as well as my dignity, and they proceed to make off with my iphone, $10 from my wallet, and my dignity, leaving my computer charger, library books, credit cards, and even my subway pass intact. Which is fortunte, because it means that I don’t even have to call my mom in Maine to have her drive me back to Manhattan from the Bronx! Also, my memory is not 100 percent clear on this, but I think they left the day’s edition of the Wall St. Journal, as well.

After a brief stop at several local institutions that do not let me use the phone, I walk the rest of the way to the police precinct, which was my intended destination in the first place. A wait ensues. Then, I am led up to the stairs to be interviewed by a detective.

Me: “This was not how I wanted to get inside the precinct office.” (Translation: I am a reporter who would like to view the interior of your offices without being subjected to physical violence.)

Officer: “At least you’re not wearing bracelets.” (Translation: handcuffs. Fair enough.)

After telling the detective that I don’t have much of an interest in looking through, no joke, 7,483 mugshots to see if I can identify the perpetrators, I depart, and my work for the day is finished.

Other than that, things are going pretty well. The Manhattan Nordic Ski Club, which consists of me and three other exceptionally friendly dudes, has already had its first team practice, and we are excited for Thomas Alsgaard’s visit to the city in a few weeks.

I have been busy reporting. And I also managed to con some people into letting me sneak in the back door to an extremely awesome investigative reporting program that runs concurrently to all the other classes I was already signed up for. One of the teachers is a private investigator. So suffice to say that if anyone is laundering their SuperTour prize money, I will be the first to let you all know, unless Chelsea or Topher or someone else at FasterSkier beats me to it. Over and out from NYC.

So, I’m not sure that anyone really cares, but I’m planning/hoping to keep updating this blog throughout my year of grad school in New York City. I do hope to write about ski-related stuff at some point along the way, but if that’s what you’re looking for right now, I’d suggest you head back to the FasterSkier main page.

I moved down here on August 1, into an apartment that is awesome, large, ideally-situated, and also, literally, infinitely more expensive than my lodging in Williamstown, where I was living rent-free.

The arrangement is kind of interesting. I came by the apartment through my sister, who went to school at Barnard for a year. Two of her friends were moving out of an apartment that was owned by one of their aunts, and they asked me if I was interested. I ended up getting a good deal, but because the place is rent-controlled and in a relatively nice building, it’s not actually supposed to be sub-let. Which means that I have no lease, and also that when I moved in, I had to do so between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. My mom was kind enough to help with this process.

School started on August 4^th with orientation. And if you anything about orientation, you know that it’s scintillating: epic sessions of deans and administrators presenting information that is simultaneously delivered by way of printed materials. I had assumed that if Columbia thought you were smart enough to go to their grad school, they’d trust you with being able to read, but apparently this is not the case. To be fair, judging from some of the questions that were asked by my peers, perhaps some of them don’t know how to read. But anyways…

After four days of orientation, we started a month-long session of multimedia training that includes lessons in audio, photo, and video. We just finished the audio unit (you can check out my pieces here http://soundcloud.com/nat-herz/bond-parade-floats and here http://soundcloud.com/nat-herz/raymond-myrie-jr-profile-v-2 ), and now it’s on to photo.

Starting in September, I’ll be covering a neighborhood in the Bronx for the remainder of the semester. Most likely it’s going to be Norwood, a formerly-Irish community with now-shifting demographics. Needless to say, I don’t think it will be very much like covering skiing. So far this year, through August 7, there have been three murders in the area’s police precinct, which, while a 50 percent decline from last year, is (I think) three more murders than I covered at FasterSkier last season. Demographically, I think it will also be somewhat different. For example, according to the 2010 census, there are 7,391 people of Dominican descent residing in Norwood, or, approximately, 7,391 more than reside the cross-country ski world. I had hoped to be able to at least do some stories on waxing and grinding technologies, but my google search for “ski shop Norwood Bronx” did not turn up very much.

As for physical activity, things have been going fairly well, if not very ski-specific. My apartment is just five blocks from Central Park, which makes it very easy to access for morning runs, bicycle rides, etc. My excursions in Central Park are almost always the highlight of my day. Why? Well, I thought that it was because I was living in New York City, and people living in New York City are ridiculous. For example, in my first few weeks here, I have seen both men and women riding bicycles while wearing skintight pink clothing (the woman was in a one-piece, complete with pink shoe covers but no helmet), a woman pushing a dog in a baby carriage, and a 200-plus-pound woman go absolutely rocketing past me on a triathlon bike in impressive fashion.

At first my attitude about the people exercising in Central Park was kind of condescending, as I was sure that they looked strange because they were bizarre New Yorkers, while I looked completely normal and badass because I am normal and badass. But upon further reflection, I have come to the conclusion that with the exception of maybe Petter Northug and Kikkan Randall, we all have our own idiosyncracies and look pretty silly when we are exerting ourselves. Of course, this is a matter of degree, but the thing about exercising in Central Park is that you go past about 1,000 people every morning, and even if the factor of ridiculousness is constant between here and Maine, you’re more likely to run into hilarity in New York because of the sheer numbers.

That’s it. Actually, that’s not it. You know why? Because even in New York Effing City, you can’t escape those god-damn guinea hens:

Okay, this isn't exactly NYC. But it is just across the George Washington Bridge, on a bike ride.

The beginning of August marks the end of the summer for me: I start orientation at Columbia Journalism School on the fourth—this coming Thursday.

But before any more discussion of my impending move to the city, there’s some important business to attend to—namely, a wrap-up of the last few weeks of my summer.

Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to participate in my first multi-race weekend since my escapades at the Craftsbury Spring Tour. First up was the Old Hallowell Day 5 K—a pleasant jaunt down (and up) the streets of my hometown. The race literally went past my front door, which was pretty awesome.

