So, as much as I hate giving up my soapbox, I didn’t do very much good stuff this week (read the last blog post if you want to know why), so instead of trying to make funny out of a whole lot of nothing, I give you guest blogger Nick Crawford:

For Sale: 1998 Subaru Wagon

All wheel drive, great in the snow, 158,500 miles, some rust, no exhaust system- Read on for details.  

Nat’s letting me pinch hit on the blog entry this time instead of just making fun of me like usual (see picture), 

because while Nat was lame and read books to get started on his homework for next semester [editor’s note: being safe and sane and staying at home], I had some big adventures this weekend.  Beware though that if the wambulance needed to be called for Nat in the last blog post, I’m going to need to have the com-plane to fly and pick me up by the time I’m done.

The weekend started with a great first ski of the year at Pineland on Friday with Nat, Tom Cook, and one of Nat’s 70 year old cycling friends from the Portland Velo Club [he’s not actually that old].  Beside the fact that the 70 year old was dropping us until we did some pre-race intervals, it was great to finally get on snow close to school.

I then made the long drive over to Burlington, VT for the first NENSA Eastern Cup weekend at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe.  Most skiers have probably had more driving in the snow then the average New Englander, but this weekend I had enough to last me a lifetime—all told I think I drove 7+ hours in whiteout conditions and another 2 on snowy roads.  I also realized that non skiers aren’t very smart when it comes to driving in the snow on the highway.  They seem to like to closely follow the car in front of them going 30 mph one minute and 50 mph the next while slamming on the brakes and turning on their flashers at random intervals. 

Anyhow, it was good to finally drive up the steep access road to Trapps, (which, by the way, was also wicked snowy–there’s no way our vans would have made it) and put on the skis. It was also good to see all the familiar faces again this year, and even a few skiing celebs like Matt Whitcomb.  The race didn’t go so well for me, but I tend not to do very well whenever I have to wade through deep powder.  Little guys like Nat seem to skim over the top of the soft snow like squirrels, but I’m more like a moose and trudge through the snow at let’s just say a somewhat slower pace. 

Trapps has a new race course designed by John Morton that’s super rad—lots of short ups, downs and corners to keep it interesting.  It’s also a great spectator course where you could probably see your favorite racer 4 or 5 times in a 5 km lap.  I can’t wait to ski it when it’s good and icy (or at least hard pack), which is more my type of snow.

The one good thing about the falling snow was that I got to use my snow visor.  This is one of my favorite pieces of skiing attire that I’m sure any non-skier thinks looks hideous.  If you ever want to find out if a significant other is right for you, wear your ski visor around on a date.  If you get comments like, “Take that off!” or “I’m can’t be seen with you while you’re wearing that” then you might want to dump them.  However if you get comments like “Sick visor!” or “Can you get me one of those for Valentines Day” then you know you’ve got a keeper.

Anyhow, getting back to the title of this post, I had another long snowy drive back to Western MA after the race. To add insult to injury, as I was about to turn off the highway about 45 minutes from home, all of a sudden my car got a lot louder, the check engine light that’s been on for the last 6 months turned off and I heard the sound of dragging metal on the road.  I quickly pulled into a gas station and found that my rusty exhaust pipe had broken off just before the muffler.  I called my dad who’s a nordic center operator by trade but has mad mechanic skillz from tinkering with snowmobiles, bulldozers, tractors and even Subarus over the years.  He informed me that the muffler was a non critical component of the car, so I zip-tied it off the ground and continued (loudly) on, taking advantage of the fact that I still had zip-ties left over from when the bumper fell off this summer.  So now my Subaru sounds kind of like a loud Harley, and I’ll consider trading it to you for baked goods, HF wax or beer once the ski seasons over. 

It’s great to be home for the holidays, but my house and family business, Stumpsprouts Cross Country Ski Area  www.stumpsprouts.com) [editor’s note: this place roolz—if you ever want a ski vacation it's worth a trip] suffered a lot of damage from the ice storm last week.  After 10 days of hard work and a lot of help from the community we’re about half open with 12 km of trails cleared.  If you haven’t got your Christmas tree yet, we’re doing cut your own tree for free as long as it’s located in the middle of a trail and you remove any brush on the trail within 500 ft of it.  I should be able to get some good strength workouts in clearing the brush this break and it will be very rewarding because what we clear one day we can ski the next.

Happy Holidays! Zip ties are a great gift if you need a stocking stuffer- Nick

Yeah, I’ve been pretty busy. Sort of. Instead of racing–actually, instead of anything, really–I’ve been working on a paper for the last three days on Star Wars and how it relates to the myth of the frontier in American history, with special consideration given to the Cold War/Vietnam War and its effect on the American psyche.

Can you tell that I was just trying to make myself sound really smart there? Did it work?

