Happy Jack

Tordis, Anne Brit, Kat, Betsy, Åsa, Christi, Denise.  (From the Olin Armstrong archives)

I spent this past weekend in Laramie, Wyoming. I haven’t been to Laramie in 33 years - not since I graduated from college there, loaded all my things in the back of my pickup truck and drove to Alaska. The reason for my return to Laramie was a Ski Team reunion, the first ever, as far as I can tell. It had been discussed off and on for a few years, but it took the energy and motivation of one of the alumni who graduated a few years ahead of me to finally pull the trigger and make it happen.

 

On our old ski trails.

The UW Ski Team had been in place from 1946 to 1992. Ours was a good team; we had a couple of NCAA titles under our belt. But the elimination of NCAA ski teams is a theme common to many around the West. Successful and unsuccessful attempts to excise ski teams have taken place at University of Denver, Western State College, University of New Mexico, University of Nevada, Reno, Montana State University and, of course, UAA. So the elimination of the University of Wyoming Ski Team didn’t make us unusual by any means.

Jon, Karla, Bjorn Olav, Øyvind, The One and Only Bernie LaFleur, Joe, Me, Jeffe, Christi, Kirsti, Åsa. (From the Olin Armstrong archives)

I didn’t have particularly high expectations for the weekend in Laramie. I attended because I thought I might regret not attending. On my first morning in town after 33 years away, I made the 15-minute drive to our old ski trails – a place called Happy Jack – to go for a little hike before meeting the group in town later in the day. I had no idea how emotional that outing would be. I ended up spending pretty much the entire day out there, rediscovering all the places where our team (and I individually) had done all those workouts, and a few races, that I really hadn’t thought much about after graduating from college. 

The incessant Wyoming wind caused a lot of snow drifts on our trails. Probably still does. We used to say, "If you can ski well at Happy Jack, you can ski well anywhere."

I learned in psych class that memory is state-dependent. It took me about ten steps out onto those ski trails for the memories to start rising to the surface. I immediately remembered how much responsibility I’d felt, as a walk-on freshman, to become a better skier so that I could eventually start contributing to the team’s success. When I arrived that first September, I knew I was going to be overmatched by my upperclassmen teammates, who’d won a national championship just prior to my arrival, and who I knew, long before I showed up in Wyoming, were going to be my role models and mentors. I recalled I always needed to make a decision before each easy team workout, whether this would be a day when I would aim to train at my “target” intensity level for the day to try to get the optimal physiological benefit from the workout (but slower than my teammates), or whether I should instead keep up with my older teammates, without regard for my heart rate, to learn how to ski through terrain at higher velocity, with better efficiency, and faster. And these decisions were made with the guidance and advice of my teammates like Per Henning, Dag, Jon Sverre, Kurt, Walter and Esbjörn. I’d felt like I had the benefit of not just our team’s coaches, Gordon Lange and Bjørn Olav Norbye, but also five or six additional advisors, because my teammates were generous with their advice. It was obvious during my freshman year that I needed to learn how to ski faster because, if my memory is correct, I was typically finishing around four minutes behind my teammates in 10km races, and around six minutes behind them in 15k races.  I was not even in the same league as them. Not even close.

Hiking the Happy Jack trails this weekend brought back those feelings that suddenly I remembered so well, and felt so intensely: excitement at being part of a group athletes that were so much better than me, most of whom had exotic Scandinavian accents, and were willing, and in fact, eager to make me part of their group, combined with the pressure and intimidation of knowing that I was going to need to do a lot of improving before I was ever going to score any points for this team. I remembered some of the things that were said in the team van on the way to practice. I remembered being in the back of the van one time, and I must have said something about some kind of aspirations for future success, because my teammate Per Henning turned around in his seat and said, “Maybe you ought to instead focus on what’s right here in front of you. You’re surrounded by good skiers right here in this van. Maybe you should try to get fast enough just to make the travel team.” And I remember Esbjörn admonishing someone on almost every van ride: “Speak fucking English! English is the official language of this team! You’re not in fucking Norway anymore!” I always thought that Esbjörn didn’t consider English profanity to be offensive because it wasn’t his native tongue, so it didn’t hit him the same way. I used to imagine him in class, turning in an assignment to a professor: “Here’s my fucking assignment. I hope I’ll get a good fucking grade like usual. I’m learning a lot of cool shit in this class, so thanks a lot for being such an awesome fucking teacher.”

The ski trails have been modernized since 1992!