Any time I go to a 5 k or a smaller road race, I always hold out a little bit of hope, usually until I arrive at the start line and get a look at the competition, that I might be able to win. I suck at running, but every once in a while you can look in the local paper and see results for 5 k’s that have the winner running it in like 19-and-a-half minutes, which is achievable even for me. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the registration table, there was a disappointingly large number of legit-looking skinny people wearing visors and sunglasses—not to mention a really tall, really skinny shirtless dude with a chestful of tattoos, including one that said “sic semper tyrannis.” Prancing around shirtless with ridiculous tattoos is okay if you’re legit, but as it turned out, the guy didn’t even win, so, bummer for him.

Anyways, the race started, and for a couple hundred meters I ran with the huge pack of people that sprinted out of the start, including a very not-legit-looking girl with tie-died leggings who looked like she was 15 years old. Initially, this did not seem like a promising start for me, but after about 45 seconds of running she got tired and all the people who sprinted out of the start died and the pack thinned out. I settled into about sixth place and did battle with a handful of folks over the rest of the race. Highlights included when I dropped a guy wearing those stupid running slippers, and also when I accidentally spit all over some poor woman’s car. (It was totally unintentional—there were like 200 meters to go and I was dying—but it was still hilarious enough to make me laugh through the excruciating pain.) Ultimately I finished seventh, as well as FIRST PLACE IN MY AGE GROUP, which meant that I got a kickass mug that I meant to bring with me to New York City but forgot at my house.

The second event of the weekend was a bike race at the Yarmouth Clam Festival, the very next day. My friends and I call this race, simply, “the Clam Fest,” but to Yarmouth residents, spectators, and readers of the local newspaper, the event is known as the Yarmouth Clam Festival Professional Men’s and Women’s Professional Bike Race, which makes it sound about 10 times more badass than it actually is. For whatever reason, the Clam Fest bike race holds some kind of mystical appeal to the people of Yarmouth, and apparently, if you do it, you are a badass, even if you’re like me and you haven’t cleaned your bike, you have hairy legs, and you haven’t actually used your bike in eight days because you’ve been busy moving all your sh-t to New York City. Fortunately, however, nobody in Yarmouth was aware of my personal history, and thus all morning people looked at me like I was a huge baller, including many long stares, and questions about how far I’d come to participate. (Answer: I woke up half an hour ago and drove the 15 miles from Brunswick.)

The treatment continues at the start of the race—there’s always a national anthem (helmets off!), and approximately one zillion spectators yelling and screaming. Technically, I suppose the Clam Fest is actually a “professional” race, since the top six get paid, but in reality, it’s about 50 local amateurs for whom the race is the focal point of the season, 48 or 49 regional elite amateurs, and one or two actual professionals. Just to hammer this point home, this is a professional bike racer:

Photo, Flickr, User jmdgolfman

This is not a professional bike racer:

Eyes on the prize. Photo, Don McEwan.

All this is not to diss the race at all—it is far and away one of the most awesome athletic spectacles I have the privilege of participating in, year after year. It is just to highlight the wide gap between perception (of the spectators, that the race is a Lance-Armstrong-style production) and reality (that I ride a bicycle with mismatched bar tape and a dried leaf that has been stuck to the front derailleur for six weeks).

The race was extremely painful, and not actually very much fun—the best part about it was when it was over. It was very, very hot—my estimate of the temperature pegged it at somewhere around 350 degrees F—and because we were hurtling at breakneck speeds of up to 75 miles per hour, I was too scared most of the time to pull out my water bottle and drink from it. By the time the race was over, my internal temperature had reached the point where it could only be cooled by one thing: a lime rickey, which consists of seltzer, lime, and sugar, and which I think is the only consumable item at the Clam Festival that costs less than $300. It made me feel a lot better. I finished with the group and I didn’t die, which were the two criteria I had to fulfill for the race to qualify as a success.

With the conclusion of the epic race weekend, it was time for my athletic focus to shift to ultimate frisbee. I’ve been playing in a summer league in Portland since June, and the weekend following the Clam Festival, we gathered for an awesome barbeque and lawn games session to prepare ourselves for the next weekend’s season-ending tournament.

Awesome photo, Avery Briggs.

That tournament was Saturday, and after a regular-season campaign that saw us go 19-1, our juggernaut of a team swept five straight games to win the summer league championship. It was awesome, although our team captain is known throughout the region as a huge jerk, so our victory was met with disappointed silence by the dozens of spectators who had been rooting ardently against us.

Today (Monday), I’m on a bus on my way to New York City, where I’ll be living through next May while I spend a year at Columbia Journalism School. That’s half of the reason I’m moving; the other half is so that I can really ramp up my post-collegiate cross-country skiing career as a member of the Manhattan Nordic Ski Club.

I will not be employed by FasterSkier on a day-to-day basis for the next year, but I do plan to stay involved and in touch with the website as Topher, Matt, and the rest of the robust and talented staff keep it growing and changing. I also plan on continuing to chronicle my athletic shenanigans on this blog, whether it’s rollerskiing in Central Park or Alleycat racing in Brooklyn. Thanks for reading!

Hi there. It’s Chelsea Little here. I work for FasterSkier too but Nat is better at his job AND a more entertaining blogger. I’m not sure I can live up to expectations here but I’m going to try.

Last weekend I was working at USA Track and Field National Championships here in Eugene, Oregon. Nat thought that it was pretty cool and said something like “keep FasterSkier in mind and see if you can write something up.” But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t come up with a legit reason to write about track on a skiing website. Since Nat’s blog is sometimes about the experience of being a journalist, I asked to do a guest spot here instead.

So, while it was really rad (to say it like Nat):

It still wasn’t as rad as this:

Skiing still wins, hands down. Being at Holmenkollen for World Champs was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Period.