Anyways, instead of bounding intervals yesterday, I got to have some fun in the gym on a treadmill, and instead of driving up to Sugarloaf to ski for three hours today, I sat on my bed and wrote about Chewbacca. Total sweetness. Yes, I would like some cheese with my whine, and yes, I would appreciate it if somebody called the wahmbulance.

I’m all about that phrase, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it,” so I think that’s just about all I’m going to say right now. Actually, no it’s not. Basically, my life totally sucks: my room is really messy; I have no clean socks left (though there are currently some in the dryer); I have a million pages to write; and there’s no skiing within a 100 mile radius of Bowdoin College. And all the freshmen stole 3 hours of training from me today.

Wow. I was hoping that I could convey via this post some sort of whimsical sense that I’ve maintained a good attitude about skiing/life/training while under academic duress, but I think I’ve failed miserable. So I’m going to sleep.

PS I’m sure all other college skiers are going through the same thing right now, but I definitely have way more to do than anybody else (given my huge baller status…).

Oh yeah, check out this sweet diagram of biogeochemical cycling that Nick made (click the image to see the big version!).

and the agony of defeat:

So today I raced the Great Glen Sprints for the third year in a row. For those of you not in attendance, here’s how it works:

1. Pay $10 to enter. Put on a silly old-school bib.

2. Warm up.

3. Curse yourself for being stupid enough to think that your heat would be the first of the day, and go inside to wait for your heat to start. Sit around.

4. Go back outside, do a crappy warm-up.

5. Race.

6. Cool down.

7. Repeat steps 2-6.

That’s the gist of it. As for the details of each heat, it was kind of complicated, but in the first one, two of four moved on to a later round, and then in subsequent rounds, only the winner advanced.

In my first heat, I was with one of my teammates, and two master skiers. We got a quick gap from the start, and that was it.

That’s a pretty lame summary, but bear with me because the next heat was totally sweet.

Just before I went to the starting line, I ran into a friendly guy with a mustache. He told me:

“My son reads your blog, and now he and his friends are always talking about how they want to be ballers all the time.”

I looked at the kid standing behind him, and briefly contemplated just how messed up the world would be if small children starting looking at me as a role model.

“That’s awesome!” I said. “Actually, that’s baller. Huge baller. Sweet.”

Then, both father and son told me that they hoped I had a “huge baller race.”

I said thanks, and told them that I’d try not to let the fame get to my head.

Then I went to the line. I was racing my assistant coach (fast/weenie ex-college skier), and a kid from Burke. I’m not a very good sprinter, but I figured I had a decent chance if I could get a good start.

Also, Chandra Crawford friended me on facebook this week, and she said that I could have some of her sprinting skills in exchange for blogging skills IF she could be a huge baller (which she is–gold medals=mad baller). I figured that this was a done deal–Olympic victories and World Cup Podiums were surely coming my way.

Unfortunately, I did not manage to secure the hole shot, and that was pretty much it. Nonetheless, I wanted to keep it close so as not to disappoint my baller blog readers.

I was really killing it about 20 yards from the finish, feeling reasonably good about things.

Then I stuck a pole between my legs. And fell, really hard, right on my face. In front of a lot of people. Hm. Chandra–I thought we had an agreement! Potentially the least baller thing I could have done–I think this blog’s readership instantly decreased by two as I slid along the snow.

I lay on the ground face down for quite awhile.

Finally, I got up, did a sweet lunge for the finish (expertly avoiding the girls lining up for their start), and avoided making any eye contact with the baller blog reader or the baller blog reader’s dad. Then I went to cool down, another epic day of ski racing in the books.

I’m really not very good at sprinting, so I am holding out some hope that I’ll have some non-horrible, non-face plant results this winter. Despite the fact that this blog makes me out to be a total wacko, I do actually train sometimes, and that training has been going pretty well for the most part, so I’m looking forward to some distance races.

On the flip side, good-to-average race results actually leave little to blog about, so I guess now there’s a bright side to the occasional debacle. Every cloud has a silver lining, especially for huge ballers…right? 

Photo credits Nick Crawford, who’s a huge jerk for taking pictures of me in my moment of defeat…

Je pense que oui.

After snow, skiing, obnoxious amounts of Franglish, chocolat chaud, a few naps, lots of food, and a seemingly neverending stream of mediocre Quebecois club skiers, Bowdoin’s Thanksgiving trip to Foret Montmorency has finally come to an end.

Rather than try to provide a coherent narrative of the journey, I’m just going to give you as many amusing vignettes as I can remember, in sequential order.

