Do not try this at home.

I’m not going to take you through my road trip chronologically this time, because I didn’t have a whole lot of time to stop and go on moderately epic adventures, like I did last time. So I’m going to share with you a few highlights, observations, and lessons.

1. First of all, unlike last time, I had a companion. His name is Frank. He’s a flamingo.

Frank pines for his natural habitat, the Gulf of St. Lawrence

He’s not very good for talking with, but he is good for talking at. He doesn’t ask tough questions. He doesn’t eat PB+J. But he does engender amused looks from passersby. And he wears a seatbelt, of course.

Click it, or ticket.

Frank traveled just about everywhere I did this winter, except for Germany, making him fairly well-traveled for an inanimate object. Had I had the presence of mind to bring him with me to Germany, I totally would have, but instead, he spent a very lonely, hungry, and damp two weeks inside my car in Seattle. Fortunately, like lobsters, inflatable flamingos don’t have the ability to suffer, so he didn’t treat me any differently when I got back.

2. Radio programs, podcasts, and audiobooks are crucial when you’re spending 50+ hours in the car. Needless to say, I think I know wayyyyyy more about health care reform than most other cross country ski journalists, having listened to many hours of debate and discussion on NPR. Also, did you know that Andre Agassi didn’t wear any underwear when he won the French Open in 1999? (That’s thanks to his autobiography, which, by the way, is really good.) And finally, if you don’t listen to “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me,” you should start. Now.

3. Food is extremely important. One thing that I have learned over the course of driving many miles this winter is that you can’t have really good food on a road trip. Instead, you have to have merely decent food, because if you have really yummy food, you just end up eating it all at once. And when I say you, I guess I mean me. And Topher. But in any case, things like potato chips are no good—instead, it’s stuff like pretzels, dried fruit, and, above all, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which I have learned to make on the fly. Sandwich-making while driving is an obscure and often-maligned art, but I have become a master at it. Actually, that’s also not true—I still end up with peanut butter all over my pants every time I try it. But it does spice things up, and most importantly, keep me awake.

The Trader Joe's strawberry jam that I'm using for this sandwich is bar none the best jam I've ever had. Maybe not quite worth driving 3800 miles for, but word is they're opening one in Portland...

4. Lawrence, Kansas is a surprisingly rad place to hang out.

5. I have the best friends on the face of the planet, who don’t seem to mind in the slightest when I show up at eight o’clock in the evening, expecting to be fed and given a warm place to sleep, and then disappear early in the morning. I have been thinking about this quite a bit, and asking myself how I would behave if someone showed up at my house in the same fashion, with these same expectations, a filthy car, unshowered, unshaven, and bragging how they’ve been in Alaska, Europe, and the Olympics this winter. Pretty sure that if I had been at home, or even at work at a sweet job, I would probably send someone like that back out on the street. Potentially with a kick in the ass. So I feel pretty lucky.

6. I played Boggle at my friend’s house in California. I honed my Boggle skill over an intensive two-year period at Bowdoin College, and it had been a little while since I’d played. I definitely still have it, and I totally kicked everyone’s a–. I am hereby issuing a challenge to any reader of this blog who thinks they can take me at Boggle during the biathlon championships and/or the SuperTour Finals, or even any other time, any place. Yes, I am the Petter Northug of Boggle, because I am talking smack. And just like Petter Northug, I will back it up. The only thing that falls as fast as the ink from my pen in a game of Boggle will be your spirits.

See if you can divine what that says...

If you made it this far, I have one more piece of wisdom to offer you, and this actually might be the only useful one from this entire diatribe:

IF YOU ARE DRIVING TO THE SUPERTOUR FINALS FROM THE SOUTH, STOP AT DYSARTS. YOU WILL NOT BE SORRY. Directions from Boston are here.

Dysarts is a rad truck stop just south of Bangor. They have very delicious homemade bread, pie, and other heinously delicious stuff. If you are hoping for exceptionally high performance in the actual races, you probably should bring a coach in with you to prevent yourself from eating too much.

Finally, as annoying as Quebec drivers are, the name of this town redeemed the whole province for me, irrevocably:

Even better than my favorite German town, Aha-Aule

After a couple of weeks of hard work (and watching awesome ski races—I’m not complaining), Topher and I took a single day off to head down to Vancouver and collect as many different Olympic sports as we could. It played out that we got to watch the curling match, sandwiched between the semifinal men’s hockey game of USA vs. Finland, and the short track frenzy that occurred later that evening.

I will get straight to the point: this post is about how I have woken up every single morning since that day and thanked God that I am not a curling journalist.

One would think that at least the gold-medal curling match would be enough to sustain my interest. Not so. And yes, Topher took this picture because he thought it was hilarious how bored I was.

I have complained a few times, if not on my blog, about how writing about certain types of ski races can sometimes be difficult—namely individual-start races, but also, for example, 50 k mass-start races in which nothing happens until 49.2 k.

Any complaints I have made about this sport I now retract. I would write ten stories about the Colby Ski Team winning NCAA’s before I’d agree to follow curling, otherwise known as the most mind-numbingly boring sport in the universe. If you know how much I detest Colby, you know how serious I am about this.

Now, I know that it’s possible to write a single story about the curling scene and venue—while even that might be difficult, it’s not impossible. Pay attention to what’s going on, observe a few amusing details (bagpipers introducing the competitors with a big fanfare, the drunk guy heckling the Swedish team leader by yelling her name [NORberg!] directly into the ears of the increasingly aggravated elderly Swedish gentleman sitting in front of him, etc.), turn it into a cutesy profile of the sport. But I’m talking about following the sport on a daily basis—basically the equivalent of what we do for skiing. I’m thinking of something like FasterSweeper.com, or MoreDexterous&CalmUnderPressureCurler.com

I am aware that there is a certain, small amount of action in every curling match, and that as Al Trautwig says, each sporting event has its own “moment of truth.” However, in the case of curling, the amount of actual describable action contained in this so-called “moment of truth,” no matter how momentous or dramatic, is miniscule. I am pretty sure that every dramatic curling shot ever made can be summarized in this manner:

“Four years-worth of practice of chucking varnished rocks down an ice rink came down to this single shot that remained in today’s match between ____ and ____. With the hopes of a couple hundred moderately enthusiastic fans riding on his or her middle-aged shoulders, _____ pushed off down the ice, stone in hand, then released it with an unexciting twisting motion. The rock slid slowly and unspectacularly down the ice, traversing 150 feet, before coming to a stop somewhere near the target.”