Having said that, I think that Hayward Field might be the Holmenkollen of track. It’s a totally sweet venue and the spectators arguably care more about track than anywhere else in the world. I mean, the University of Oregon sells season tickets to track races. How many other places can do that? Every day of the four-day event the stands were packed with more than 10,000 people (okay, that’s 1/10 of the fanbase at the Holmenkollen 50 k, but they have a lot more space there!). The spectators got psyched for every event, even the masters racing.

Click any of the photos to enlarge.

And their level of bias and support for anyone who is or was a University of Oregon or Oregon Track Club Elite athlete is definitely analogous to the Norwegian support of their own home team. It was crazy. I sometimes felt bad for the other competitors.

As far as venues and atmosphere go, I guess one major difference is that you can’t bring alcohol into Hayward Field, although it’s possible to be sneaky. But I definitely wasn’t going to have the same experience I did when I was skiing around the Holmenkollen course before the men’s 50 k and getting offered various unidentified alcoholic beverages from spectators’ flasks and water bottles. It’s not as rowdy and obviously, there are no tents or campfires or sausages roasting away, which is a strike against track as far as I’m concerned

Here are a couple of stories, and then my list of the top ten reasons that track is different from sking, including a Serena Williams wannabe, tattoos, and Twizzlers. But first:

Credentials

Our story starts when I biked down to Matthew Knight Arena to pick up my media credentials. It was a much simpler and easier process than when I was hiking around Holmenkollen with my klistery skis in hand and my laptop in my backpack, and hoping that none of the klister would end up on the laptop over the course of the day.

I walked in the door and the helpful lady directing everyone to the right registration table asked, “So you’re here to register for the junior meet?”

No. No, I was not. I was pretty torn between feeling flattered that I apparently looked like I was in good enough shape to be competing at junior nationals, and being insulted that I also apparently look like a teenager. I’m 24, people! 24!

The name above me on the list of media was someone from the New York Times. I was kind of intimidated- for obvious reasons but also because this isn’t something that happens at ski races. Not at national championships, not at World Championships, and only maybe at the Olympics. Holy crap. I was there working for a regional NH/VT newspaper with a circulation of 16,000. I’d be up against some big guys when I tried to snag Andrew Wheating for an interview….

Journalists, Photographers, and King of The Hill: TV

I later realized why that nice lady thought that I must be a competitor. I spent a lot of time in the photo zone at the finish line on the track, and I think I saw three other women there, total. (One was a kind of overweight woman from the University of Minnesota who obviously wasn’t used to big events, because she kept walking in front of people’s cameras and ruining their shots and never even realized it. party foul!) I was definitely the youngest of the ladies and also one of the only people there who looked like I ran fairly often.

Bottom line: sometimes when I walked in there people would kind of look at me like, uh, what are you doing here? The upside was that I didn’t actually have a photo pass, but nobody checked or gave me shit about it because they just didn’t really know what to do with me.

I didn’t experience the photo zone in Oslo – that was reserved for Topher – so I don’t know what it was like. But here in Eugene, the photographers felt very entitled to getting their shots. The senior guy from Sports Illustrated seemed to run the show and would occasionally joke with younger photographers that he knew their bosses before they were born. Was I scared of him? Yes. According to Nat I should have chatted him up, but I’m kind of a wuss.

Here’s a typical story though. Before the final of the women’s 100 m hurdles, two women began rolling out a tape at the finish line just as they had in the 800 m races before. The photo zone began to buzz with complaints.

“They’re going to ruin the shot! I can’t see the hurdles!”

Mr. Sports Illustrated was griping about how he had discussed it with the meet director and they had agreed: no tape on the hurdles. He talked to the media attaché who was organizing all of us. Still, those two women held the tape. The situation was becoming more desperate. The announcer called runners to their marks. The stadium went quiet.

“Lower the tape!” the photographers shouted into the silence. I cringed, but the two women kind of squatted down a little bit and the tape sank lower. All of the sudden the hurdles were in each camera’s view. The photographers were happy. The race went off, and they probably all got their shots.

Even the photographers didn’t act as entitled as the NBC TV guys did though. I was over on the far curve to watch the start of the 200 m heats and was standing behind a meet official who was checking whether any of the runners stepped on lane lines. As the runners took their marks he stood up to get a better view.

There was a camera about 20 feet away on the curve and the cameraman became agitated.

“Please sir,” he said. “Excuse me. Sir. Sir? Could you step back please? Or sit down? You’re in the shot.”

The meet official grumbled, but he tried his best to accommodate the TV guy. He later told me that he also wasn’t allowed to stand in front of any of the signs lining the sides of the track, either, because he couldn’t obscure any of the advertising logos.

“It gets hard to do you job,” he said.

While these stories probably give media a bad name, mostly everyone was really nice. Just like in Oslo, where we ended up talking to a journalist from Sweden when Alex Harvey decided not to race the relay, people were interested in talking to other journalists who might know more specifics about something they were interested in.

The first interview I did was with Andrew Wheating after the 1500 heats. Andrew had won his heat and was in a pretty good mood, so rather than wait for him to go through the athlete area and out into the mixed zone, I approached him on the track. You’re technically not supposed to do that, but I didn’t want to miss the other heats so I just went for it. He sat down under a tent to change his shoes and I sat down next to him. Andrew is a really nice guy and was pleasantly surprised to see someone from his hometown paper, so we chatted for a few minutes before he went to cool down. I returned to the photo zone and everyone kind of looked at me.

Then a guy approached me, handed me his business card, and said, “Pitch me a story about Andrew Wheating.”

Cool!

