UAA Nordic Ski Team: December 2022

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Copper Country

I guess it was probably a day or two ago when I arrived at the Anchorage International Airport at 3:20am to meet the Seawolves for a 5am flight that would get us to Minneapolis by early evening. I had a few things to wrap up around the house, and a couple of errands to run. An old college ski teammate was in town with his daughter, who was competing in the tryouts for Biathlon World Juniors, and I wanted to get together with him for a beer and hear the latest news from his world. Considering that I was going to need to wake up a little after 2am anyway to make our flight, it seemed easier to simply stay up all night rather than to try to get one or two hours' of half-sleep.

I'm not someone who sleeps on airplanes. That's just not my thing. I enjoy flying too much to sleep through it. A six-hour drive from Minneapolis to Houghton, Michigan after our arrival meant that we got to bed the next night (this morning) around 3:45am. It might be another day or so before we're all feeling completely rested.

Our first RMISA college race of the year is the day after tomorrow here at the US National Championships. We're looking forward to it. There's plenty of snow, plenty of daylight, and comfortable weather. And most of us have never been here before. It's always fun to see a new part of the world.

We're enjoying each others' company. We're having a lot of fun and a few laughs. We talked about our new year's resolutions over dinner this evening. One resolution that nobody made tonight was to stay awake to ring in the new year. After our recent travel to Michigan from faraway states and distant countries, we'll all be fast asleep long before the arrival of 2023.

Monday, December 19, 2022

Preseason Has Ended

There's a lot of anticipation, nervousness and trepidation going into any new competition season. Especially in cross-country skiing where "...the skier is made during the summer..." and you try to formulate the right plan in the spring for a summer's worth of the right proportions of hard training, easy training, recovery, and all the other elements that you hope will produce a couple months' worth of really high-end performances. But you never really know how it worked out until you look back at it at the end of the season, in hindsight.

At Kincaid Park. Before our three big snowstorms last week.

It's in November and December, though, that you start getting clues about different scenarios that might play out in the coming season in regards to your racing fitness and your potential for winning ski races. It's natural, even as the early-season results start to come in, to speculate about the meaning of those results, whether they're good, bad, or mediocre: "I'm skiing pretty slow and feeling heavy, but does that mean my summer training sucked, or does it just mean that it's going to take me six or eight races to get going, and then I'm going to be on fire?" Or, "I won the race, but does that mean my summer training made me a lot faster skier than I was last year, or am I going to be a 'Christmas Star' this year? Or worse, a Thanksgiving Turkey? Or even worse, a Halloween Pumpkin!"

At the time of this writing, each of our athletes is in their own unique situation in regards to the results they've achieved in our early-season races of the past month, and each has their own mix of confidence and nervousness about what message their pre-season results might be telling them about the racing season to come. In my conversations with our skiers, the only through-line that connects all of them is the sense that the results thus far are less meaningful in and of themselves than for their use as predictors of what's going to happen between January and early March.

But now the pre-season has ended. We finished final exams last week and we raced the Besh Cup this past weekend at Kincaid Park. We've had some really extraordinary results lately. And we've also had some less-than-optimal showings. We can analyze these results and speculate about what they mean for the coming season. But the real racing season starts in a couple of weeks, at our first NCAA college races, in Michigan. It won't be long now before we can end the speculation about what our pre-season results are saying. We'll soon be able to get down to business with the real thing. Our flight south departs Anchorage Int'l on December 30.

Thanks to Freshman Carmen, who came out to the Besh Cup to cheer for Matt, Astrid, Tuva, Pacale, and the rest of us! This is Carmen's photo.

Friday, December 2, 2022

Tropical Yukon

Our alpine skiers like to spend a couple weeks at our secret spot in the Yukon Territory each November. It's dark and it's usually really cold at this time of year. That makes our alpine skiers tough, which is necessary for their sport, which involves bashing into plastic sticks all day long, and sometimes crashing into safety netting at 50 miles per hour. But this year things were a little different. It was as dark as usual, but the cold weather was nowhere to be found. We spent the entire 2+ week training camp in temperatures right around freezing. It was glorious.

As in recent years, our team was generously hosted by Amanda and Judd Dueling, and Elizabeth Reid and Perry Hynes. This is no small thing. Our alpine team is big this year, and we pretty much overran both of their houses. Somehow, our hosts still had the energy left at the end of the camp to have the whole team over for a big Thanksgiving dinner. Our training camp would not be the same at all without the generous support of our friends in Riverdale. We know this because we have done this camp in the past with a different lodging situation, so we appreciate how good we have it now!

The snow at our secret training spot was perfect, the local people were as polite, friendly and generous as Canadians are reputed to be, and the lift lines were nonexistent. We got a lot of good work done, and we're ready for the competition season!