With two more long weeks left in my internship, I was hoping for an exciting, confidence-boosting weekend–the high from which I would ride through the monotony of the work week. At least I got some excitement…

On Friday, I cruised down to Western Massachusetts with a couple of friends for one of my last bike races of the year–the mythical Tour of the Hilltowns. I’ve ridden a lot in the area, knew the course, and was racing with lowly cat 3s, instead of mixed in with pros, cat 1s, and cat 2s. I haven’t been riding too much, but I’ve been training for skiing really well, and I’d had a great spring on the bike. There was no way I could screw this one up.

Fueled with oatmeal and fresh raspberries from my friend’s house, I breezed through the first 20 miles of the race to the bottom of the first big climb, a 3 mile, 6% grade up East Hawley Rd.

My friends had warned me that I should probably be at the front at the beginning of the climb, so as not to make things more difficult for myself. I had initially planned to heed that advice, but then there was a long downhill, which left me at the back. I still planned to move up in the field, but I decided instead to mess around switching the empty water bottle on my bike for the full one on my back, so that I’d be able to drink easily on the climb and over the top when I would surely be in an escape group.

We started the climb. I was at the back. My legs started to hurt. I passed maybe 30 people, but there were still 50 in front of my. My legs started to hurt more. Much more–to the point where I was struggling to maintain contact with the field.

Then I had to slow down, and watch the field ride away. Then I got passed by the support car going over the top. I worked with a group of maybe 10 guys to close some of the gap, but to no avail, and then I dropped my chain and cramped up hard while getting back on my bike. The 20 other guys behind me all rode past  as I stretched it out–I waved as they went by.

Muscle spasms under control, I was left with about 30 miles of pedaling back to the finish. Rather than suffer, I rode easy the rest of the way around the loop, contemplating my fitness, and misfortune.

With 20 miles to go, I smelled goodness. I wasn’t sure what it was, but then I came around a corner and came upon a country store with a grill out front. One of my friends had stopped at a barbeque at this race last year, so I figured it was worth a try.

I walked over to the woman manning the grill, and asked her if there was a discount for cyclists– expecting and hoping that she’d just offer me something delicious right then and there. Instead, she just grinned and said “sure…”

I reached into my jersey pockets, fully knowing that there was no wallet inside, and came up with a strawberry banana powergel.

“Crap,” I said. “All I’ve got is this gel. Can I trade it to you for something?”

The woman laughed.

“Sure, why not? We’ve got lamb kebabs, shrimp kebabs, and swordfish kebabs.”

Swordfish it was. I grabbed a kebab, thanked the woman, and hopped back on my bike as fast as I could before she reconsidered. It was delicious.

On Sunday, I went on a pretty solid 3-hour classic ski. That went really well until I got my rollerskis tangled up, ate s—, and broke a pole. On an uphill. No consolation there…

Lessons learned from this weekend:

1. Rollerskiing does not make you a faster cyclist; riding your bike makes you a faster cyclist.

2. Cat. 3s are actually pretty fast. Also, getting dropped hurts a lot more when you’re expecting to win.

3. If you ever come to a barbeque and you’ve been dropped, make sure to stop for swordfish.

One of my roommates is a Cat. 2 cyclist (that’s sick nasty in bike-speak), and last spring he finally prevailed upon me to jump in a few road races. I wasn’t particularly excited about it–I’d done a criterium the year before, and gotten totally served. It was in New York City in the middle of March, not warmer than 30 degrees with a fierce wind, and I’d gotten dropped before I even knew what was happening–needless to say, a pretty miserable experience.

When I finally entered some road races last year, though, I discovered that the addition of hilly terrain worked in my favor. I did pretty well in a few of them, and then started going on group rides with the local bike club. All of this was awesome, and in all of the excitement, I pretty much forgot that I’d had a decent ski season and could have improved even more with focused training. Instead, I raced bikes into September, then hurt myself on a canoe trip and didn’t start rollerskiing until October.

This year, I resolved to quit screwing around on my bike (I’m planning to do plenty of that after college) and train for skiing one last time, so I hung up my chamois at the end of May. Sort of. Actually, I still ride once or twice a week, and picked out four races to do over the course of the summer. Since I only get to do four, I figure I have to make the most of the opportunities.

Of all the races I plan to do this summer, the Clam Fest is probably the most exciting. It’s only 10 miles from Brunswick, it’s hosted by my club, and delicious recovery foods (read: fried clams) are available no more than 10 yards from the finish line.

All this is a roundabout way of explaining how I ended up two nights before the race limping and swearing around my apartment with a seriously tender ankle. 15 minutes into my run on Friday, I rolled my ankle on a root after being distracted by an obnoxious, fat dog, and instead of stopping, I decided to keep going for the full hour and a half. This was fine until I got home. By nine that evening, I had resorted to ice and popping large quantities of ibuprofen in hopes that my Clam Fest aspirations could be preserved.

I had to skip a rollerski I had scheduled for Saturday, but in the end, I made it to the start line without too much trouble. Actually, I didn’t get any sleep the night before due to the apparent racquetball game going on in the adjacent apartment, but my ankle was fine. 