Some similarities I hadn’t thought of

If you had asked me where else I expected to see the pig-snout masks that some skiers use when it’s really cold out, Hayward Field wouldn’t have been high on the list. But there one was: distance standout Galen Rupp started both the 10,000 and 5,000 meter races wearing a breathing mask, supposedly because he struggles with all the pollen in the air in Eugene. Even though Rupp went to Oregon, nobody really likes him and he got a lot of boos, especially with the mask. I mean, he looked like Darth Vader. Some of the biggest cheers of the night came when he took that mask off and threw on the side of the track.

Also, you can still fall down even if you’re racing on the track, which hadn’t actually really occurred to me. It happened a couple of times but I felt the worst for this lady in the steeplechase.

Top Ten Differences Between Track and Skiing

1. Doping, meh: One of the first events I saw was the 100 m prelims. As he came onto the track Justin Gatlin, who is returning from a four-year doping ban, waved to the stands and tried to get the fans behind him. Very few of them responded and it must have been pretty discouraging. But by the time he made it to the finals, he had full crowd support and everyone loved him. In the ski world, would he have been able to win in the court of public opinion? Probably not. Nobody will ever like Andrus Veerpalu again, which is too bad because he has the nicest blue eyes.

2. Victory celebrations that make Petra Majdic look subdued: There’s screaming, there’s jumping up and down, there are tears. The whole gamut. The 100 m hurdles had two of the biggest celebrations in a single race. It was intense.

3. Food in the media center: in Norway, there was coffee, some fruit, and a lot of waffles. Every once in a while there would be a display of local foods and they’d have crackers and fancy cheese, jam, and even sausage. At Hayward field, there was coffee, Gatorade, and Twizzlers. A few battered-looking apples and brown bananas went mostly untouched. Did I take an extra pack of Twizzlers when I left for the last time? Yes, I did.

4. Diversity of suits: This isn’t the land of Swix and Adidas domination. There is no smattering of Craft and Toko and Oneway. While Nike was definitely the predominant attire, I saw lots of interesting outfits, including a male javelin thrower in what appeared to be a neon green bodysuit. It was bright. I also saw some triple jumpers in pink and black leopard print bootie shorts and rainbow tiger print spandex. Finally, there was this woman, who was probably trying to be the Serena Williams of sprinting. My only comment there is that as a fellow woman, I can’t imagine sprinting in that getup. Where’s the support? Lady, you’re not doing yourself any favors! Also, a lot of women sprinted with their hair loose… not sure how they do that.

5. You can actually see tattoos: A lot of athletes who have been to the Olympics get tattoos of the rings. For example, Canadian biathlete Jean-Phillipe Leguellec has some big ones on his calf, which I noticed at a rollerski race last year. But when skiers are racing, you can’t see them. Here, tattoos were everywhere, and not just in sleeves covering the sprinters’ massive biceps. A lot of distance runners had their school logo tattooed on the side of one thigh. Nick Symmonds’ rings peeked out from under his jersey as he waited for his start in the 800 m final.

6. Girls who make Marit Bjoergen look like a twig: Much has been made of that famous picture taken of Marit Bjoergen’s back while she’s flexing her muscles. But let me tell you something: you haven’t seen anything yet and if Marit wanted to kick these girls’ butts, she would have to get on a serious lifting regimen or maybe take some steroids. There were some big athletic women out there. Sprinters have big butts and they use them.

7. On the flip side, Athletes who make Therese Johaug look like she eats Big Macs three meals a day.

8. Generally, more diversity: Not only does track feature some people who aren’t white – what a revolutionary idea! – there were a wide variety of body types at work. You had tiny distance runners. You had muscled-up sprinters. You had pole vaulters with bodies like gymnasts. The guys who throw the hammer are HUGE. Also, unlike in skiing, you don’t have to have Scandinavian blood in your veins to be good. It was pretty refreshing to see a wide swath of Americans excelling.

9. Heptathlon: Multi-events are the coolest sport that doesn’t make any sense. The decathlon and heptathlon have arguably the most athletic people in the world in them. They are badass. But the problem with these events is that in order to get an overall score they have to convert everything to points, which makes it harder to get psyched as a fan. The times and distances aren’t what get you the win; it’s the overall points. For instance, look how much this girl won the 800 m race by. And she finished third overall.

10. Friends: Well, to finish up, nationals wasn’t as cool as Oslo because I didn’t have the wonderful FasterSkier team there with me. Missed you guys!

If you ever have the opportunity to eat your 3-hours pre-race breakfast BEFORE YOU GO TO SLEEP, you might want to reconsider your racing plans.

For better or worse, I was too stupid to do so this morning, which was how I found myself toasting bread for a peanut butter and jelly at 4:15 a.m., in anticipation of the half marathon that I was about to run at 7:30. The birds were chirping, and I’m pretty sure it was getting light out. I couldn’t find peanut butter, so I went to bed instead of eating the sandwich. Then I got up two hours later and drove to the race.

To step back a bit: thus far, this summer seems to be dedicated to me making a mockery of my body, and endurance sports in general. What happened this time? It starts last night at Bowdoin College, where we were having a ski team reunion.

Ski team reunion—how cool is that? This was not, just, like, me and a bunch of friends deciding that we wanted to get together and screw around over the weekend. (Not entirely.) This was official, organized-by-head-Bowdoin-ski-coach-Nathan-Alsobrook, legit ski team reunion, featuring past coaches like Marty Hall, athletes dating back to the 1980’s, and a scrapbook featuring absolutely awesome party invitations created by the legendary Badger brothers, who I wish I’d had the privilege of skiing with. (Example: one of the party invitations in this scrapbook had a condom taped to the inside, along with a postscript to the directions to the off-campus house that read, “If you get lost, pull over your car and drink all the beer in your trunk.”

