After reading UVM’s last blog post about the assistance they gave Dartmouth with their equipment in the mass start, I was initially heartened to hear of such kindness and generosity. In a sport where we all work so hard to fight for every last edge, it was nice to see that people are still willing to help each other out in times of desperate need.

Since then, though, my heart has hardened. Now, I’ve decided that skiing–and the Eastern Intercollegiate Skiing Association in particular–needs more drama, anger, controversy. Thus, this blog post is dedicated to sowing discontent and bitterness among the EISA’s teams and skiers. I have decided that the best way to accomplish this is to insult each and every team (I’m an equal-opportunity trash-talker). So, in reverse alphabetical order (because the Bates insult is the best, and I want to save it for last), here goes:

Williams College: Your endowment is even more screwed than Bowdoin’s is (yes, I know it’s a whole lot bigger–that’s why it’s okay for me to say this).

UVM: Your coaches’ and athletes’ actions in Saturday’s mass start further support the hypothesis that your school is filled with peace-loving, pot-smoking hippies.

UNH: You are impolite (see my previous post).

St. Michael’s: Purple is the color of sexual frustration.

St. Lawrence: You guys are all earth-destroyers and climate changers, given the massive amounts of driving that you must do to reach any carnival besides your own.

Middlebury: Also hippies, although perhaps with less marijuana and more climate activism. With UVM, you guys could make a great team.

Harvard: Your school let in Ollie Burruss–I think that says enough about you.

Dartmouth: You’re big bullies. Why don’t you let someone else win for a change? Also: Fartmouth.

Colby: Our coach is younger and more attractive (his beard=dreamy [at least, so the Bowdoin girls tell me]).

Bates:

See you at UNH–hopefully you all will have forgotten about this by the next mass start!

I think in the last post I promised to make a number of updates in relatively rapid succession. Predictably, that didn’t happen–it turned out that I used up a lot of time this week (not) doing my homework and other related tasks. Fortunately, it is Saturday night, the Bowdoin ski team has gone dry for the season, and my reading for ES 375: Food and Agriculture makes me want to stab my eyes out, which means that it’s time to write on the blog.

The Bates Carnival transpired this weekend, and it was pretty sweet. In total, we got to do 30k of racing–a 10k classic individual start, and a 20k skate mass start. The 10k classic was not bad–I managed to restrain the impulse to thrash and flail that usually accompanies important races, and skied to a reasonable-but-unspectacular 74th. The 20k was pretty sweet–after a crazy start (I’ll include details in a moment), I settled in for the hour-long grind, had some fun doing some drafting (okay, okay, sometimes it works pretty well), and ended up 65th.

There were a few things that happened over the weekend that I think might interest readers, but the most important has to do with facial hair. Like many other teams, the Bowdoin men have a no-shaving pact from ski camp through the first carnival. This usually means that some people end up with awesome facial hair, and others, despite getting a week-long head start, end up looking not very different than normal. (Hopefully I’ll get some photos up in the next few days of some particularly attractive individuals.)

When I was a freshman, I really didn’t look any different than normal after a few weeks of no shaving–I think this was because I hadn’t started to shave at that point. Sophomore year, I had the odd but amusing (to my teammates, at least) phenomenon of a sideburn growing on only one side (I think it was the left). Last year was kind of the no-man’s land of facial hair, but this year, as a senior, I told myself it was time to step it up. I gave myself a week’s head start, and ended up with some interesting results–mangy is the first adjective that comes to mind.

However, shaving is allowed starting the night before the first carnival, and in a few minutes of free time this morning after breakfast, I decided to do some serious facial hair-sculpting. First, I shaved my chin and upper lip, and then, after I couldn’t notice any difference in my appearance, I got rid of everything except for my sideburns, which I tried to emphasize and even out. This left me looking pretty sharp and clean-cut, but with a little bit of an edge. The way I pictured it, initially people would see my lack of facial hair before the mass start and think “oh, that kid’s a total uptight square, I can push him around.” But then, upon closer inspection, they’d see my serious sideburns, and realize I was not to be trifled with. See the emo picture below of the “don’t-mess-with-me-sideburns” (photo taken by Steven Kolberg–not a ski racer but still a very friendly and charismatic roommate):

So the gun went off, and things were going pretty well. I had a good double pole, scooted around the lefthand corner on the inside, and even made an aggressive move on the lap track by skiing around traffic through some powder on the far left side of the trail.

However, as we looped back through the finish, things went downhill. I was on the right side of the trail, doing my own thing, when all of a sudden I heard an “OUT OF THE WAY, BOWDOIN!” I’m not quite sure who it was, but I’m pretty sure his College’s name starts with a “U” and ends with an “NH.” After greeting me with this friendly introduction, said individual proceeded to pass me by skiing over my ski, which knocked me over and spun me around, whereupon I saw my life flash before my eyes as 8000 rabid college racers blew by me at speeds approaching 200 miles per hour.