Of all the bike races I’ve done in my two illustrious years of racing (this is actually more than you’d expect–I raced about 25 times last summer), the Clam Fest is probably the biggest spectacle of any of them. There are about a bajillion people who are already at the Clam Fest, anyways, and about half of them end up wandering over to see all the funny people pedal around with their shaved legs and spandex (my legs are actually still hairy–it’s not worth the effort for four races). Everyone in Yarmouth takes it super-seriously, too: full-road closure, national anthem, newspaper coverage, etc. There were only three pros in the field, but people still call it a “professional bike race.” The effect of all this was to make me feel EXTREMELY badass lining up at the start. My parents also showed up, as did a bunch of my friends, so at this point there was some serious pressure not to make a fool out of myself.

I wish I actually had a lot to say about the race, but I don’t. I was relatively out of my league, so I was generally concerned with trying to be useful for a sprinter teammate. Toward this end, I had an exciting moment trying to chase down the pro that soloed to victory–but this lasted for no more than a half mile, until lactic acid caught up with me. Mostly, I sat at the back of the pack and bumped around with Matt Boobar (SMS coach) and Andrew Gardner (Middlebury coach). A futile attempt to control the pace at the beginning of the last lap ended with me limping in at the back of the field.

One exciting thing that happened was during the second of ten laps. I was riding next to my roommate (the one that got me started on bike racing), and he pinch-flatted on a gnarly set of railroad tracks. I honorably expressed my sympathies to him and watched as he drifted backwards towards oblivion, not even considering for a second that my bike or rear wheel might have been useful to him, especially given that it was his birthday. All I can say is that if we’re neck-and-neck in a ski marathon and my ski breaks, I’m still taking his….

Check out the sweet pictures–one is the ankle in question; the other is a racing shot that makes me look way cooler than I did in real life….

Beer. Bad equipment. Inexperience. Midway through the Chief Worumbo canoe race on Sunday I was already thinking of excuses for losing to the boat of two extremely jacked women that was creeping up behind us.
A seven mile slog down the Androscoggin River north of Brunswick, the Chief Worumbo canoe race is a part of the town of Lisbon’s annual Moxie Festival. For those of you lucky enough to have never tried Moxie, it’s a soda found in New England with a distinct taste something like cough syrup and motor oil combined (that’s really what it tastes like, but it’s actually surprisingly good anyways). I was there with a Bowdoin ski teammate, Nick Crawford, and we were psyched to knock heads with some locals and get a good workout. We entered the male tandem non-racing canoe division, and figured our chances were good, given our fitness and good looks.
If you’ve never done a canoe race before, they’re totally rad. With 20 minutes before the race, we hopped in our boat and paddled over to the far side of the river. As the race start neared, there were about 80-90 boats from bank to bank, and when the whistle blew for the it was as if someone had turned on a huge blender–men, women, and children all flailing around with their paddles. We had a good start on the left side, and were mixing it up with a couple kayakers as well as a racing canoe with a chubby old guy in the back and a teenager who looked like the banjo-playing kid from deliverance in the front.
According to my podiatrist, who I talked to after the race (he’s a competitive paddler), canoe and kayak racing is a lot like cycling–you can get a 15-20% draft if you’re in the wake of the boat in front of you. I wish I’d known that as we were killing ourselves trying to keep up with the old guy/deliverance boat.
Anyways, due to our lack of knowledge of boat-drafting, Nick and I found ourselves drifting backwards after our excellent start. Canoe racing is hard (I can say this authoritatively now that I’ve done one race)–it’s fun when you’re going fast for the first fifteen minutes, but when you realize you’ve only gone 1/4 of the way and your arms want to fall off and there are no downhills, it starts to get less appealing. We adopted some strategies to lessen the pain, mainly switching sides every 10 strokes or so, which also makes steering a little easier–instead of using correction strokes, you just switch sides when the boat starts turning.
Halfway through the race we were still getting caught. The two-woman boat was getting disturbingly close, as well as another non-racing canoe containing a former Bowdoin ski coach (Bill Yeo) and his wife. This was the point at which I started thinking about excuses:

Hi!

I’m Nat Herz, and I’m a collegiate skier at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, in midcoast Maine. Fasterskier.com decided to trust me with a blog, so I’ll use this site to bring you updates on training, racing, and hopefully some other exciting things, like epic weekend hiking excursions.

Currently, I’m living in Brunswick for the summer working in the planning office of a nearby town. During working hours, I’m generally splitting my time between exciting outdoor work like exploring sweet streams and trails and unfortunate office stuff like sitting at a computer.

My goals for the upcoming season are to train a full 550 hours and record it all diligently, as well as to score at least one NCAA point, which entails a top-30 finish in an EISA (Eastern Intercollegiate Skiing Association) race. I still haven’t broken into the top fifty before, but hopefully with some focused, high-quality training over the summer and into the fall, I’ll be able to make some progress.  Also, I have a career skiing goal of one day winning the Bogburn, so I might take a crack at it this year. Beating a bunch of Colby skiers this season would be pretty sweet, too.