After the official part of the reunion was over, a group of recent graduates departed and engaged in various shenanigans, which included, in no particular order, brownies from scratch, at least one game of Go Fish, and streaking. A good time was had by all, and we left Bowdoin College at about 3:15 a.m. for the drive back to my house in Hallowell

Sorry, you just wish you could see pictures of streaking—you get the brownies instead.

I had been planning to do this half marathon for the better part of the last week. I had not spent the $40 to pre-register, so in theory I could have backed out, but you really can’t do that after telling like a dozen of your friends that you’re going to run a half marathon.

Secretly, I was hoping that I might be able to turn in a performance a la Kikkan Randall in last year’s Spring Series, when she won the U.S. 30 k title after 300 races in 12 days and singlehandedly flying her airplane from Sweden to northern Maine via the Bermuda Triangle and the International Date Line. I was thinking that when I was interviewed by the local newspaper after winning the race, I could tell them all about my Go Fish exploits and give them a quote like Randall’s: “My body really doesn’t know what to think. But it’s in good shape, so we’ll just keep rolling.”

Unfortunately, the difference, in this case, is that Kikkan Randall is a world-class athlete, and I am a barely fit weekend warrior/borderline master-blaster/idiot who stays up with his friends until 4 a.m. And running is definitely not my sport of choice—example A: what my running shoes look like.

Yo, sock.

So, yeah—I don’t really know what I was thinking not rolling over and staying in my bed at 7:30 this morning. Instead, whatever the reason, I was on (or at least near) the start line in Augusta when a gigantic cannon went off and scared the bejeezus out of the 200 runners that were milling around and waiting for someone to organize them.

For the first mile, I ran behind NENSA Executive Director Pat Cote, before realizing that doing this was decidedly not following my race plan of “start slow, and don’t die.” So I had to let Pat go, and he went on to utterly destroy me by like five minutes—apparently the morning after his sister’s wedding, as well as despite a bathroom break, which really put a damper on my potential excuses for a slow time. (Fortunately, I did manage to beat Pat’s wife Tracey, who is the head coach of the Colby College Ski Team; if I hadn’t, I probably would have gone to the zoo and fed myself to a polar bear out of shame.)

After Pat went away, I ran with some people who looked like runners for a while, before this girl Anna who still goes to Bowdoin caught up with me. Anna is really little and cute, which meant that I could not let her beat me, because then she’d be really nice about it afterwards and that just wouldn’t work at all. So instead, I drafted her for like two miles. And then she dropped me just before the turnaround at 6.5 miles.

Yeah—the turnaround. That was the point at which I realized that I’d already been running really hard for 45 minutes, and that I would have to continue doing so for at least that long again, which made me really upset, because my body was really starting to hurt all over. Especially my knees and legs. For the next three miles, this caused me to go slower and slower, whereupon I was caught by another woman, and a couple of dudes.

But then, at like 10 miles, this guy with a red shirt came by me, with another guy who looked kind of legit. Red shirt guy was moving pretty quickly, so I hopped onto the back of the kind of legit dude, but then he stopped briefly for some Gatorade, so I decided to make an effort to bring back red shirt guy. Surprisingly, it didn’t turn out to be all that hard to reel him in, which in turn led to a Eureka moment: my knees and legs might be in excruciating pain, but they did not seem to be in greater pain the faster I went. It was a pretty exciting feeling—first, I reeled in red shirt dude and chilled behind him for a while, while we caught a couple of other folks, and then I was actually able to make a Kikkan Randall-like move with two miles to go (if Kikkan Randall were running seven-minute miles in a half marathon instead of winning World Cups) and drop everyone around me, including Anna from Bowdoin. (It’s okay—I was very nice to her after the race was over.)

With two miles to go, I ran through my town and past my friend Nick, and I asked him calmly to please to get me my fu-king bike out of the garage so that I could ride the rest of the way, but he ignored me so I had to keep running. Which I did.

So, yeah—I ended up with, given the circumstances, a reasonably adequate performance of 1:31:42. How anybody could possibly run twice that distance at the same speed, or potentially much faster, (and want to) is way beyond me. But that’s beside the point. More to the point is that the race was sweet, and I won a hat in the raffle. And now I’m going to bed.

If I had a motto for bike racing (I don’t, because I don’t do it enough), it would probably be something along the lines of “leave as much of the preparation and logistics as possible until the last possible moment”—which surely makes any respectable endurance athletes reading this cringe.

Some of the things that I would not recommend to others that I did before this year’s edition of the Lake Auburn Road Race on Saturday include the following:
–First, I broke one of my shifters on Monday, and while I obtained a new one on Wednesday, I wasn’t able to install it until Friday, because I had lost one of the necessary pieces of cable housing. Since there is no bike shop in Damariscotta, it took me a few days to get down to Bath to get a new piece.

–Then, I actually had to do the work of installing the shifter, less than 24 hours before the race. Given that I am a horrendous bike mechanic, this was no small task. I actually did fairly well—only temporarily turning one screw in the wrong direction—but I did a worse job with my brakes. One of my wheels is about to explode and fairly out of true, and as a result, it was rubbing against my brakes. When I tried to adjust them, I ended up with my brake pads totally off target, hitting my tires and threatening to slice through them. Which I decided was related to the fact that my rear brake pads are totally used up—a problem that in turn I decided would be alleviated by switching the front and rear brake pads. All told, this whole maintenance process took about three hours (to be fair, punctuated by frequent breaks to watch scenes from Talledega Nights with my sister), and by the time I was done, my hands looked like this:

–Since my bike was broken all week, I didn’t ride it at all between Monday and Friday.

