In John Brown Country

 

Winter came late this winter to the Northeast. It arrived a just a few days before we did. But it's here now. And so are we. We've had our ups and downs here in Lake Placid.  The alpiners had a rough first day. And so did we, over here at Mt Van Hoevenberg. 

Leon & Ella

But today was the day for slalom, and we scored a bunch of points and a couple of All-American finishes, so we're making a comeback. We hope to continue the trend tomorrow in the 20km classic races. 

2023 Seawolf NCAA Championship Fan Guide

 

The NCAA's begin tomorrow!  Can you believe that?

And just in the nick of time, here's your 2023 NCAA Championship Fan Guide. Scroll down to find your favorite Seawolf so you can cheer for them while watching the livestream coverage. As for where you can find this livestream coverage, I don't know. I'm not able to find any links to it. But I'm sure you're a better web surfer than I and you'll track it down somewhere.

Magnus Noroy - Nordic

Anna Berecz - Alpine Assistant Coach

Astrid Stav - Nordic

Trond Flagstad - Head Nordic Coach

Ainsley Proffitt - Alpine

Adam Verrier - Nordic Volunteer

Ella Bromee - Alpine

Sparky Anderson - Head Coach

Toomas Kollo - Assistant Nordic Coach

Tuva Bygrave - Nordic

Ashleigh Alexander - Alpine

Pascale Paradis - Nordic

Leon Nikic - Alpine

Ari Endestad - Nordic

Morten Kjerland - Alpine Volunteer

Peter Hinds - Nordic

To Lake Placid!

 

Flying in or out of Anchorage on a sunny day can make for great views out the window. This is the Chugach Range just behind Girdwood.

As is often the case, February was very busy. We flew back to Anchorage from Colorado a few weeks ago. We had a series of four RMISA races in Alaska, including the RMISA Championships.  I spent a week in Wisconsin. Then we had a few days of training and here we are in Lake Placid, New York, for the NCAA Championships. Most of the team caught a cold after our series of Alaska RMISA races, but we're recovering and hoping for good things a couple days from now, here at the NCAA Championships. 

Arriving at the Team House here in Lake Placid.

Ski stadium reconnaissance

This is our rental car. Trond parked it in the wrong spot and they put a bubble around it! Can you believe that?

Team dinner at the house.

Tuva and Trond

Decisions...

Every once in a while, Toom, Trond and I can break free for a little coaches training session. Today we made a lap around the 1980 Olympic 50km course. What a fantastic race trail that was - and is!

In the Boat

I always like coming back home to Alaska after a racing trip. I love the skiing here, and the big mountains, and the ocean, and everything else. But there's no denying that it can be kind of a dark place in mid-January. Our morning training sessions start at 8:30. That means we start our workouts under the lights.

After a brief stay at home, we're back on the road again. This time in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. It's considerably more sunny here.

Toomas & Trond. Ski testing.

Tuva G was doing double duty this past weekend: providing feeds for her teammates during the classic race....

...and racing in the skate race.

Here's Pascale at the start of the third of four laps. Downtown Steamboat a few hundred meters in the background.

Toomas & Trond. Working hard to get out on course and into position to give splits.

The day after our final race of the weekend, we got together for a group workout with CU, DU, and UAF. It was nice to get to know our competition a little better.

This morning's workout was delightful.

Travel Travails

We like to ski to work whenever we can.

 Some people think it's a bummer to get marooned in western Alaska in a mid-winter ice storm.  Toom and I traveled west earlier this week to take a look at a few houses scattered across the landscape. It took us a couple attempts to get to where we wanted to go. Our first flight was cancelled. But it wasn't cancelled while we were in the airport, waiting to go. It was cancelled when we were about a thousand feet above the airstrip at our destination. We were a little late to our destination because, as we approached, we got word that a squall had come through and covered the airstrip in a layer of ice. So we flew laps above the airport while the crew de-iced the landing strip. After a half-hour or so, we got word that everyone was ready and waiting for us on the ground. But just around the time I would have expected to look out the window and see the ground a thousand feet below, the pilot hit the gas, pulled the nose up, and back we went to Anchorage. We were told that visibility had reduced to zero on the ground at just the very last moment.

You can stash your luggage in the forest and it's usually there when you get back to it.

So that day was pretty much spent, and we went back to the Anchorage Int'l airport the following morning for another try. No problems getting to our destination this time. But the word on the mean streets of Dillingham was we'd better get across the bay and out of there before nightfall because more weather was coming at us from across the Bering Sea. So we rounded up a pilot, a Piper Navajo, and a volleyball player from Manakotak trying to get to Anchorage in time for her charter flight to Arctic Winter Games in Alberta, and we flew across the bay, to a big, beautiful paved military runway from from whence we were pretty sure we'd make it back to Anchorage in time for Saturday's interval workout with the Seawolves.

Skiers and volleyball players.

But we were thwarted once again! Another blast of icy rain blew through right around the time we were planning to board a flight out of here. It caused all the cars and houses and trees to become encased in a layer of ice, it dropped traffic speeds from 55mph to 20mph, it caused a guy name Joe to slide his pickup truck into the ditch right outside the airport, and it made it so that the two dead caribou that were being dragged back into town behind a guy on a snowmachine hardly got scuffed up at all, due to the icy sheen covering everything. And it caused our airplane to bail on us, leaving us here for another night.

Bristol Bay

So we're not at practice with the Seawolves this Saturday morning, and it's kind of a bummer. Because I bet todays workout is a good one! 

If you're in a western village overnight, there might be a basketball tournament you can go to.

But the weather and prospects for today's flight are looking much better! If we can just make it back to Anchorage by 6am on Tuesday, then we'll be able to board the plane with the team for our next Skiwolf road trip, to Colorado.

This was was last week on Kodiak Island; not this week in Bristol Bay. Note the sushi platter on the dashboard.

One Team

Our home training hill at Arctic Valley in Anchorage.

Through most of the winter, the Seawolf downhillers and the Seawolf uphillers are on different travel schedules. But we're the same team, and we're competing in the same RMISA ski meets. Often, as in the case of the MSU Invitational, we will complete the nordic portion of the event one week, but the ski meet won't be over until a couple weeks later when the alpiners show up and do their thing to finish off the event. You may wonder why it's scheduled this way. For-profit alpine resorts are not motivated to host ski races on the busy weekends because that's when the lifts and slopes fill up with paying customers. It's not in the resorts' best interest to close a section of the mountain on a busy Saturday morning to run a giant slalom race. Consequently, alpine races tend to be scheduled on weekdays, at times of least conflict with the weekend rush. Sometimes those windows of opportunity for alpine races can be separated by a week or two from the nordic portion of our RMISA ski meets.

Training at Arctic Valley

Our alpine skiers just finished up a set of races in Utah. Now they move on to Montana to finish off the MSU Invitational, in which we're currently in second place after the nordic portion of the event.

Carmen won silver at the World University Games a week or so ago in Lake Placid!