Now, to be fair, there could be some variation involved. The rink actually could be anywhere between 146 and 150 feet long; in some countries, there could be as many as a thousand fans (although that’s really only in the extraordinary case); and in a few very rare cases, the athletes are not middle-aged.

However, I’ve decided that this line of exposition is not that interesting, or even funny. So I’m moving on. Instead, I’m going to write about how curling would be cooler if it were more like skiing.

First, I’d get trash talking involved. Curling needs its own Petter Northug. Listen to the lame-ness of Kevin Martin, Canada’s team captain, after leading his men to curling gold:

“Finally, it took a long time, a lot of years…The hard work’s worth it.”

Sorry Kevin, but that’s not going to cut it if you want to take your sport’s popularity to the next level. Here’s are some Northug-esque quotes that I am suggesting for you and your Canadian teammates:

“My stone curls with the fury of Pierre Trudeau and Avril Lavigne. Tell the Americans’ stones to get out of the way.”

“The Swedish stones are fat.”

“I had another degree of angular momentum that I could have imparted on that shot; I just chose not to use it.”

Another way to mix things up would be to have the players develop their own styles. That’s what makes skiing interesting—Axel Teichmann using his big, long strides to attack with 800 meters to go vs. Northug waiting until the last hundred meters to turn on his finishing speed.

For curling, you could require each player to have his or her own signature style of releasing the stone, kind of like Happy Gilmore hits golf balls (everyone should definitely have a running start). I’m thinking like windmill style release, a bellyflop/diving style release, etc.

And finally, let’s get some real technology and equipment involved, like skis, poles, and waxing. Those things are constant fodder for hungry ski journalists. Give those sweepers some high-performance carbon fiber brooms, allow service staffs to do some literal stonegrinding, that kind of thing—then you’d get some real stories. And take the roof off the darn rinks and let the weather wreak a little havoc—try hitting that target in the middle of a Vancouver downpour.

That’s all for now. In all seriousness, if anyone reading needs a ride from the west coast (San Francisco) to the east coast (Maine, or anywhere along the way) leaving next weekend, or knows anyone who does, please let me know. I’m going to need someone to keep me awake for the drive…

The only thing that won't work to keep me awake in the car is if you start talking about curling...

Awesome

We’ve been in Whistler for a couple of weeks now, and our condo has been graced by a few sets of visitors. Everyone who has come has been super-patient with our poor hygiene, obsessive work habits, and manic schedules.

We connected with our last pair of visitors through Andrew Brisbane, a friendly forerunner who we met on the bus up to the venue one day. His friends Maja and Lauren were looking for a place to crash in Whistler for a couple of nights, and since there are like 20 beds in this place, it was no big deal. Then they left us this awesome hand-drawn note (complete with Norwegian lessons!), and two absolutely massive and awesome bars of chocolate. Which is awesome–that is all.

I thought I would write a few things about some of the interesting challenges that have presented themselves over the last few week, since I honestly haven’t done or witnessed too much outside of what has been written in race reports.

First, I want to bring up how much I wish that I had studied Norwegian—or Italian, or Swedish, or Russian—in college. There are about 5,000 international journalists here, each one of them wanting to engage the athletes and coaches in their own individual conversation in their mother tongue. This makes it very hard to ever engage in a conversation of your own, in English.

A corollary to this is the fact that when you actually go back and listen to the answers in English from a lot of these folks, it sounds like you just interviewed Yoda. For example, here’s a quote from Martin Koukal, who anchored the Czech relay team to third place in the relay yesterday:

“It was like this, that if we have been top three, after three legs, it was like that for me, I was on the big pleasure, because for me it was anything close than medal it will be big disappointment, because I am good sprinter and good skier…I fight and then in the last kilometers, I concentrate for a —because I know that for me, the way to the medal is to beat the French guy.”

Now, I obviously don’t have any right to complain, not speaking a shred of Czech or Norwegian or Swedish myself. And I do not want to denigrate Martin at all—he was exceedingly friendly and gracious and patient with me, as I tried to understand what was going on through this fog of language. But it does illustrate how hard it can be to get a sense of exactly what was happening out on the course. Don’t even bother with the Russians—they don’t speak English at all, and they get offended if you even ask if they do.

By the time you get to the press conferences, these guys are already so sick and tired of reporters trying to extract stuff from them that they basically just thumb their noses at you.

For example, the guy running the press conference yesterday asked all the members of all the relay teams yesterday (they bring in all the medalists) to introduce themselves and give a comment about their race. Among the highlights from the Swedes:

“I’m Johan Olsson, and I’m very happy for the gold medal.”

“My name is Marcus Hellner, I’m also very happy for this gold.”

And then the absurd:

“Yes—my name is Odd-Bjorn [Hjelmeset], and I skied the second lap, and I f—ed up today.”

As Patrick Stinson already covered in his post, one of Odd-Bjorn’s problems was that he had iced up harries skies. But Topher and I saw him on one of the climbs, and he looked like he was just hurting, so:

“Odd-Bjorn, when you say you f—ed up, it sounded like there were problems with both your body and your skis, or just your skis, or just your body? What was it?”

“No, I think I have seen too much porn (laughter). For the last 14 days, I have the room next to Petter (Northug), and every day it’s some noise in there, I don’t know what. So I think that was the reason for I fucked up. By the way, Tiger Woods is a really good man.”

I swear to god he actually said this. If you don’t believe me, leave your e-mail in the comments and I will send you the audio file.

In any case, that made Topher and I laugh (as well as everyone else in the room)—I mean, that was pretty funny. Then we waited for Odd-Bjorn to actually answer the question. He didn’t—we moved on. Thanks, dude.