Anyways, all this is not to whine or call people out by name (mass starts are definitely not known to be bastions of kindness and altruism), but to express my disappointment that my don’t-mess-with-me-sideburns failed me so miserably. My only hope is that perhaps people didn’t have time to contemplate them at the start, or were unable to take the time to fully examine my facial profile before passing once the race had started.

That’s pretty much all for now. Below are some pictures of the bowling round of the Maine vs. the World competition (taken by the unmatchable Erin Hatton), which I had promised to blog about at some point. However, I suspect that chances of that happening at this point are dwindling; suffice to say that Maine dominated the world (which doesn’t deserve a capital letter).

Maine dominating

Team world rolling parallel gutterballs

This last week was ski camp. In addition to expected activities such as skiing, napping, and waxing, my coach organized extracurriculars centered around a competition pitting the Mainers on the team against those from Minnesota, Colorado, Massachusetts, and other abysmal locations. More on this later.

            First, though, my coach suggested that I write a few things about the races I did over the last couple of weeks, because, after all, this is a blog on fasterskier.com, not betteratrandomactivities.com or whocanwritethefunniestblogpost.com.

             So on that note, I take you back to last Saturday, January 11^th, when I drove with my assistant coach, Ollie, and teammates Tom “le monster de biscuit [that’s French for cookie monster]” Cook and Colman “the top hat” Hatton to Jackson, New Hampshire for the inaugural UNH/Jackson criterium.

            For those of you who don’t already know, a criterium is a spectator-friendly format borrowed from bike racing in which racers do multiple laps around a short course. It was a mass start, and was about a 1.5 k lap that was mostly flat with one short steep hill. It was pretty much all college racers, and I managed to hang in with a chasing group for most of the race before cruising into the finish with one of my teammates. I wish that I had more to recount, but I really don’t, so we’re going to move on to my analysis of the race.

Now, before launching into a critique, let me preface my remarks by saying that I thought that this was a really fun race that was well-timed (in terms of there being no other races in the area) and well-run. However, there’s one thing about the “criterium” that really annoyed me: bike races and ski races are not actually all that similar. Okay, that’s not entirely true, but the drafting effect in cycling is a lot more noticeable, and in skiing, it’s a lot less likely that you’ll end up with a big pack skiing around with people sitting in, team tactics, etc., because most of the time, people are killing themselves just to hold onto to their position (at least, that’s my experience).

So when I heard the race announcer talking during the race about people trying to break away, team tactics, etc., like it was a bike race, I was kind of irritated, because I’m pretty sure that most of the people in the race were not, like, “biding their time” in preparation for the final sprint. Or, maybe I’m wrong, and perhaps everyone except for me was actually pleasantly skiing around waiting for the final sprint, chilling out, tightening their pole straps and wiping the snotcicles off of their noses. All I know, though, is that the thoughts going through my head during the race were more along the lines of “ow…V1…ow…I really want this to be over…V2…ow…that UNH kid just cut me off and I want to stab him with my pole…ow…V2…ooh I think I just accidentally spit in that guy’s face…how many more laps do we have to do …three?…three…V2 alternate…three….okay…ow…” Maybe one day I will be blessed with sufficient fitness to calmly ski along and discuss team tactics and modern art with my teammates, but for now I can only do that during Cat. 3 bike races.

Wow. That was only last Saturday, and I have to bring us all the way to today. So, suffice to say that Sunday’s race, the “Race for those Not Heading to Nationals (as well as for those that did head to nationals and had races cancelled, or for those who are elderly or small and did not contemplate going to nationals but would still like to enjoy a lovely jaunt on the snowy Pineland trails),” was excellent, with no heart problems, comparisons to bike racing, or even much excitement. My goal was to go out really relaxed and pace the race well, and I felt like I did that—being relaxed and at ease while racing or just going fast was one of the things I worked on a lot all summer, and I think that it helps a lot—I’d recommend it to those that haven’t already discovered this.

One more thing about Saturday—the race was really well run, and since it wasn’t heavily promoted it didn’t seem like it required too much time, energy, etc., aside from the commitment of a few volunteers and the organizational abilities of Pat Cote. This is not to say that the people that were there didn’t have to work hard—Pat and the volunteers obviously put in a lot of effort—but rather, I’m trying to say that it would be cool to have more races like this—not too serious, but still good fun and good competition. I’d be happy to organize one next winter, when I’m done being a super-serious-weenie-extreme-college-skier.

Originally, I was going to go on to talking about Maine vs. the World in this blog post, but I think doing that now would be unreasonably long, so I’m going to leave you with a cliffhanger—I’ll update again later in the week with some pictures… 