–Even though I had not actually raced my bike this whole spring (save for three training criteriums in Scarborough—which were awesome), I decided that it would be a good idea to compete in the Pro-1-2-3 race, rather than the dedicated Cat. 3 contest. For those of you who don’t know about cycling and its byzantine system of categories, that’s essentially like choosing to race against Lars Flora and Mike Sinnott when you could be racing Bates and Colby in the Chummy Broomhall Cup. (If you don’t know who Chummy Broomhall is, go read Wikipedia now.) The pro race was six laps of the course, for 70 miles (I haven’t ridden my bike more than 50 miles all year), and among the entrants was Will Dugan, fresh off racing the Tour of California with Levi Leipheimer and Andy Schleck. (One year, Ted King raced the Lake Auburn Road Race fresh off the Giro D’Italia, and I was riding like an idiot and he gave me a (friendly, assistive) push IN THE MIDDLE OF THE RACE. And then I was really out of shape and got dropped after 20 miles. No joke.)

–Despite my best efforts at being punctual, I arrived at the race at 11:15—only 45 minutes before the start. Among the things I still had to do (in order of priority) were use the bathroom, get and pin my number, change a tire, make sure that my bike wasn’t going to fall apart in the middle of the race, make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and make a bunch of Gatorade. Time was short, and I had no utensils, so I resorted to using a greasy tire lever for my sandwich:

Not recommended. (Yes, that is grease on the end. But I used the non-greasy end.)

Now, you may be reading all of this and thinking, ‘What kind of an idiot goes to a bike race when he has prepared like a 14-year-old?’ (Answer: me. But that’s beside the point.) But one of the things that I have discovered about post-collegiate athletics is that unless athletics is a serious part of your life, and you are training for cycling in the middle of the winter or skiing in the middle of summer like a crazy person, you’re probably not going to be doing all that well. Mostly, you’ll just be surviving. So, if you do just about everything you can to mess it up, any small measure of success feels pretty good. And, you can allow yourself to think that you might even be a little bit better if you had actually trained during the off-season. Is this an approach that will lead me to excellence? Certainly not. But it still is better than the opposing method of paying someone else to fix my bike, buying pricy Cytomax instead of Gatorade powder, and showing up at the race two hours early in hopes that those three things will make up for the training I missed in February. (For the record, I do think it would be pretty sweet to train through the winter for bicycle racing, actually take it seriously, and see what would happen. But that didn’t happen this year.)

So, yeah: as I rode up to the start line with hairy legs and a bike that was still muddy from riding in the rain two weeks ago, I was just looking for some small, personal victories. Racing against fit people when you’re underprepared is kind of like picking a fight with a large, mean person in elementary school: you know you’re going to lose, and it’s going to hurt a lot, but maybe you can scratch him hard enough with your fingernails to draw blood before he gets you in a headlock. (Okay, the metaphor kind of fell apart at the end there, but, yeah…at least you’re standing up to the bully. Even if in this case the bullies are a bunch of relatively friendly skinny dudes with shaved legs.)

As it turns out, there isn’t actually that much to say about the race. It did really hurt. But at at least one point, I was in front of Will Dugan, and I heard him breathing pretty hard. I made it more than three laps with the group—which included four trips up the steep, evil “wall,” as well as the big hills at the end of the loop—before, embarrassingly, I got dropped on a flat section at around 40 miles, when my legs just kind of stopped working. But I did finish the race—I rode a couple laps by myself, and a couple with some other dropped folks—and while I may have been the last finisher (I’m not actually sure…), there were definitely some people that got dropped before I did, who quit. Definitely a little bit of blood drawn.

Other highlights? When I tried to eat my PB+J and essentially choked on it when it got really fast all of a sudden. And then tried to put half of it back in my pocket, but mainly just succeeded in slathering peanut butter and jelly all over my hands, shorts (how the f— did it get there???), and even my shifter:

See that weird texture? That's strawberry jam. Smuckers Orchard's Finest Pacific Mountain Strawberry Jam, if you really wanted to know.

And then, the best part of the day was when I was limping into the finish, like half an hour after the winners. I must have looked pretty bad, because this crusty old lady looked at me and went: “Haha! At least you finished!” Amen.

There’s not a lot going on in the ski world right now, so it’s time for me to catch everyone up on a couple of other things.

First is my ongoing war against the vile animals of Cricket Creek Farm, where I live.

I’m not a hater. I get along with most animals, or at least dogs. But at this point, I have had more than enough guinea hen and rooster for my entire life.

The enemy.

Do you know what it’s like to live with a flock of guinea hens and chickens making its home directly outside your house? No? Well, here’s a thought exercise.

First, imagine a car alarm. One that goes off at 4 a.m., every morning, directly outside your house. You can’t turn it off, because its internal circuitry has malfunctioned. And, it’s organic, which means that you can’t kill, bludgeon, or otherwise harm it—not even chase it around. Basically, the only solution is earplugs. And even those can be insufficient at times.

If I were a James Bond villain, I would kill all of my victims through sleep deprivation, by locking them in a room with thousands of guinea hens and roosters.

In any case, during the winter, these animals were mostly quiet, huddled in their shelter behind the house. But with the onset of spring, a fire has clearly kindled inside them, and precipitated a conflagration of crowing and squawking. Before my trip to New York City this weekend, I still hadn’t determined the best way to handle this—although I was starting to think that the only solution was going to be to move back to Maine. But that all changed when I walked into an Italian foods-store.

I went straight to the manager, and signed a contract to deliver a dozen guinea hens next week...

The second story is the Tilsetningsstoffer Saga. When Topher and I arrived in Norway, we noticed an excellent advertisement on the subway, for a delicious-looking noodle casserole called Fiskegrateng—macaroni, with salmon and broccoli:

Yum.

I don’t know why this company thought that sticking in a random Norwegian word in an English-language advertisement would be effective—but in the end, it kind of was. I thought this was so funny that I actually spent something like 68 kroner on a box, when we were in Lillehammer, just so I could say I tried it.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/dBBYligiyC8" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

(If you look at my plate, you might be skeptical—it looks like I’ve already been eating fiskegrateng all evening. But that really was my first bite—Topher and I had had some pasta as an hors d’oeuvre.)

