Back in the 'Boat

The NCAA national championship will be held here in Steamboat Springs in the first week of March. But we have a more immediate concern - this weekend's University of Colorado invitational meet. We rolled in to town this afternoon after a relaxed half-day drive from Pinedale. We're settled in at the team house at the base of Mt Werner. There's heaps of snow on the ground.  All is good.

The road in Wyoming

The "Prairie Dog" in Wyoming

The route in Colorado

Hanna in repose

Luca in his phone

Sara in disco heaven

Sara in motion

Hanna in trouble

Toomas in style!

Rendezvous!

Today we put Bozeman in our rear view mirror.  Destination Steamboat Springs. Stopped in West Yellowstone mid-way for a couple hours' worth of classic skiing. Tons of snow. Great skiing. Stopped in Pinedale, Wyoming for the night.

The back side of the Tetons.

Video analysis tonight in Pinedale, Wyoming. Sara and Mario.

The training never ends.  This is how we eat our meals on this crazy ride.

I leave you with this.

Bozeman Day 2

Today was 15km for women, 20km for men

Mass start

Classic

+2 degrees celcius

Snowing heavily

Here are some pictures:

About 800 meters into the men's race

Up the first big climb.  Etienne went on the attack early - at the 1km mark. That's him at the front, in black.

An aggressive first lap for Etienne.

Toomas Kollo was lurking a few places back, in the front group.

Etienne leading halfway through lap 1.

Marcus Deuling

Eventually, Etienne was skiing by himself, off the front.

The main front pack, including Tom, caught up to Etienne at the 5km mark.  Etienne latched onto the group.

Tom, in the mix all day.

Etienne, mid-race. Hanging onto the group.

The final hill of the race.  Toomas in about 12th/13th.  He won a sprint to get tenth at the finish line.

The first step to winning a race is winning a lap.

It was good to see aggressive skiing out there today.  Mackenzie put herself in the leader group right from the start. The group of seven skied together for the first half of the race before splitting up, with Mackenzie getting seventh, our best result of the day, and Mackenzie's best classic college race of her career so far. Toomas got tenth, Etienne was sixteenth, but Etienne came with his game face on and gave it his best shot, and Tom was there to pull through mid-race with our best result on the men's side. Things are improving. We showed some spark today, even if the results are yet to come.

We leave Montana tomorrow for Colorado, and another set of races next weekend.

(If you're wondering why there are no pictures of the women racing, it's because I've been in the wax cabin during their races. Perhaps next weekend I'll get to see the women race.)

Bozeman Day 1

Soft snow, comfortable weather, slow courses, fast skiers.  This is RMISA racing.  Today was 5km skating individual start for the women, 10km for the men.  Here are a few photos:

Team travel - by elevator

Team dinner

Team meeting

The head coach has a variety of responsibilities, including speaking with the press.  Fortunately, it's not always necessary to wear a suit and tie to press engagements.

Pati

Marcus

Toomas

Mario

Etienne

Toomas

Toomas again... and Hanna

Mario

Etienne

Mackenzie Qualifies for Under-23 World Championships!

As I was speed-reading the newspaper article about Casey Wright that appeared here on this blog last week, I noticed that Casey had qualified to race for Australia in the Under-23 World Championships to be held next month in Romania.  She had been planning to compete at the championships until she got the opportunity to come to UAA, at which point she decided to skip the U23's in order to focus instead on the RMISA circuit and the NCAA Championships.

She's not the only one on this team who's skipping U23's in order to focus on the college circuit. Mackenzie Kanady spent the week before last in Houghton, Michigan competing in the US National Championships, where she was one of the top five under-23 women in the USA and thus qualified for the U23 Championships. But like her teammate Casey, Mackenzie has also decided to skip the races in Romania and focus on this year's NCAA Championship races in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. This is Mackenzie's senior year, and she'd like to finish off her college career in style.

Congratulations, Mackenzie, for making the U23 World Championship team!

Mackenzie, fighting the coach over the radio dial, looking for Jim Croce songs.

Sharing the Highs and Lows of a Niche Sport

I'm sure you were glued to the internet during the past couple of days, keeping up with the results from UAA's first set of RMISA races in Utah.  And I'm sure you saw the name Casey Wright in the results - UAA's second-fastest woman both days.  And I'm sure you wondered to yourself, "Who is this Casey Wright?" And I'm sure you worked your back through all the UAA Ski Team blog posts over the past several months, searching for a reference to a "Casey Wright".