1. Getting detained at Canadian customs on the way in. I don’t know whether it was Tom’s sketchy beard (see below–his is the red one), the sketchiness of our white van, or random search quotas, but those Mounties sure had it in for us. First, we had to get out of our van (the second of three in a row, mind you, all with the same destination and contents), while they searched it. And we had to empty our pockets, and turn them inside out. Seriously? If I was going to be transporting something illegal into Canada, be it Cera F, crack cocaine, or high-powered assault rifles, rest assured that the last place I would keep it is in my pockets. Anyways, after being searched, then we had to go sit in the border station (which was actually very nice–wood floors, bathrooms with automatic flushing [we're talking Jackman, Maine], etc.) and be interviewed by the immigration agent one by one. Then we waited for like 20 minutes while they checked our passports to make sure we weren’t wanted by Interpol or the CIA, and we were back on the road.

2. Restaurants in St. Georges, between Jackman and Quebec City. Choice options included the just-opened “Boston Pizza,” as well as the enticingly-named “Sushi Taxi.” Needless to say, we managed to stifle our hunger until reaching our condos in Stoneham.

3. Driving the vans. Or, specifically, rallying the vans up our condo’s precipitous driveway. They don’t have snow tires, and they don’t plow the driveway very well, so we had to get a pretty good head start, which occasionally resulted in a decent amount of excitement given the cars parked right at the top, combined with our lack of stopping power.

4. Skiing at the Foret. Yes, it was seriously dope/huge baller/rad/extreme/sweet/snowy and wonderful, but that in and of itself is not very entertaining (see above picture for proof of baller-ness, however). Much more amusing was the spectacle that I’ll call Club Subway Desjardins. I’m pretty sure this club has a real name, but I don’t remember, and Subway and Desjardins were two things that I saw on the back of their ubiquitous jerseys.

Wednesday-Friday, there were only a few people to share the trails with at the Foret. Starting Saturday, however, a massive influx of Subway/Desjardiners arrived and began populating the trails. Unlike in the U.S. (at least in New England, on the trails I’m familiar with), where skiing seems to be a very individual pursuit, in Quebec most people seem to belong to clubs. And on weekends, members of these clubs all go out and ski/mingle/stand-around-on-the-trails-in-your-way. And they all wear matching black and orange jackets.

Saturday was the most crowded day for Subway-Desjardiners, and I felt like I was in some sort of bizarre surrealist film, trying to escape the demons of my past which were embodied by these groups of club skiers. I was classic skiing down a long, rolling hill for about 5 or 6k, and I just kept on running into more and more groups, each doing their own one-legged scooter drills or something similar. I feel like I’m not doing a very good job of expressing myself here, but IT WAS TOTALLY INSANE. There were more skiers on that one day than I think I’ve seen cumulatively in my entire Bowdoin ski career at Pineland. The best part was that we were having a time trial using that trail, and all the college skiers had to negotiate their way through this morass. Phew.

5. Trying to speak French. I took three years of French in high school, which was just enough to convince me that I know what I’m doing. Mostly this resulted in a lot of mixed French-English speaking–for example: “Nathan, a quelle heure are we aller-ing to the Foret?” or, “je suis huge balleur.” Very juvenile, I know, but it kept me amused for the whole trip. 

Occasionally I would actually try to speak French with Quebecers, which usually resulted in such disastrous combinations of words like “est-ce que c’est bien?” which means, “is it that it is well?” This was the phrase I used when I was trying to ask a couple of youth alpine skiers if the skiing was good.

6. The music video for the new Britney Spears song, “Womanizer.” Super sweet.

7. The Bowdoin coaching staff. There were probably about 10,000 things that had to come together to make this camp a success. I’ll list a few, for example: lodging, Thanksgiving fixings, trail passes, transportation, keeping people from skiing themselves into the ground (especially me), and waxing. I know there were like at least 9,995 other things–I just can’t think of them off the top of my head.

8. One thing that I’m going to have to think about: people actually reading this blog. When I first saw Colby’s coach, Tracey Cote, on Wednesday, she told me that I should be concerned for my safety, as members of her team had been mildly offended by the museum-quality artwork in my last post. Then one of the Stratton coaches mentioned that she liked my blog, too. The fact that two normal, well-adjusted adults read this leads me to two possible conclusions. First is that perhaps I should be a little more mindful of some of the juvenile things that make it in here. The second, much more preferable conclusion is that maybe reasonable adults actually can enjoy juvenile things, which gives me great hope that I may some day become a reasonable adult myself.

Next week I’m looking forward to the Great Glen Sprints, which in the past has been an annual early-season exercise in futility. I do think that I’ve improved my sprinting technique a lot, especially for skate, so I’m hopeful. Whether those improvements are large enough to actually make anything happen remains to be seen–I don’t think I’ve ever advanced out of the first elimination round of a sprint race, so I think I’ll make that my goal.

I leave you with a preview for my upcoming film: Nat and Nick’s nordic adventure–it’s just like an Andy Newell video, but less well-made… Also–the photos and video are both by Nick, as well. If you want to hire him for your wedding, his number is 207-751-3354.