There are many, many perks involved in the life of a huge baller international ski journalists, but one of the unexpected disappointments of the last winter was how little time I had to ski, and especially to race. In the 2009-2010 ski season, I raced a grand total of three times. One of those was in Fairbanks, where I wore Swix warm-up pants because it was -15, and another was a 6 k citizens’ biathlon race in Fort Kent, where I beat up on masters, kids, and shot at the wrong targets. (At least I hit them.) Training wasn’t much better—I got a few chances to ski in some beautiful places (Germany, Anchorage, Whistler), but I was usually too busy to put much time in.
So when I got home a few weeks ago, I was excited to be able to jump on my bike and start riding. I put some pretty good days of training in this month (hill repeats! intervals!) in anticipation of some solid spring racing.

The only problem is that paying for races, and for getting yourself there, is expensive. And since I only recently graduated from college, have little talent, and am not “all in,” I have not been recruited to ride for a club or a team. Therefore, I’d been sticking to local group rides and training races until this last weekend, when I caught a ride down (or up, as it were, or actually, down and up, since there’s absolutely no efficient way to drive to central New Hampshire from Maine) to Dartmouth for the eastern collegiate cycling championships.

I know, I know—I don’t go to college any more. But there were open races both days—individual and team time trials the first day, and a road race the second. And you can’t argue with a free ride to New Hampshire, especially when the alternative is sitting around the house.

As it turned out, one of the Bowdoin cyclists got sick, so on Saturday, I raced in the Men’s Collegiate C Team Time Trial as J.B. Chun. Yes, for about twenty minutes on Saturday morning, I was Asian, and still a college student. It didn’t matter because we didn’t win, and it was wicked fun.

In the afternoon, I hung out and watched about eight different criteriums. I spent most of the time sitting on the grass in someone’s yard watching people overshoot the course’s most technical corner, except for when I conned my way into the pace car with one of my friends for the women’s intro race. It was pretty rad—we had to drive pretty fast just to stay in front of the women who were just learning how to race, and I can only imagine how awesome it must have been to rally around that course in front of the Men’s A race.

The view from the pace car

The other highlight of the day had to do with that aforementioned corner. It was a tough, 180-degree bend that came right after a pretty fast downhill. People would often be going too fast and end up in the grass on the outside (in the best-case scenario). At one point in the men’s B race, this UVM kid comes flying down the hill, and I guess he sees some senior citizens step out into the road without really realizing what was going on. He screams at them to get out of the way (we can hear this from about 100 yards away up on the hill where we were sitting), has to swerve to avoid them, and goes straight into the grass, falling off his bike as the rest of the field goes by.

By the time this guy fell off, he wasn’t going too fast, and it looked like he probably could have caught back up. Instead, he picks up his bike and starts screaming and running with it up the hill where we’re sitting. His parents are about ten yards from us, and they ask the kid if he is okay as he goes by. In this high-pitched, hysterical, breathless voice, he goes “FU–ING OLD PEOPLE!!!” Then, later, when his race is over, he comes back and is complaining to his parents again–he sounds like he is about to cry. “Fu—ing old people! They should just put them all in a home or something!!! I worked all year for this! These two fat, old people…” and so on, and so forth. Good stuff.

A few other highlights—we parked next to the West Point squad. These guys do not f—k around. As we were packing up our van and discussing what we wanted for dinner, who was buying beer, etc., these guys were having a serious meeting about the day’s races and about the plan for Sunday, which involved being ready to rumble at oh-six-hundred hours. We had the option of asking these guys to get out of our way and pulling out of our parking spot forwards, or backing out. We backed out.

Don't f--k with the cadets...

We stopped to pick up dinner at the Co-op in Hanover. I know that Dartmouth kids have some funny traditions and odd proclivities, but I was especially amused by this aisle sign (and yes, I am equating the weird hippie co-op in town with the college itself). I have no idea what an aseptic juice is, although it does make me wonder if I’ve been drinking septic juices my whole life—I certainly hope not.

Ew.

Sunday dawned sunny and warm, and I was incredibly excited to step up to the line for my first road race of the year—60-ish miles over Vermont hill and dale. I was pleasantly surprised to see former Harvard skier David McCahill in my field, as well as the guy who advised the cycling club at the Putney school my senior year.

The first forty miles of the race were relatively uneventful. The most exciting thing that happened was when I shoved an entire apricot Clif Bar in my mouth all at once about thirty seconds before a gigantic hill popped up out of nowhere. With some serious nose breathing, I barely managed to keep drooling and choking to a minimum before we got to the top. Other than that, I’d felt great—in the front going up the climbs, staying out of trouble, yelling at my friends on the side of the road, etc.

At about 45 miles, we came down a big hill about to start our last of four ten- or 12-mile laps. I am not a super-ambitious descender (they don’t not call me Il Falco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Savoldelli) for nothing), and every time we’d gone down this hill, I’d been just about the last one in the group. As I downshifted and accelerated to close up the gap, I heard a loud “PING,” and then some serious tinging and more pinging. F—k. I stopped to check things out. My frame appeared to still be intact (good). So did all my cables (good). Then, I glanced at my rear wheel. Oh yeah, broken spoke. Not good. All I wanted to do at that moment was scream “FU—ING OLD PEOPLE,” but sadly, there was no one around to get the joke.

Not cool.