15 minutes of waiting for more Norwegian journalists to finish talking to him after the press conference, I finally got an answer. But it took quite a while…

There is other stuff to be written, but this has to suffice for now—time to go watch some Nordic Combined!

I am currently on the bus to the Whistler Olympic park with about thirty other international media. We are listening to Coldplay, I think, for better or for worse. (Actually, definitely for worse. I hate Coldplay.)

I though I would provide a quick update on what it is like to be a member of the hordes of international ski media assembled here in Whistler. I am going to do this by showing, not telling, because apparently that’s the more writer-ly thing to do.

I was going to begin by showing the ingredients for the FasterSkier satellite office, as they were in a pretty rad picture that I took in the Whistler press room when my s— was spread out all over a desk. Unfortunately, in my infinite wisdom, I seem to have deleted it from my computer. So I’m going to ask all of you to just imagine that you’re looking at a picture of desk with a whole bunch of crap on it, as I take you through it.

First, the black bag on the left. That’s a camera. With a moderately baller lens that I borrowed from Topher. (I keep having to revise my standards for lenses. Compared to the one that came with my camera, this one is totally baller. However, compared to the ones being used by photographers here, I feel like a member of the Ethiopian ski team competing against the Norwegians.) In any case, you’d think that I’d be able to use this to get some good photos, but don’t be deceived—Olympic courses are on such lockdown and things are such a giant cluster that it’s actually very difficult. Not to mention the fact that I can’t seem to hold the camera still with a bigger lens on the end of it. Mostly what I succeed in doing with the camera is getting it wet, then trying not to let it get more wet, then bringing it inside and fogging the crap out of the lens, resulting in minimal pictures of American nordic combined medal-winning later in the day. At least that’s what happened on Sunday…

Next we have the yellow drink belt. Pretty self-explanatory: even huge baller ski journalists need to hydrate, at least in theory. Thus far over the three days of the Games I have filled it up once, and that was at three o’clock yesterday afternoon. But when I did that I was working hard on the nordic combined report, and I also had to pee, so I didn’t want to drink more. I didn’t end up going pee until like eight o’clock, either, so I actually drank the whole thing between when I got home and when I went to bed, which was a period of about half an hour. The fact that I didn’t even come close to waking up in the middle of the night is a pretty good indicator of my level of dehydration. Other than my water intake last night, my consumption of liquids at the Olypics has consisted exclusively of the free hot chocolate, coffee, or some mixture of the two that’s available at the various media centers. I haven’t actually noticed any real difference in how I feel in terms of energy or anything, but at this point I’m more psyched about sustaining myself with hot chocolate and coffee than peanut butter and jelly, so until my gums start falling off from scurvy I think that I will continue with the brown beverage diet. I will let you guys know how it goes—maybe it will be the next big thing. [Update, as I am finishing this late at night: I had two more cups of coffee and one of hot chocolate today, which made for an energetic day if nothing else.]

Now, we move to the big jumble of wires in the middle. Technically those papers are probably next on a left-to-right basis, but I’m more psyched to talk about the wires, so that’s where we’re going. As you can see, we’ve got a macbook charger, and then also an Iphone connector cable, an Ethernet cable, and a pair of headphones all in one gigantic ratsnest. I have stopped bothering with untangling them each time I take them out of my backpack; it’s actually easier to have them in huge knot, because then you don’t have to go fishing in your backpack for each cable every time you want it. Instead, you just poke around in the knot for the end you need, then plug it in. It actually works surprisingly well. Perhaps another marketing ploy along with the free hot chocolate/coffee diet. Maybe I could combine the two somehow, or market them as a package—like, sell big bottles of coffee mixed with hot chocolate (I know, that’s a mocha) with a big jumble of soggy wires at the bottom as the prize when you finish drinking it.

One thing worth mentioning specifically is the ethernet cable. The wireless network at the Olympics is not very reliable, and they have ethernet cables for checkout at the various media centers. Most of the time they make you sign up on a list and then return them, but yesterday was different in an awesome way. I went up to the desk and asked for a cable, and the woman smiled and handed me one without taking down my name or anything—just saying something along the lines of, “you just have to promise to return it, okay?” I nodded and gave her a pretty solid s—t-eating grin, all the while thinking to myself, “there is absolutely no chance that you are ever seeing this thing again.” So now I have my own, and I don’t have to bother with checking one out any more. Yes, I did steal a two dollar ethernet cable from the Olympics. Proud of it.

I don’t remember what else was in the picture, so I’m going to move on to describing the actual journalism scene here. I will begin with this:

It's weird--all the Polish reporters seem to wear team jackets...

That’s Justyna Kowalczyk after the 10k today. There have been some seriously legit reporter scrums here. Basically the way things work here is that things are set up in an extremely complicated hierarchy. First you have “rights-holding broadcasters” like NBC and others, who get like baller TV spots, course access, etc. Then you have news agencies like Reuters, the AP, etc., who get prime standing location in this area called the mixed zone, a kind of gauntlet through which every single athlete has to pass, like it or not. This leads to amusing situations like this one, where Johnny Spillane is talking to the AP and someone from the venue with a microphone in the elite mixed zone area, and all these other reporters don’t have access, so they’re recording what he’s saying out of the speaker.

After everyone is done talking with NBC, the AP, etc., they come down to the lower part of the mixed zone where us sharks of the rest of the media can feed. The amount of Scandinavian media is crazy, as well as when there are medal contenders from other countries. And they all talk in Norwegian or Swedish or Polish or Czech or whatever, making it very difficult to get any idea what is going on. And then when there are any American medal contenders, the scrum of English-speaking reporters appears to multiply by a factor of 47. Yesterday after the nordic combined race, there were probably a grand total of like 50,000 reporters who wanted to talk to Johnny Spillane.