Unfortunately, Findus, the company that produces the fiskegrateng, did not respond to repeated requests for comment—I called, and e-mailed, to no avail—so we will never know the thinking behind their ad campaign. On the bright side, Topher and I went on a ferry ride in Oslo the night that they were swapping out their advertisements. This was possibly the best thing that happened to me during the entire month that I spent in the country, because I managed to convince a ferry employee to give me the poster—which is now adorning my bedroom.

(For the record, tilsetningsstoffer means additives. I can attest that there really weren’t any in there—or at least, it didn’t taste like it.)

Boo-yeah.

In a couple of days, if you’re a regular FasterSkier reader, you’ll most likely be seeing some kind of a job posting.

Not just any job posting. This will be an advertisement for what is very possibly the sweetest job in the entire world: mine.

Sadly, it’s true—I’ve been fired. For inappropriate contact with a member of the Norwegian women’s cross-country ski team. (For the record, it was totally worth it.)

Just kidding. After almost two years as FasterSkier’s associate editor, dozens and dozens of race reports, features, interviews, investigative pieces, and blog posts, I am moving on.

This isn’t intended to be melodramatic or anything. Basically, the only reason I’m making any kind of “announcement” is because I don’t want Topher to scoop me. But I feel like I owe at least a brief explanation to the people who have so avidly followed my work on the site for the past two seasons.

My tentative plan for the next year is that I’ll be attending Columbia Journalism School in New York, which offers what sounds like a pretty sweet 10-month masters’ program in exchange for approximately $5,000,000. That may sound like a lot, but trust me—I’ve been making boatloads of money for the past 24 months, and also, the earnings potential for reporters has never been better.

No, for real, the reason it’s tentative is because I haven’t really been down there and gotten a good sense of the place to see if really makes sense to give them my $5,000,000. I’m kind of assuming that it will be, but it seems worth it to go down for a real visit and check it out before making the call.

In any case, my role with FasterSkier is definitely going to diminish in the next few months. It won’t disappear—school doesn’t start until August, and I’ve got a laundry list of about a dozen stories that need to be written before then. And hopefully, I’ll be able to work something out with Topher and Matt that will give me a longer-term role. So don’t worry—I’m going to be sticking around. Everything is still on the record, unless you tell me it’s not.

I’m definitely still planning on posting a recap of Spring Series, as well as the second half of the Craftsbury weekend, and an explanation of what the heck Kris Freeman was doing with my skis. And also, perhaps some reasons why you should apply for my job. But you’ll have to wait a couple of days, because right now, it’s time for vacation.

It probably is a sign that you should lower your expectations for a ski race in late March when, the day beforehand, you find yourself removing the road tips on your ski poles and replacing them with snow baskets.

To be fair, I’ve actually done a decent amount of skiing this winter—probably more so than last year. But never with my own skate poles—I borrowed my boss’s, or just used my classic poles for skating.

But this weekend, I was planning on competing in the Craftsbury Spring Mini-Tour, which included a pursuit. Therefore, both sets of poles were necessary, (or so I initially thought).

I have only raced one other time this winter—a sensational performance in Jericho, Vermont, where I skied more than fast enough to avoid having to eat any of my equipment. Despite the fact that my annual salary is not among the upper echelons of the tax bracket, I decided that it would be a good idea to drive up to Craftsbury this weekend and spend $80 to compete in their season-ending mini-tour—a classic prologue on Friday afternoon, a pursuit on Saturday morning and drag-race sprints that afternoon, and a 20 k skate on Sunday. (I should add: the $80 was money well spent. In addition to four races, Craftsbury also gave us two awesome meals—dinner Saturday night, which included a delicious cheddar-squash casserole [not necessarily two things I would have combined, but after eating it, I can recommend it], and a barbeque lunch Sunday that included donuts and sugar-on-snow.)

Looking at the list of entrants was interesting. Between men and women, there about a half-dozen or so athletes who I had interviewed for stories this winter—a sure harbinger of an impending beatdown if there ever was one.

I drove up to Vermont on Thursday evening and met Topher and Jen (boss+girlfriend) in Waitsfield, where we spent the night. Then, after watching the World Cup men ski their own prologue in Sweden and writing a race report about it, we went off to get our Ilia Chernousovs on—my goal for the day, aside from not embarrassing myself, being to better Chernousov’s winning time of 10:51.

One thing I have discovered since graduating from school: I suck at waxing my skis. (So much so that I am surprised that Topher has not fired me.) A second thing I have discovered since graduating from school: having yourself as a wax tech when you suck at waxing skis also sucks. And it’s a gigantic pain in the butt—how are you supposed to get in an effective warm-up while simultaneously applying and testing different kinds of klister, clumsily applying top coats, and complaining about how much you suck at doing those things?
Fortunately, on Friday, I had Topher. He came prepared, with a pair of test skis (something that I most certainly had not thought to bring myself), and a wax box containing numerous types of klister. After Topher set up his test skis with two different types of klister, we headed out on the prologue course to check it out.

As I recall, I think both types of klister seemed to be working reasonably well for Topher. Unfortunately for me, the type that we selected did not seem to work on my skis whatsoever—and I think I also just sucked on Friday, too, which certainly didn’t help. Afterwards, I think Topher’s quote about the wax when someone asked him about it was something like, “Oh yeah—it was great. Any issues we had with it were almost definitely operator error.” Agreed.

I really, really do not want to delve deeply into the results from Friday. They were so bad that I am reluctant to even point anyone in their direction, lest they see that I was only 20 seconds from being beaten by a 14-year-old, and soundly beaten by two high school girls. (Not to take anything away from those athletes at all—only to say that as a 23-year-old male in, ostensibly, my “prime,” it would be a little more dignified if I were competitive with my peers.)