Hiking at Happy Jack, I remembered how much pressure I felt to get myself to a point where I could make a contribution and score a few points for the team. I took this pressure and applied it to my coach, Gordon Lange, who’d so graciously allowed me to come to Wyoming as a walk-on in the first place. I knew I desperately needed to be on a plan of improvement, so I was always bugging Gordo to set up a “special program” for me, so I could do extra workouts and try to bridge the gap between myself and my teammates. And Gordo obliged. Team workouts were in the afternoons. But I was doing extra morning workouts a few days a week, and Gordo worked with me to modify my program to make it fit with the team but also accommodate my wish for lots of special attention. I was a bit of a control freak about each week’s training, so Gordo agreed to meet me every Monday morning to discuss and debate the week’s plan. Hiking at Happy Jack, I suddenly recalled how much of a huge pain in the ass I had been. And I knew it at the time. I felt guilty for making myself a nuisance to my coach, but I also was operating under a guiding principle of ‘no compromises, ever, on anything related to skiing’, because I felt certain that I was so far away from where I wanted to be as an athlete that there would be no way I could succeed if I were to make any concessions to group dynamics. So, not only did I feel like I was a huge pain in the ass to my coach, but to my teammates as well. This caused me some mixed feelings, because I’d never been on a team like this, full of such high performers whom I respected so much. I loved this team more than anything! But I felt like I couldn’t afford to just follow the standard program – a program which had been, obviously, quite successful for many years. There was some kind of regional development training camp in Park City, Utah one weekend that I’d qualified for. Gordo drove me there in his Chevy F-150, not the team van. This was happening outside of office hours. This was off the clock for Gordo. I didn’t take it for granted. I understood the unpaid extra effort Gordo was making. But still I tried to stay focused and stay selfish. Selfishness was necessary, I thought, in my situation. I hadn’t thought about this in years. Walking in Happy Jack this weekend brought it back. Memory is state dependent. 

1992 RMISA Championship classic race was on this trail. I think I won that one.

Hiking in Happy Jack, I passed by the old Pole Creek alpine lift line where we used to do hill bounding repeats, and I remembered the feeling of stumbling back to the team van afterwards, barely able to jog the warmdown. I passed by the little 500-meter campground road loop at base of the old alpine hill, where we spent a lot of time in November on two inches of early-season snow, going round and round and round. And the place where I’d gotten the Alpine Grizzly snowmachine and tracksetter stuck one spring in Pole Creek one morning, grooming the trail for myself after the racing season had ended. Gordo let me take the keys to the Athletic Department Suburban and trailer, and go do my thing. The machine dropped about two inches through a thin ice shelf, onto another ice shelf, creating a hole the exact size and shape of the twin Alpine tracks. I’d planned to ski on my freshly groomed tracks that day, but it never happened because I spent almost the next six hours trying to extricate the machine. After about three hours of trying to get the machine out, I bonked, drove home, made a sandwich, and drove back for another three hours of cursing before finally, in frustration, as it was getting dark, I started the machine, gunned the throttle and held it wide open, hoping to blow the engine or for something – anything – to happen. I just wanted to smash that machine, but I didn’t have a sledgehammer. Standing there next to the machine, with the throttle wide open and both tracks spinning at full speed, it suddenly lurched forward… and I was out! I pulled the Suburban into its parking spot under the football stadium stands after dark, having spent pretty much the entire day, from sunup to sundown, standing over that machine and screaming at it.

 

Here's where I got the Grizzly stuck. I spent the entire day in that frozen creek bed.

But I didn’t travel to Wyoming just to go hiking at Happy Jack. I can do that any time. This was the Ski Team reunion – the first ever – and I hadn’t even met any Ski Teamers yet. Other than a couple of old teammates I knew were coming, I really didn’t know what, or who, to expect. And I have to admit I was a little anxious. Would I even recognize these people?  Would they be the fun people I remembered from school, or a bunch of tired…… 

Just like old times. Esbjörn, Ylva, Åsa, Olin, Gina & me. (photo: Betsy Blandford Walker)

Every year at UAA, our graduates scatter to the four winds. Some stick around in Anchorage – sometimes indefinitely. Some go off to graduate school or careers in other states or on other continents. My first inclination each spring is to assume that I will never see these Seawolves again – these people whom I’ve gotten to know, and become friends with, and have spent so much time with, in team houses, in team vans, on the workout loop. But every year, I’m quicker and quicker to remind myself that experience has shown this not to be the case. As my old teammate Esbjörn told me on Saturday, this is a pretty small world, considering how big this world is. 

It was a warm vibe when all us Cowboys got together in the same room. We had all shared a similar experience, as members of the same ski team, even if some of us were on the team twenty or more years before others. Spotting my old teammates, we hardly needed reintroduction; we picked up the conversation right where we’d left off, decades ago. And I finally got to meet the people attached to the names I’d heard legends about – those who had come before me. I’d been hearing stories about these crazy individuals who’d been on the team five or ten or fifteen years before me, and now I was finally meeting them for the first time. It was fascinating to meet these people I’d only heard stories about.