It’s all kind of funny for a few reasons. First of all, a lot of these athletes don’t actually have that much to say. Obviously, some are better than others—Kowalczyk is actually great, although her English grammer isn’t the best (not a criticism, as my Polish definitely blows—it’s just a fact), as is Petra Majdic, and Todd Lodwick was actually incredibly candid and honest yesterday. But a lot of times, you’re getting some seriously canned quotes, and the funniest part of it is that large portions of these interviews are being recorded and transcribed and distributed by the “Olympic News Service,” which is both a blessing and the bane of many reporters’ existence, because these people take quotes and information that might normally be in your exclusive possession and instead distribute them to all the Olympic press centers and then around the world. So there’s a lot of absurdity here, because you have all these people standing around and waiting to get something that really could be (and is) gotten just as effectively by one person. And I won’t even get into some of the non-sequiturs or self-serving questions that some of these reporters ask (although again, to be honest, I have definitely asked a decent number of these myself). I laughed out loud yesterday at a question from the New York Times reporter, until I realized that she was the New York Times reporter. Then I shut up.

I am a naturally competitive person (that’s why I got into skiing in the first place), so I am not happy to just stand around and do the same thing that everyone else does and write something pedestrian. Instead, I want to beat them. Journalistically. I mean, this is the Olympics, after all–it’s about competition. In any casing, dominating the other journalists basically entails finding stuff out that nobody else does. Which means that sometimes you have to step away from Johnny Spillane or Billy Demong or someone important, and actually walk around and go find someone else interesting to talk to in the vague hope that they might be able to tell you something that nobody else will. In general, this happens with mixed success, and I definitely have not figured it out yet. I struck out with a couple of Fischer service guys this morning, and a Norwegian staff member this afternoon who just flat-out said “no” when I asked her about Petter Northug and then walked away in an ice-cold manner. But then I got lucky with the Swiss team doctor, and some short dude in a Norwegian team hat who turned out to be the team’s sprint coach (gulp—next time, I’ll know). Fortunately, there’s one thing that’s very helpful in these pursuits: the gigantic credentials that everyone wears around with their names on them. Sometimes that leads to some awkward scenarios, as I’m like trying to sneak up on someone from behind, walk past them, and find a way to stare directly at their chest (where the credential hangs) without them noticing. But for the most part it’s pretty helpful.

That’s about it. Finally, I leave you with this photo of a Slavic journalist (sorry—couldn’t discern his nationality), doing god knows what. We surmised that he may be doing something with radio—at a certain point, as I was having a conversation with a friend nearby, he pulled his head out and gave us a pretty strong glare…

Until next time…

Before I get going, I need to respond to a comment from my mom on the last post about how my car needed to be fixed. I realized looking back at the last post that my description of the problem with the brakes made it sound a little worse than it actually is-it’s really not that bad. Plus, as Topher reminded me, the periodic alarm bell that goes off on the dashboard is the only thing keeping us awake at the wheel.

From Silver Star we headed back down the valley into Vernon’s unpleasant suburbia. After a quick stop to load up on some non-astronomically-priced food, we continued on our way. I had some coffee, which meant that for a while, the driving was totally kickass.

We were making really good time, ripping along route 97 towards the town/city of Lillooet. We had covered about 75% of the distance and were scoffing at the e-mail warnings we’d received of how the roads into Whistler were “treacherous,” “winding,” etc., until we turned onto the “scenic highway” that is route 99. It was pretty awesome, but it slowed our progress to about 20 miles an hour.

Pretty sweet road...

Our goal for the evening was to reach Whistler by 8:30 PM, which we figured would give us enough time to attend the “Spyder Media Party” to which all media were invited, and at which they promised that all in attendance would be given free gift bags, and, we really hoped, some dinner. Again, while FasterSkier staff always adhere to rigorous journalistic standards, this was a similar situation to the one I found myself in Germany: Spyder doesn’t make any xc equipment. And we were both hungry.

I think Topher and I both assumed that this place would be totally hopping, and that we’d be able to sneak in, grab a couple of the sandwiches that were awaiting us, and then leave. Surprisingly, when we got there, there were about six other people in the room, total: two Spyder PR people, two other journalists, and an artist who was painting the new Spyder racing suit onto a naked woman. I kid you not:

If you're offended, don't look at this

Needless to say, I didn’t actually notice what was going on when I stepped in the door-I was too focused on the cupcakes. I had a delicious chocolate one with vanilla frosting. At a certain point I turned around to check out the rest of the store where this event was being held, and lo and behold…well, yeah. I turned back around very fast and tried to focus on what the Spyder PR woman was telling us about the conductive capacities of the silver fibers in the new suit. Is this what the Olympics is going to be like? Hm. And then the woman insisted on making things really awkward by spefically POINTING OUT the painted woman behind me, I asked her if I could take a picture, because some things just have to be blogged for posterity. She encouraged me, which made things even weirder. After receiving our sweet gift bags, Topher and I busted the f— out of there back to our condo.

The next day, I got credentialed:

Huge baller credentials

This is pretty sweet for a few reasons. First, it’s legit. Second, note the photo. I think it’s kind of thuggin’. Third, see that infinity symbol on the left? That denotes the infinitely baller status that said credential grants to its bearer: basically, Topher and I can get into any event that we want, save figure skating (woe is us), and the gold medal hockey game (admittedly kind of a bummer, but I’m willing to make the sacrifice). It remains to be seen if we actually have time to go anywhere aside from the nordic events, but in theory, it’s totally sweet.

We spent some time yesterday in the Whistler Media Center, which is sweet, but nothing particularly surprising.

Not impressive

The most notable part is that the Olympic organizers appear to assume that all the journalists at the Olympics are total hacks. Inside each of those boxes are “fast facts” and “flash quotes” from all of the different sports. I suppose if you’re a reporter from a small paper and you’re covering a whole bunch of different events, this stuff could be useful, but it’s also highly inane. Could anyone really use this one-liner from a Lichtensteinian downhiller-”on the Canadians having home course advantage: ‘The Canadians have an advantage here because they have been able to train this one here.’” That’s it. No context. Nothing else on this sheet of paper on Canada having home course advantage or from this guy about anything, whatsoever. Um, cool.

Other tidbits from the media center(s):

–the fact that they want $260 for 14 days of internet access. Wow. And you’re not allowed to use a wireless modem or anything like that, or they cut off your fingers.