But you won't find any prior references to Casey in the blog.  That's because she blew into town recently from Australia, where she just finished the racing season Down Under. Casey told me the other day that between the Aussie winter racing season and the Euro winter racing season, she is now commencing her eighth consecutive winter racing season (two per annum). Or maybe it was her sixth - I don't quite remember - but it was a lot!  We're glad to have Casey here in Alaska with us now.

As always, the UAA Ski Team Blog interns have been working overtime trying to get up to speed regarding our new skier. I was getting a little annoyed with the intern expense reports that were being submitted (Quantas plane tickets, rental cars, wallaby-burger receipts, etc) until the following report was filed here at HQ, making it all worthwhile.

You'll notice that Casey's brother Abe has to skip this year's World Junior Champs due to two broken arms and two broken collarbones when he got tossed by his bicycle recently. If I'd known about this, I never would have suggested that Casey join me for a bike ride at the Kincaid Park glacier last week. She casually mentioned it to me mid-ride as we were skittering across a glass-smooth sheet of ice: "...Oh, by the way, my little bro fell off his bike last month and broke half the bones in his body..."

Paradise

There wasn't much going on around here last week. 

So I went to Hawaii.

I brought my bike.

It looked like this:

(Click on the photo for the video)

Here we go...

It's been a little quiet around UAA Ski Team HQ lately.  Team members scattered far and wide during the holiday break, but the group comes back together this week in preparation for our first RMISA races of the season.

Andrew is currently in Houghton, Michigan for the US National Championships with Sadie Fox, David McPhetres and Mackenzie Kanady.  You can follow them here and here.

Sara is in Utah with most of the rest of the team, preparing for next weekend's first RMISA college races of the season. They'll be joined by the US Nationals crew at the end of this week.  Etienne is traveling to Utah from Quebec, Mario is coming back from Italy, and the rest of the team is flying down from Anchorage where they spent the holiday break.

Meanwhile here in Anchorage, former UAA Ski Team alumnus and UAA Athletics Hall of Famer Toby Schwoerer was spotted by an attentive paparazzo last week zooming around on the ski trails at Kincaid Park with a gun slung over his shoulder. It's been a long time since I've seen Toby enter any kind of ski race, but I won't be surprised if he's soon dominating the local beer-league biathlon circuit.

The UAA Ski Team's racing seasons starts for real this coming weekend.  Hang on tight!

Dick and Me

I raced in a ski race this past weekend.  Or perhaps I should say I skied a bunch or laps around the snowmaking loop at Kincaid Park and they timed me.

When I was a kid, my dad bought a boat.  It wasn't very big.  But it was old. My mom had doubts about this boat.  It was made of wood, and it had some leaks, but the leaks weren't too bad.  My dad figured if he (or we) painted it with good paint, it would probably keep most of the water out.  And we were only going to use it on the small ponds and lakes of New Hampshire's "north country" anyway, so if anything really bad happened and it sank, we would just swim to shore. The way dad figured, we'd go waterskiing all summer!  We did paint the boat - red white and blue like the American flag.  And it didn't leak very much.

This boat had a motor.  It was not a sailboat. But that motor didn't have much juice. It was an old Evinrude. It had 15 horsepower. But that was probably when it was new.  This old Evinrude motor was no longer new.  It was pretty old.  This Evinrude was built in around 1967.  But it was 1982!  I bet it had way less than 15 horsepower.

If you want to waterski behind a boat like our little old boat, you need to be in eighth grade or younger. And you'd better be the smallest kid in eighth grade, too. Luckily, I was. If you were the younger sister of an eighth grader, you could waterski, too. Young cousins could waterski. A squirrel could also waterski behind this boat. When I was in eighth grade I didn't know any squirrels who knew how to waterski, but I know there are some out there who do.

But that old boat also had better be up on step BEFORE it starts to try to pull the little waterskier.  Do you know what it means for a boat to be "on step"?  That means it's hydroplaning.  The only way a boat can hydroplane is if it produces enough power to get up out of the water and skim along the surface.  Once you're hydroplaning, you're golden.  It doesn't take much power to keep the boat skimming along on step, but if you let the speed come down, it starts plowing through the water again and you end up using a lot of power to push water around instead of using it to waterski.