While Friday was disappointing, the great thing about the mini-tour was that I still had two more days of racing to go! My next chance at glory or humiliation was in the “15 k” pursuit, on Saturday morning. Just like the Swedes at World Championships, I was planning on drawing some lessons from my poor waxing performance in an early event, and using them to my advantage in my next event. The only problem was that unlike the Swedes, I hadn’t really drawn any lessons at all from Friday—aside from the fact that I fared about as well with klister and a blowtorch as the Swedish waxers would have writing an English-language race report on the U.S. Ski Team.

It didn’t help that it froze up hard overnight on Friday, and conditions were very different the next morning. Fortunately, I got a very helpful e-mail from Topher: “Probably try something purple – KR40, and if it warms up a lot, KR50. If there is enough new snow to cause issues, you can try throwing some kick wax over the top once it has cooled. Probably won’t work as well with the the 50.” Excellent—a starting point!

Actually, before I get back into this waxing business, I suppose I should probably mention a few other things. First, because I have two different binding sponsors (or, actually, because my friend Walt gave me a pair of skate boots and NNN bindings at school one year), I was in a bit of a pickle for the pursuit—my classic boots wouldn’t work on my skate skis, and vice versa. So I had to borrow a pair of classic skis with NNN bindings. My co-worker, Chelsea, was kind enough to set me up with some belonging to her teammate at Craftsbury—obviously, a very good thing, but also, perhaps a bit of a question mark, given that I had never used them before, and had no idea whether they would work for me. (I was going off the sticker behind the binding that recommended a skier weight of 60 to 75 kilos.)

I also didn’t have a wax bench. Fortunately, there were a couple of forms in the house where I was staying in Craftsbury, which happened to be directly adjacent to the trails—though a 10-minute ski away from the start of the race. Thus, I devised a plan:

1. Apply KR40 and KR50 to my own classic skis (the ones with SNS).
2. Ski to the stadium on these classic skis. Drop off my skate skis, and go to the classic course to test.
3. Return to the house, and apply the superior klister to my race skis.
4. Head back to the stadium on the race skis, with skate boots—but also with test skis and classic boots, just in case the race skis ended up being a total debacle. (Yes, using the test skis for the classic leg would have entailed a boot switch before the skate leg. But I was prepared to do it.) Bring klister in pocket and hope that someone will be kind enough to let me borrow a wax bench in the event of an emergency.

Everything went according to plan until, of course, step four. The test skis were fu—ing awesome—they kicked like a mule. VR 50 seemed to be slightly better, and it was warming up pretty quickly, so I went with it. Except that the race skis didn’t kick at all. I chalked this up to too short of a wax pocket and, as the start approached, I lengthened it, and managed to convince Marc Gilbertson (Craftsbury coach and wax tech, as well as an Olympian) to iron it for me. (Further research reveals that he is an alumnus of Colby College—I guess it was a good thing that I opted to race in a sparkly red one-piece, rather than my Bowdoin suit. Or nobody else but me actually cares about where anyone went to college.)

At this point, there was no time left for testing, so I just ran down to the start with my skis. I don’t really remember what I was thinking at this point, although in retrospect, whatever it was, I’m fairly certain that it was absurdly optimistic, given the state of my skis immediately prior. (Given the way things turned out, in fact, anything short of anticipating a maiming from a direct meteor strike would have been optimistic.)

My skis did not kick whatsoever going up the first little hill from the start. This was fine, because it was a short hill, and I was extremely jacked up on adrenaline. This was the best moment of the race. Then, we went downhill for a while, and through some rolling terrain before we hit the first reasonably-sized uphill, and I realized just how miserable things were going to be.

You know how in elementary school, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all? That’s probably the best approach for the classic leg of the pursuit. Although I did, actually, think of a few things that were good about it:
1. I have arms. It would have been even more difficult to get around the classic course with no kick if I had no arms.

2. Though I didn’t do any weight training over the summer, my arms are pretty strong from grasping pencils, lifting notebooks, and typing. Vigorously. (I am a fierce typist.)

3. Most of the people who were watching along the course had left by the time I came through, which at least made my suffering slightly less embarrassing.

4. The classic course was supposedly like 7.5 kilometers, but I think it was actually more like five.

5. Thanks to Marc’s ironing, I had a wax tech that I could blame. (Really, it’s okay—he said I could blame him.)

Basically, the classic leg was pretty miserable. Fortunately, I had an ace in the hole in the exchange zone. The night before the race, I had checked the FIS rules to see if it was legal to race a pursuit with just one pair of poles. Lo and behold, “Skis must be exchanged, poles and boots may also be exchanged.” So, I decided that I would use my classic poles—which are new, and a little too long still—for the whole race. Clearly, this strategy was a good one, because my 30 seconds in the pit tied for the ninth-fastest exchange time, out of 54 men. (Actually, it’s a little embarrassing that despite the fact that I didn’t change my poles, Scott Patterson still managed to get in and out of there six seconds faster than me. But whatever.)

There’s not a lot more to say about the race, aside from the fact that my left quad actually cramped when I started skating, which was utterly preposterous. It’s okay for Alex Harvey to cramp an hour into the 30 k pursuit at the Olympics, when he’s trying to hold off Petter Northug and the Russians—but for me, 20 minutes into a 10-kilometer pursuit? That’s just bad. Fortunately, it went away after a while, but the psychological damage was done. I almost caught a Stratton kid before the finish line, but then I didn’t.

I know after this account of the first two races of the mini-tour, you’ll be very anxious to hear about the last one. But I’m tired, so that one—and it was epic (at least, as epic as 52 minutes of racing can get)—will have to wait until tomorrow. Until then…