–security. We went though kind of an enhanced security screening off the bus in Vancouver-I think it was for people going straight to the opening ceremonies.  Similar to the airport, except the people operating the equipment didn’t seem to have any idea what they were doing. There was a sign on the wall that says explicitly that media are allowed to bring in small quantities of food and drink, but the five people inspecting bags at the end of the conveyer belt were engaged in an extensive debate about whether or not this was actually true. They had pulled out a media gift bag given to an Asian journalist that had chips and gum in it. Eventually they decided that the gum was okay, but the chips had to go. The guy tried to take them back so that he could just eat them right there, but he ended up having to tear them away from the security person-maybe he was hungry and was trying to score some food for himself. Actually, in retrospect, that could have been what was motivating these security screeners all along.

I wasn’t thinking too hard and ended up going through the x-ray with a PB+J sandwich in my bag. Luckly, they didn’t catch me-I’m pretty sure if they had it would have been a bloodbath, or at least a jelly-bath.

An illegal PB+J. Please no one report me.

So now I’m ensconced in the press center, trying to actually get some work done. We’ll see. I picked up my ticket for the opening ceremonies this morning from the USOC. They told me to “have fun.” I am not sure that they would have said this to a grizzled veteran, which made me a little bit irritated. But then I thought about it, and though it takes a lot after getting to go to Nationals, Germany, and Canmore, I have to say that I am a bit wide-eyed. I’m not doing anything differently-still walking around the press center with five days of scruff in dirty jeans and a Bowdoin sweatshirt. But I’m walking past people with credentials that say they’re from the AP, BBC, CBC, etc., listening to them asking questions, talk to their editors, and jump over some of the same mundane BS hurdles here that everyone has to. The cool part is that there feels like there will be actual work to do-while few people are going to be reading our coverage of the opening ceremonies, it is pretty exciting to think that there will be a bunch of people who turn to us for the first stuff from the xc races. And if Kris Freeman wins a medal on Wednesday and someone sitting in their house in Iowa does a Google search for his name (assuming they don’t misspell it), they’re going to find us. That’s pretty exciting-now we just have to not screw it up. Sorry for all this emo-weenieness, but this does feel pretty monumental (and yeah, that’s what she said).

More soon!

40 cameras at the press conference about the Georgian luger.

Last time I wrote, I was chilling (literally [I know, I used that joke already]) in Fairbanks. Before I left, I encountered some huge baller journalism:

Woof

My original plan for the winter after Nationals was to hang out in Fairbanks, cruise back to Seattle after a couple of weeks, then drive with Topher up to Canmore for the World Cups. Then, I was skiing in Fairbanks, and I ran into a family member of one of the competitors at U-23’s. Basically, she offered to let me stay with them in Germany and report on the races. Turns out plane tickets from Seattle to Switzerland (closest airport) aren’t insurmountable expensive, and a whole crapload of logistics later, I was on my way (after first passing through Wasilla, home of Sarah Palin).

Wasilla is rad. Photo by Nick Crawford

I had a night in Seattle on the way with some friends there, and we had a pleasant evening sampling some of the city’s famous breweries. We also paid a visit to a Mexican taco stand, which ended up being very fortuitous. Sadly, I did not order the passport meal because my passport wasn’t on me, but I am 100% sure that I would have forgotten to bring said passport to the airport had I not seen this menu at 11:00 the night before I left.

I had a vegetarian taco...

On the plane from Seattle to Washington D.C., I ran into one of my professors from college, Nat Wheelwright. How crazy is that? In addition to having an awesome first name, Nat is an excellent biology professor. He was on his way to Zurich to discuss song sparrow genetics with some Euro scientists…

I think he's taking a nap...

In the United Airlines magazine, they had a pretty hilarious inane story on a Ghanian alpine skier who’s competing in Whistler. The author said that the skier’s story “may well be the definitive triumphal story of the Vancouver games.” Really? A Ghanian ex-pat who works in an office in Britain skiing to a mediocre finish in Whistler could be the “definitive triumphal story”? (I promise, there really wasn’t much more to the story than this–although he does train inside, which is pretty sweet.) This is why the mainstream media should stick to writing about football…

Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong

A shot from the Dulles airport that needs no explanation:

The fake grass is the best part

On the way up to cruising altitude on my flight to Copenhagen, I discovered that 20,000 feet is a similar climate to Fairbanks:

Fairbanks-esque weather

Then I made it to Zurich, Switzerland, which is the closest airport to Hinterzarten, where the races were taking place. They were having a sale on Jesus:

Not sure what exactly is going on here...

On the drive, someone in Germany got pretty psyched that they figured out where the village of Aule is:

Rad Swiss signs

In Germany, it turns out that the championships were sponsored by this crazy euro-disneyland type place called Europa Park. Midway through the week, they had this crazy gala banquet for the volunteers, some of the coaches, and the media, if they wanted. Normally accepting free meals would not mesh with my journalistic standards, especially ones that included amazing German beer, quail, steak, white chocolate mousse, and contortionists (yes, there is a woman inside that ball):

Really, she's inside it. Later it opened in half and she dangled by her feet...

But I figured that the likelihood I would ever be on assignment at Europa Park was pretty low. And I’m young and a ski journalist. So I went, and it was awesome. And totally insane. It was like dinner theater kind of, but basically a variety show instead of anything with a narrative. It included a beauty pageant, a ventriloquist who took me from my spot at the dinner table up on stage in front of 500 people and made me look like a total jackass (Abi Holt has video, and I am hoping that it never sees the light of day), some really crazy strong dudes, singers, an out-of-shape older guy guy who all of a sudden started jumping on a trampoline and doing ridiculous stunts that seemed like they should have given him a heart attack, and plenty of other stuff.

It also included a rendition of the horribly obnoxious and persistently catchy official song of the championships. My hunch is that this guy is an actor/employee of Europa Park. He was around all week with those wooden skis, signing autographs, singing the dumb song, and gyrating his hips in a manner that I would not have approved of if my small children were watching.

