Dune

Again, as every year around this time, we found ourselves at the sand dunes of Kincaid Park. This is a miserable workout consisting of multiple sprints up the northern and southern aspects of a seaside sand dune, and it's an annual rite of late September for the UAA Ski Team, both nordic and alpine. Every year somebody pukes. Even the coach has been known to hurl on occasion. We don't take this workout lightly.

Instructions from Andrew at the start of the workout.

But today, it wasn't just the ski team out there. We had company!  The UAA hockey team and men's basketball teams agreed to join us for this workout, and they added a lot to the spirit of the event. No UAA team wants to get shown up by another UAA team, so there was a real effort to show who was the toughest group out there.  Personally, I was a little concerned about the hockey team. Their sport consists of a series of 45-second shifts in which they charge as hard as they can up and down the ice only to crawl back over the boards, exhausted, rest a couple minutes, and then do it over and over again for three 20-minute periods.  It seemed to me like those boys might be pretty well-suited to these sprints. I was less concerned about the basketball players showing us up.  I figured those big, tall guys probably weren't so well suited to a series of fast uphill sprints in the sand.

We started with a bunch of sprints of the north side of the dune. It was steep and deep, just the way we skiers like it.

That's Marcus on the right.

Jon & Dom

The hockey players were charging hard today.

The second half of the workout was on the south-facing, firmer side of the dune. A greater distance, at higher speed.

That's Marte in blue, near the front.

We had a lot of tired student-athletes at the end of this thing.

The men's basketball team.

So, how did the skiers stack up against the hockey and basketball players you ask?  It seemed to me like it was pretty even.  I saw Marcus and Tom winning some of the sprints, but definitely not all of them.  I saw a bunch of hockey players winning their sprints.  But I also saw basketball players winning some of the heats, too.  It didn't seem that any team was truly dominant.  But, for the final heat, in which the fastest athletes of the day were pulled out for an "elite" heat of the day's fifteen best, hockey players went 1-2-3.  So I don't think you can come to any other conclusion than that the hockey team won the workout. Personally, though, I was pretty impressed by the basketball team. They definitely held their own out there, and they had at least three players spewing their breakfast during the workout. That in itself tells me they were giving everything they had, and they definitely earned my respect!