Our old Evinrude 15hp motor had just enough power to get up on step IF all conditions were perfect:
-The motor had to work on that particular day. Sometimes it didn't.
-All extra passengers, gas cans, lunch, life jackets, etc needed to be out of the boat. The boat needed to be as light as possible.
-The boat needed a running start as long as a full length of waterski rope (or in our case, an old spongy rope that we also used for climbing the roof to clean the chimney).
-The eighth grader or his younger sister needed to start from a dock.  Water starts were not possible. The boat started next to the dock and the driver gunned it to get the speed as high as possible while the little waterskier waited for all the rope to play out, and then braced him/herself to get violently jerked off the dock (we learned to jump just a little at the moment of impact to keep from getting an assful of splinters).
-The wind needed to be coming from behind the boat and skier.
-The waterskier needed to be able to hold his/her breath for at least five or six seconds because after the initial jerk off the dock, the little waterskier would slow down the boat enough that the skier would sink (the boat would almost sink too) and even though the little skier was technically doing a dock start, it was essentially a water start.
-Mars and Saturn needed to be aligned with Venus.

This is the kind of stuff I was thinking about in the middle of lap 3 of the 5-lap 15km skate race this weekend. I came around the right-hander out of the stadium tunnel and was starting to slog and stumble my way up and over the tunnel hill when Toomas came by me "on step". He was out of sight and gone by the time I got a good look at him. Andrew was standing on this hill giving splits, and I can always count on him for some words of encouragement like "You're living and striding!" or something about the flavor of my hands... you know - inside joke stuff.  But this time Toomas was coming through at the same time as me so I knew Andrew had business to attend to and I'd have to wait another lap to hear those comforting words from the coach. After the race, I asked a bunch of UAA and APU skiers how their races went, and the answer from all of them was pretty similar: "It was super fast and fun and you just felt like you were flying around that course!" And it made me think they must have been having a very different experience than my own.

But I've been on both sides of this one. There was a time a few years back when I was in the process of winning the Tour of Anchorage ski marathon and I passed one of my co-workers, Dick. I was going about twice the speed that Dick was (or maybe more). The elite skiers used to start later in that race, and the slower skiers started earlier. It was great - you got to see all your friends out there. The next day at work, Dick said "I don't know how you top guys skim over the snow like that. It's incredible!"  And it occurred to me that when we passed Dick, we were going so easy and relaxed. We weren't skiing very hard at all. It wasn't until a couple kilometers later that the hard charging began...

Me. Tour of Anchorage. A few years back

It seems that in a race like this past weekend, if you have the strength to apply just a little extra power, you can skim over little hills using the V2 skate without having to "downshift" into a slower stride like the V1 with its dramatic loss of velocity.  If you can just manage to keep the power high enough to stay above that threshold, you can stay up on step. If you don't quite have the power to stay above that threshold, you'll suddenly find yourself not "hydroplaning" anymore. And that's a sure recipe for ending up up 53rd on the result list at the end of the day.

But as I passed slower skiers wallowing in that sugary snow on the Coastal Trail a few years back, I didn't think too much about what it would feel like to stumble along with legs on fire, doing the granny-skate while guys like Toomas fly by "on step". But now I understand.

Dick

Hibernation

Yesterday was the shortest day of the year. It's only going to get lighter from here on out.  This is the time of the year that makes curious people like Hanna ask "If a polar bear and a brown bear were to get romantically involved and have a baby together, would the little cub hibernate during the winter or not?" 

This is the season of SAD.** 

It's the season of cabin fever.  

Is Andrew dreaming up the perfect combination of kick, glide, flourination and structure? Probably... yes.

I have the kind of job where I don't have to set an alarm and get up early for work. I can sleep until whenever, and stumble into the office when the mood strikes me. Nevertheless, I'm usually having breakfast by 7:30 or so. But the other day I woke up and looked at the clock and it said 9:30! How had I slept so long? I looked out the window and it was still dark outside.  I went back to sleep.  

It's the season of hibernation. 

Hey Andrew!  It's a lot more cozy in there if you close the lid!

On this winter solstice weekend, we had a couple ski races here in Anchorage. A lot of the UAAers were there. They seemed to be awake and had the energy to ski a bunch of laps around the snowmaking loop at Kincaid Park. 

They also had energy to dance between sprint heats.  I remember this dance from the mid-'90s. It's called the Macarena. Didn't know the kids are still doing it. (Notice the poor people desperately trying to get past this nonsense to/from the bathrooms.)

Meanwhile, the coaching staff...

IT'S NAP TIME!!!
(If you're not on the UAA ski team this year, you won't understand the "NAP TIME!" inside joke. Sorry.)

The coaches got their job done.  I heard nothing but glowing reviews about the glide or the grip. But I saw nothing but winter hibernation.

**Seasonal Affective Disorder.