Also, it snowed all the f—— time in Germany. This made for some pretty epic drives up to the venue, which have been well documented by the members of the U.S. team there. One thing that I will add is that even though the drive to the venue entails going up a very steep pass that seems to be subjected to constant blizzard-like conditions, nobody in this area appeared to realize that it might be a good idea to get some snow tires or chains for their cars, leading to situations like this one:

Hm....

On the other hand, all the snow led to one of the most awesome skis I’ve ever gotten to go on. First tracks for like 15k, got to go down into a whole different valley, great views of the countryside, villages, etc.

You can't see the extremely sweet corduroy

On my last night in Germany, I tagged along on a trip to the city of Freiburg with some of the Americans, whereupon we found an interesting beverage. I am curious to find out how the American Birkebeiner got its official drink into a German bar menu:

Wodka and Red Bull...yum.

On the airplane back, there were a couple of interesting things in the newspaper. First, I don’t know exactly what this advertisement is going for, but I really like it:

Violins+Guinness

Also, Petter Northug on the cover of one of the Norwegian newspapers (I think it’s Norwegian; I don’t honestly know).

XC is a big deal in Norway

I also got a chance to buzz into Zurich on the train on the way back, which was pretty rad:

Zurich is nice

Then, we drove from Seattle to Canmore. This was a two-day process, which also entailed a stop in Winthrop, Washington for some huge baller skiing in the Methow Valley.

Since we are such important ski journalists, Topher has some serious equipment that we used to enhance productivity on our drive. You can see here the computer charger and cellular modem that gives us rad internet access on the road.

A normal day in the office

One other interesting aspect of our drive is the car that I am driving. As I mentioned in my post about the cross country drive, there is a minor problem with the ABS in my car, which leads to a pretty rad warning light:

Imagine seeing that every two miles...

This problem has worsened over the last week. Pretty much every time we go around a righthand turn, we get a really annoying high-pitched whine that for some reason seems to be disconcerting to any passengers that we have along. I can’t really tell why…

This is all for this post–I think I am going to put up another one with some observations in writing from the last few weeks. Unfortunately I just don’t feel like photos and writing mix very well, so this will be separate…

“Your blog has lost its edge now that you’ve gotten all professional,” he said.

A lot of other people I’ve talked to feel the same way. And I do too. It sucks. It’s true: ever since I started being serious, my blog has sucked.

In all fairness, I think that there are good reasons for seriousness. As much as the internet is sweet, I don’t think that anyone is actually going to pay me real money after I show them blog posts on how purple is the color of sexual frustration, or about how I am the fastest Jewish skier in the EISA. Or maybe they will, but I’m not sure that those are the kinds of jobs that I want. Okay, actually, given the state of the economy, if anyone reads this and does want to offer me a job, you should probably let me know. But you get my drift.

Also, now that I’m trying to actually be a “legit” ski reporter, there are other reasons to be serious. It probably would not make people want to talk to me if I started making jokes about, like, Mike Sinnott smoking crack on the side of the trail, or who would win in a coach’s cage match between Pepa and Eli Brown (predictions?). If I did stuff like that, I’d end up like Stinson (just kidding Patrick!).

But then again, Patrick writes some pretty contentious stuff on his blog on a regular basis, and he’s still a FasterSkier employee, which makes me think that there’s plenty of funny s— that happens all the time that I can write about without losing my job, or even seriously damaging my ability to do it. I mean, for one, I do stupid things on a regular basis that most people would probably find pretty hilarious, and as one of my friends says, you can always make fun of yourself. And then, when you consider the number of happening places I’m going this winter (Canmore, the Olympics) and the number of hilarious clueless tourists that will be in attendance, it seems like it would be a pretty big waste not to bring the blog back to full force. Not to mention the fact that it really sucks when people tell you that you have lost your edge.

So, starting today, I bring you the revitalized Nat Herz blog, complete with (hopefully close to the) original levels of inanity and irreverence. And requests for sponsorship: I’m still skiing around on two different kinds of poles, two different kinds of boots, and two different kinds of skis-it’s a travesty. At least I have a sweet new FasterSkier jacket.

For this first post on my born-again blog, I’ve got a report from Alaska.

After a few weeks hanging out in Anchorage covering Nationals, I caught a ride in a rad Suburban up to Fairbanks, where I’m chilling (literally) with my friend Nick (who coaches for FXC) for a week before heading down to Canmore via Seattle.

Throughout the 8-hour drive, I experienced a full spectrum of emotion as I observed the fluctuations of the dashboard thermometer: impatience, as the temperature refused to budge from the high teens; excitement, as it finally began its downward fall; anxiety, as it approached the -16 “Steinbock/Johnny Klister threshold”; and finally awe, as it plunged below -20, ultimately reaching its nadir at -30.

See...I'm not making it up.

My first full day in Fairbanks was pretty cold, even by Alaska standards. It was -30 outside Nick’s A-frame when we got up (making for a 90+-degree differential between inside and out), and even by the time we rolled out to Birch Hill around 2, it was -25. I lasted just over 30 minutes outside, wearing a lot of clothes.

After breaking the seal on the race season in late December in Minneapolis, I had been able to put in a pretty solid training block while in Anchorage to rebuild my base after a fall of sitting around in an office in New York City. I did a couple of overdistance workouts (skis for longer than half an hour), a bunch of specific strength (working on developing my thumb and ring-finger muscles by doing a lot of note-taking), and a few hard interval sessions (running around in snowboots and full winter apparel to watch the mass start and sprint races at different points along the course), as well as some pace workouts (trying to keep up with Rob Whitney as he skis at level one pace).

Serendipitously, my visit to Fairbanks coincided with the storied “Town Race Series #2,” a 10k classic competition around the trails at Birch Hill, and I figured that my solid base-building efforts of the past few weeks had put me in a position to have some success here. And, if all else failed, racing at -20 would leave me with a good blog post, even if it also meant a trip to the emergency room or diminished reproductive capacity.