For my whole life, up until a few weeks ago, I occasionally noticed a weird hiccup in my heartbeat. It happened very infrequently—maybe once every couple of weeks—and I never thought too much about it. Two weeks ago, though, I started noticing it happening a lot more often: first in a weights session, then when I was warming up for a time trial, and then while I was racing.
As far as sensations that are unsettling as an endurance athlete, a weird heart beat is probably up there as one of the most disconcerting. As far as I’m concerned, your heart is one of those things that’s just supposed to work—it either does, or it doesn’t. I was very skeptical of any in-between, half-working business, and I couldn’t help but think of that guy in the Olympic marathon trials this spring whose heart just stopped beating right in the race.
Last Saturday after a time trial with Burke, I mentioned this to my mom (kids, if you really want to mess with your mother, tell her your heart isn’t working right—just be prepared to deal with the torrent of emotions you unleash), and we both decided that as this was something that seemed to be getting worse, not better, I should probably call my doctor. I did, and she told me that she couldn’t allow me to keep training until I had an appointment—I’d probably be fine, she said, but if I dropped dead on the side of the trail, my mom would blame her and be really pissed.
My doctor’s office is totally baller (Full Circle Family Medicine/fullcirclefamilymedicine.com—I know it sounds like a bunch of hippies, but they actually do great work and even prescribe drugs), and one of the things that’s great about them is that you can make same day appointments. So on Monday, I called as soon as they opened at 8:30, and got an appointment for 9:15, and thus began a two-week-long saga that finally ended yesterday with a specially-trained cardiologist super-doctor man telling me that all that was happening was that my heart was occasionally making an extra beat (which is not a problem). Along the way, I was forbidden from hard training or racing, and was forced to wear a ridiculous heart rate monitor, give blood to get my cholesterol tested, and submit to a handful of other extremely weird heart tests, including a kind of ultrasound where we listened to my heart valves making extremely weird noises.
Rather than write a boring narrative of every doctor’s appointment and test I went through, I’m instead going to offer you readers a few of the lessons I learned from this experience:

1. If you ever have the opportunity to choose an activity to be in a hurry to do, I would not recommend making this activity anything to do with doctors or hospitals or getting your heart fixed. I was fortunate enough to have a doctor that understood that I really really wanted to get back to training and racing, and I still almost stabbed my eyes out with impatience.
2.  If you want to hang out with your peers (hip, young, athletic people in my case), I have discovered that hospitals and cardiologists are probably not the best place to do this.
3. Girl Scout cookies cannot be purchased from state Girl Scout headquarters. Yesterday I got to the cardiologist’s office early, and I hadn’t had lunch. It was in a corporate industrial park, and there was nothing nearby, except for the Maine offices of Girl Scouts of America. They didn’t have any cookies.
4. Blogging about somewhat bad things that happen to you is fun—falling on your face during a meaningless sprint race, for example, or getting harassed by Canadian customs officers. Blogging about really bad things that may be happening to you, like heart problems that preclude interval training, is actually not as much fun. Thus the absence of blogging for the last few weeks.
5. Now for the emo part. Before this season started, I set a couple of goals for myself: train 550 hours, log all of that training, and score NCAA points by finishing top-30 in a college carnival—which I fully acknowledge to be a stretch. However, that’s okay, because scoring NCAA points is a outcome goal—not something that I have a whole lot of direct control over. Instead, I’m much more concerned with the other two, which are process goals, which I am able to achieve on my own (though there is a lot of gray area here—I’m strongly dependent on coaches, parents, teammates, etc. to help my through the process).
So when a hurdle like this comes up and potentially gets in the way of my outcome goals, I want to be able to shrug it off and be content with having been fully committed to the process. I’m on track for 550 hours this year, and it’s all in my log, and that should be enough. Clearly, though, it isn’t, because the prospect of not being able to race this season seriously disturbed and disheartened me.
Ultimately, what I’ve realized is this: for me, training (process) is not an end in itself, though it can be and usually is quite fun. Instead, training is a means to an end—it’s the best way that I know of to improve (if any of you know of a better one, let me know). In a weenie sport like indoor track or swimming, you’d measure improvement by objective measures like personal bests. However, since skiing has so many variables, race results are not an objective way to measure “faster.” So instead, I assume that training really is the best way to get faster, and I substitute the completion of the training process as a measure of improvement.
For a lot of people, this logic could be problematic and dangerous, because if your process or training plan isn’t perfect, it actually might not be making you better. In my case, though, I’m pretty confident that while my plan isn’t perfect, it hits most of the bases, and executing it should be a pretty way to measure “getting faster.” Thus, for me, I’m not racing because I’m looking for a specific outcome; rather, racing is an end in itself, and it’s the most important part of the process—it’s the place where I can affirm my own improvement.
I’m not really sure where this leaves me though, because without an objective measure, how do you really know that you are faster, or if you are improving? For me, to a certain extent I can tell: I can feel that my technique and my fitness are miles beyond where they were at this point last year. I do also think that you can take some stock in results—if you’re destroying the field that you struggled in a season before, that should also say something. But now that I’ve thought about it a little more, I do also think that perhaps training is an end in itself. For example, what if you go through the whole season following your plan, execute it perfectly, and then get mono in December and miss all your races? That doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in the work that you’ve done, and that’s something of which I’m quite sure. I’m not sure what that value is—it could be something like learning to work hard, finish what you’ve started, etc.—and I don’t have the time or energy to figure out what it is right now, but I know it’s there.
And on that note, I’ll go back to my zen cave in the woods and meditate until the Jackson Criterium on Saturday. Hopefully I’ll fall on my face, and we can finally get back to business on the blog.