 

Åsa, Betsy & Olin

I’ve been telling people for decades that NCAA skiing is the best racing circuit around. It’s a friendly and welcoming circuit, but it’s also very competitive. And it’s been this way for a long, long time. It’s not easy to win an NCAA college race, and it never has been. But we form durable friendships on this circuit. We’re all in essentially the same situation, whether at UAA or Utah or Colby College or Middlebury. We only get four years to try to win an NCAA title, after which we’re kicked off the circuit permanently. We are all full-time students. For the most part, we have similar advantages and similar constraints. And we’re all competing for a team, while doing an individual sport. It makes for a tight-knit community, and it makes for lasting friendships, even if there are decades of time between reunions. I feel very fortunate to have been able to worm my way into a situation in which I didn’t have to give up NCAA skiing after four years. Lucky to still be allowed to tag along with these young, ambitious and curious people, with a team roster that changes every year.

 

Esbjörn and me. (photo: Betsy Blandford Walker)

My weekend in Laramie gave me a few epiphanies. My old teammates are still just as interesting, engaging and warm as I remember them to be. As far as I can tell, based on meeting them over the weekend, the Cowboy skiers who came before me are as legendary as the stories I was told made them out to be. The growth experience of being on an NCAA athletic team can’t help but lead to success in later endeavors; we seem to be a group of happy and healthy people. And not much has changed on this circuit since I was racing on it 35 years ago. Sure, some things have changed - the social scene is somewhat different than it was decades ago – but I’ve been around this circuit for quite a few decades now, and I don’t think it’s any easier or any harder to win a college race now than it was then. I think the demands of, and rewards for, the student-athlete are about the same as they were back then. And I think the friendships that our UAA Seawolves are forming now are just as deep and durable as they were back then.

If you haven't been to Vedauwoo, I guess you'll want to go there soon.

Any reunion is a time for reflection. And it’s only natural to come away thinking deep thoughts. The Wyoming Cowboy Ski Team reunion put my involvement with UAA Seawolf skiing in perspective, and reminds me how important it is to me. I saw this weekend the importance of quality experience during our college-age years. There are a variety of ways to have such experiences – a college athletic team is just one of many. My old teammate Betsy and I toured around campus, sneaking into a few buildings and trying to remember where we may or may not have attended class. (I don’t mean to say we skipped class; what I mean is that we couldn’t remember which buildings were the ones where we took our classes.) It was shocking how shaky our memories were about the location of different buildings and landmarks. It occurred to me then how much poorer my memory for classroom buildings is in comparison to my memories about the people with whom I shared ski team van rides. Our Wyoming Ski Team reunion only strengthened my belief in the current value of our UAA Ski Team experience.

Back in the old football stadium, where we used to sell soda and popcorn to raise money for the ski team.

A couple days after the reunion, I was invited to dinner in Breckenridge at the home of my old teammates Åsa and Olin. Olin had brought to the reunion a couple of photo albums full of old ski team photos. He’d put in the effort, decades ago, to document our experience, and I was grateful to look through them because I’d hardly taken any photos while in college (and it’s not like we were walking around with cell phones in our pockets in 1987). Another Cowboy skier, Jørgen, had an immaculately catalogued cell phone repository of photos and result lists from his time on the team, about five years before I arrived on the scene. He had old ski results in there and everything!

Lina, Betsy, Stanzi. From the Olin Armstrong archives.

 Lately I’ve slacked off a little bit with this UAA Ski Team blog. Lately, when faced with the choice of reading something or writing something, I’ve chosen to read, based on the justification that it’s better to absorb rather than emit. But after browsing through Olin and Jørgen’s catalogs, I feel re-committed to documenting the experiences of this team. I have said for years that the main purpose of this blog is to reassure our athletes’ parents that their offspring haven’t been eaten by a polar bear or gone off and joined the circus. But I’ve come to realize that most of our Seawolves’ parents, through the magic of modern technology, probably have a pretty good idea of which continent their children are on at any given time. (Unlike my unfortunate parents. I remember my mom and dad asking me one time, “Japan?! When did you go to Japan?!  For a ski race?! Why didn’t you tell us?” And my answer was, “I was too busy to write a letter, and I guess now I should tell you I also was in Europe for the past couple of months.” I was famously bad at keeping in touch. My parents probably assumed I had been somewhere in Minnesota.) So lately, and especially after looking at Olin and Jørgen’s photos, I’ve been thinking that the more important role of the blog is simple documentation and cataloging of our experience together on this team. The longer the blog goes, the more fun it is for me to look back on the zany things that happened on this team years ago, and to remember all the interesting characters that have come through this organization. And unlike in the 1980’s, when an incoming freshman could only hear half-believable stories about those who’d come in the years before, the wizardry of modern technology allows us easy access to all those old stories, and more importantly, old photographs, from the comfort of our own living rooms, regardless of which continent we currently reside on. So I think, after the WYO ski team reunion, I’m committed to keeping this blog going, to document our Seawolf Ski Team experience together, to keep a repository of photos where we can look back on them years later, and to remember the good times we're having together. 

The whole group. At Kurt & Karla's house.