I had missed the pre-registration deadline, but it turns out that being a ski journalist can come in handy sometimes. I e-mailed my Fairbanks connection to request a start position, and since he also happened to be the race organizer here, I received an e-mail stating that “I think there’s a bib reserved for a huge baller. Maybe #666.” Finally-someone treating me with the respect I deserve. I mean, every race should keep a bib open for a huge baller, just in case I decide to show up. (American Birkebeiner organizers-I know you’re reading this. I’ll be at the Olympics this year, but I just read how you are offering free lifetime entries for Olympians. You didn’t specify that they had to be Olympic athletes…and I do really like #666.)

My excitement over getting into the race quickly diminished when I looked over at the thermometer again. Nick told me that the middle school races are cancelled if the temperatures are below -10, but that the rest of the field would still go as long as it stayed above -20. Fortunately an inversion appeared to be setting up for the evening, which would most likely leave Birch Hill above the Fairbanks-legal racing limit for the next day. (For those of you not from Alaska, an inversion is a psychological disorder afflicting residents of this state that causes denial of preposterously cold temperatures. Symptoms include training and racing at temperatures below -10 degrees F.)

When we woke up yesterday morning, I don’t remember what the temperature was, but it was definitely still cold. The inversion had set in at full force up at Birch Hill, however, and when we arrived around 10:00, coaches were already there prepping skis and volunteers were outside setting up the course as if it were 45 degrees warmer. I threw a coat of CH4 on my race skis and went upstairs to ponder my clothing options.

The middle school race was indeed cancelled, but the high school and senior women’s race went off as scheduled, with temperatures around -15. This left me with very few options. If high school girls were outside racing, I didn’t have much of a choice left myself.

By the time I went outside to “warm up” (not sure that you can really go outside and warm up in these kinds of conditions, but whatever), I think the temperature was up to -10. Balmy. I skied about two k, put in about 60 seconds of level three, and called it good. I went to the line, took off my jacket, and put on my poles. I was ready to go. My warm-up pants? Those were staying on-I only brought one pair of windbriefs with me to the venue, and trust me: there are some things that are more important than aerodynamics.

I stepped up to the line. In addition to the fact that I was still wearing my warm-up pants, I was also sporting a buff over my nose (but not my mouth), and my bib was definitely not on correctly (it was one of those annoying paper bibs with those stupid elasticky holder-onners-I may have a bachelor’s degree from an excellent college, but I’m still too dumb to figure those things out). I don’t have a good metaphor to use to describe what I looked like, but I’m pretty confident that I did not look like a legit athlete, and especially not someone whose job it is to write about and judge the performances of elite athletes.

While looking good is the most important part of skiing, fortunately having fun comes in a close second. Despite the fact that I was going the same pace as Nick’s high school athletes who were skiing behind me at a talking pace, it was still pretty sweet to get out and hammer a little bit. Everything hurt, including my self esteem. But racing is always rad, even at -10.

In the end, I finished 12^th. I can take pride in the fact that I would have been the fourth high-schooler. And I also did not get girled. Boo-ya. However, I did get beat by about five minutes in a 7k, so I compiled a list of excuses:

1. I was wearing my warm-up pants. This definitely added a minute to my time due to loss of aerodynamics.

2. My bib was all funky and flapping around. This cost me another minute.

3. I didn’t have a cold-air mask. One more minute, and also permanent lung damage, unfortunately.

4. Somehow, my skis were slippery. 30 seconds.

5. The rest of the field was from Fairbanks, and they know the trails. 30 more seconds.

6. I didn’t have any rub-ons. Yes, it was -10 degrees and nobody else had any rub-ons, but I sure could have used the psychological benefit. One more minute.

This leaves me just about tied with Tyson Flaharty, the eventual winner. But unfortunately for Tyson, the race organizers forgot to subtract the “huge baller bonus” from my time. In New England, they have the “Freeman rule,” which keeps really really fast people from coming to Junior Olympic qualifiers and screwing up the points for everyone else. The “huge baller bonus” is just like this, except I’m not really really fast (or even really fast, or even fast), this race wasn’t a Junior Olympic qualifier, and I definitely did not go fast enough to screw up the points. Basically what it does is just subtract however much time from my result is required for me to be declared the victor of the race, which in this case was one second. So, yeah, pretty much I would have won if things hadn’t gotten all screwed up.

A few more days in Fairbanks, then heading down to scenic Homer to help wax skis for a big race. Hopefully I will not have to inhale too many fluoros to come up with another good story.

As the original huge baller once said, keep ‘em pointed straight ahead….

One more picture:

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner engages in some huge baller journalism...

NYC from the 68th floor of the Empire State Building. Thanks to Britt Harwood, who smuggled me up here as allegedly a participant in an LSAT prep class...

But to make a long story short, the internship ended on December 18th, and since winter is for skiing, not sitting around in an office, it was time to get in gear. I left New York the day after my job finished, on the 19th, got home, went to bed, got up, packed up all my stuff, and drove off in my sister’s car. No sooner than 2 miles into a 3100 mile journey (for the record, that’s less than one tenth of one percent), the dashboard starting flashing a big, red, all-caps light that said STOP! BRAKE FAULT! YOU’RE F—ED! (Okay, maybe not the last part). I pulled over and used the brakes to stop. They worked. I kept going and tried the brakes again. They still worked. The light turned off. I performed a quick cost-benefit analysis of continuing to Williamstown, Massachusetts, which resulted in me continuing to Williamstown, Massachusetts.

After a night at FasterSkier world headquarters (editor Topher Sabot’s house), I continued on to Ithaca, then Chicago and Minneapolis. Minneapolis was sweet–good skiing and really good food, courtesy of my friend and former teammate Jeff Bush and his family. When the fourth-largest snowstorm in North Dakota history decided to block my path for a few days, they graciously allowed me to celebrate Christmas with them, too (somewhat of a novelty for the EISA’s fastest Jewish skier [although--and I hope no Jewish Olympic Committee officials are reading this {something tells me there aren't}--I have celebrated Christmas before with my dad's Episcopalian wife]).