So that was the end of the day for me. Pretty big bummer, since I’d felt pretty good, and I was curious to see how my legs would hold up on the final climb against the small field of Cat. 3s and 4s. Hopefully, though, I will get a few more chances this spring. If there are any cycling company executives reading this post, I have yet to secure my free bike(s) for the year, and at the very least, I am in need of a new spoke.

A few other things of note:

–This photo

This does not seem like it should fly at West Point, but...

–Free gas (for me)

Thanks Bowdoin!

And the fact that Bowdoin called me to try to get me to donate to the alumni fund as I was literally in the car on my way home from Brunswick on Sunday night. I have copied and pasted their thank-you note. Please note my title—all future correspondence with me should use it.

“Gift Detail

Name:  The Most Rev. Nathaniel Herz

Gift Amount:  $1.00

Gift Date:  4/26/2010

Designation:  Alumni Fund”

Imagine you’ve trained hard and dominated the domestic circuit all season, winning races and collecting prize money along the way. Then, in the last, biggest race of the year, Kris Freeman or Kikkan Randall comes back from Europe and gives you a sound beating—a firm reminder of your place in the pecking order.

That was what I felt like yesterday, when I opened up the New York Times home page on my computer to find a story detailing the annual salary of U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) CEO Bill Marolt. Whether or not it’s justified, it’s a lot of money–over half a million dollars–and that’s something that people should know. From what I’ve gathered online, not very many people did.

To get a few things out of the way: until yesterday, I didn’t know. And I’m sorry and disappointed with myself that the majority of the cross country ski community learned of the figure from the New York Times—which covers skiing only occasionally—rather than FasterSkier, where that’s our primary responsibility.

Coincidentally, I was at a conference just this Friday to learn about how to conduct research and investigation of non-profit organizations like USSA. In fact, Saturday morning, hours before the story on Marolt was published, I was parsing through the very files that the New York Times must have used in order to get the data that they did. They’re called Form 990s, and every non-profit organization has to fill one out. They’re then made available to the public—you can see USSA’s by searching for it at Guidestar.org.

This kind of journalism is more complicated and more challenging than covering a race, where you can watch it, talk to a few racers and coaches, then go inside to write it all up. For the story on Marolt, Katie Thomas—the New York Times reporter who’s been covering skiing all winter—teamed up with a computer-assisted reporter, Andrew Lehren, presumably to interpret the information in the 990 and to gather and wrangle all the additional data required to put it in context. (Computer-assisted reporters specialize in data gathering and analysis; one of Lehren’s colleagues at the Times taught a session on it at the conference I attended on Friday.)

But just because it’s more complicated—and because the New York Times has special reporters to do it—doesn’t mean that we’re not going to try to tackle this stuff ourselves. This is the most exciting type of reporting (and most challenging), and rest assured that we’re going to keep looking into these kinds of issues, because the flow of money in the sport is just as important as who wins and loses—and it can often be a determining factor.

As much as it sucks to get scooped, in the end, it’s a good thing, because it pushes us to do better work. We will learn from this experience: we’ll be doing some more digging, and we’ll follow up when the next set of forms come out. Will we get scooped again in the future? Probably. But we’ll do our darndest to ensure that we don’t make the same oversight twice.

This post is designed to answer a question that I’m sure scores of you have been asking yourselves for the past week: What on earth do huge baller ski journalists do in the off-season?

To be honest, I have spent most of my time at home reading stuff. I had a big backlog of New Yorkers to catch up on (including the one with the article about the history of Olympic skiing), and some rad newspapers and even a book. But sadly, me giving you a recap of the last week in Nat Herz’s reading is probably the one thing on this universe more boring than curling, so I’m going to skip it.

The one thing that I’ve done since getting home that’s tangentially related to skiing has been to bust my road bike out of storage and get it ready to go. I can’t say that I’d done a fabulous job with maintenance in the fall, so there was an interesting, petrified layer of grease on my chain rings and derailleur that I had to get rid of before I could do anything. It took about an hour, but now my bike is looking pretty awesome:

Some seriously pimpin' bar tape...

Please notice the green bar tape. All you patient, reserved people who think that curling is scintillating probably think that this bar tape is ostentatious and poorly matched with the rest of my color scheme (true), but that doesn’t make it any less awesome. In any case, I’ve been on three rides this year so far, all of which have been quite short in an effort not to replicate last year’s spring, in which the first ride of the year was four hours, 60 miles, and a bunch of ridiculous climbs on a bike that I had never used before, resulting in catastrophic knee failure that simultaneously ruined my racing aspirations for the spring and facilitated the completion of my senior independent study.

Other than that, I’ve cooked a couple of delicious meals. One was this pizza with leeks and mushrooms:

Some dank pizza. And yes, dank can be used as a synonym for rad, awesome, etc. Look it up on UrbanDictionary. And yes, I went to high school with a bunch of stoners, which is how I learned of this use of the adjective.

and the other was enough lentil chili to feed a dozen Axel Teichmanns, except this was actually for my ski coach, who just had a baby daughter on Wednesday!

Those are some lentils

Finally, I got a chance to remind myself what being an intern is like this afternoon, when I helped my mom and her fiancé stuff envelopes this afternoon for a mailer for their new organization, the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. It’s a pretty cool idea—filling the void of newspapers with dwindling newsrooms and all those clichés in a state that doesn’t really have a tradition of fierce political or investigative journalism. Check it out…

Hard at work in the dining room...

Other than that, central Maine is pretty much the way I left it. If any is passing through and wants to go shred some spring tele gnar or go for a bike ride, please let me know—I can only handle so much envelope-stuffing…