From Minneapolis, I spent my one night in a very cheap, only moderately dingy Motel Six in Fargo, North Dakota (no wood/body-part chipping, fortunately), then moved on to beautiful Glendive, Montana, where I spent the night at a friend’s house. Oh, wait, I raced in Minneapolis. And lost six minutes to Matt Liebsch in a 10k. Fortunately, there are no fitness requirements for being an xc ski journalists, and also fortunately, I have some room for improvement with my training, given the two hours per week that I got in New York.

Also before reaching Glendive, I got a chance to visit the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, in Western North Dakota. For those of you who think there isn’t anything cool in North Dakota, you’re wrong. There are actually 16 cool things in North Dakota: Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the 15 elk inside it.

Unfortunately, I didn't have my biathlon rifle ready for the elk, but fortunately, my friend's dad shot one (in a different location), and I got to have elk lasagna in Missoula.

In the park, I drove about 10 miles down the plowed scenic road to where it became unplowed. Then I strapped on a pair of my classic rock skis, and headed out for a quick tour. There was one other person within a 10 mile radius, and he was about 250 yards down the trail. Once I passed him, there was absolutely nobody around, and the scenery was spectacular.  The road was unplowed, but most of the powder had blown off, leaving a 3-inch deep layer of packed snow on the road that was perfect for extra-blue classic skiing. I skied out for about an hour, climbed a hill, took some pictures, and skied back.

Some baller skiing. Theodore Roosevelt=the man.

After the park and eastern Montana, I drove to Missoula, and then to Seattle. This is a spectacular stretch of driving, and I highly recommend it to anyone with a lot of time on their hands and a fuel-efficient vehicle (there are a lot of uphills).

No, I do not condone shooting pictures while driving.

The only bad part about this section was that I’d finished my book on tape (John Krakauer’s “Where Men Win Glory”, about Pat Tillman–I really recommend it, except for the parts where he tries to tell the history of the Cold War) and there were no radio stations, except for one that had these really dumb, obnoxious DJ’s talking about the club that they were building (?) inside the radio station, and they would NOT shut up. I was very frustrated. In other places across the country, radio was actually very good–the public radio network across North Dakota and eastern Montana was great. Especially entertaining was the “Thomas Jefferson Radio Hour” in North Dakota, which features scholar Clay Jenkinson in character as the third president, talking about things like his relationship with his wife, and how it compared to John Adams’ relationship with his wife…for a whole hour. Okay, so actually, in this particular case, maybe the concept was better than the execution, but who cares? Two other choice (and/or shocking) quotes that I heard on the radio west of Minneapolis (and by repeating them, I certainly am not endorsing them):

1. “Those funbags of hers are really quite remarkable.” –Some DJ referring to the anatomy of Dog the Bounty Hunter’s partner.

2. “100 percent of the Islamic terrorists coming at us are Muslim.” –Some conservative commentator. Profound, and needing no further analysis.

In any case, I made it to Alaska, and I’m now chilling (literally) there, waiting for things to start happening. Hopefully the stories that come out of here in the next two weeks will be decidedly more professional and less inane than this blog post.

Because The Nation is so important, it’s in New York City, since that’s where most of the important people in the world are and we want to have them within striking distance. (I know, Barack Obama is in DC and Bjorn Daehlie is somewhere in Norway, but really, most of them are here.) But due to the fact that there are so many other important magazines covering the same kinds of important topics as The Nation and trying to talk to the same important people, it can often be quite difficult to get through to the person you want to talk to. One of the more entertaining things that happens every day (at least for me…) is when another intern (there are nine of us) picks up the phone, makes a call, and then has to introduce themselves like four times in a row (because they get transferred and transferred and transferred, or even hung up on). Other times, people simply choose not to return your calls, like yesterday when I was trying to check a fact with a neoconservative think tank, or a few weeks ago when I called a mountaintop removal mining company to confirm the height of the machine was that was spewing mine tailings into Appalachian hollows and streams. (“The author says 20 stories, but I just wanted to double check…”)

Ski journalism, on the other hand, is a little easier. This might be partially due to the fact that US Ski Team Head Coach Pete Vordenberg doesn’t own any 20-story-high pieces of machinery spewing mine tailings into Appalachian hollows and streams, or because Kikkan Randall has not been involved in any extra-judicial executions in Iraq (at least I don’t think so–FasterSkier doesn’t use fact-checkers, so none of this has been confirmed independently). But it also might have something to do with the fact that people in the cross-country ski community don’t take themselves too seriously, and maybe even enjoy their jobs.

One excellent example of this is FIS Cross Country Race Director Jürg Capol. Recently, I needed to get in touch with Jürg for a story, so I e-mailed him a list of questions. Two days later, having received no response, I tried him again. Still no response. I figured that as an important member of the international cross country skiing community, he probably felt that he didn’t have to bother with pesky American reporters. So I called up FIS headquarters in Switzerland, fully expecting to get transferred to a Swiss-speaking secretary and put on hold until the Sochi Olympics in 2014. Instead, I was greeted by a very pleasant (if initially Swiss-speaking) receptionist, who, entirely unsolicited, offered to give me Jürg’s cell phone number since he wasn’t in the office. This is quite noteworthy, given that at The Nation and other important New York places, to get an important person’s office number–let alone their cell–you have to have serious street cred, or even–dare I say it–huge baller status. And yet to get the hotline to the FIS Cross Country Race Director, I didn’t even have to give my name. All of this leads me to believe that someone has a highly inflated sense of self-importance: It’s either me, for thinking that it’s a big deal to get to talk to the FIS Cross Country Race Director, or it’s all of these New York weenies who think it’s really important to keep their telephone numbers a big secret.

In any case, Jürg’s easygoing attitude is further and perhaps best illustrated by his profile on Twitter, in which we get such lighthearted posts as “flying home:) vancouver 2010, not even 8 month to go” and then, slightly more ominously, “still at the airport, plane has technical problems, hope, they wonna solve asap…” While it is rare to get insights like this into the mind of such an important figure, even more unprecedented are intimate photographs like this one.

If only he were sitting on a 20-story-high piece of machinery spewing mine tailings into Appalachian hollows and streams instead of a toy motorcycle. Then, I’d have a story.