Trials

Magnum. In full Spencer Loop time-trial regalia.

This is a traveling race team.  In normal years, after the fall training season transitions into the winter racing season, we start leaving town regularly, to travel to places like Fairbanks, Colorado, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin, Germany...  Since we're so often boarding planes and flying to other places to go skiing, it's not so bad for us if we get a meltdown or some other meteorological event that makes the skiing conditions really bad for a couple of weeks. Most of the time, during the winter, we're scheduled to go off racing in a few days anyway.  But it's a different situation if you're not on a traveling ski team like ours. You pretty much have to take what you get for skiing conditions, and if all that's available is rough, rocky, icy trails then you just have to use your rock skis and suck it up.

Sheila.

I don't know what's going to happen with our racing calendar this winter, and everything's still up in the air, as it is for everyone, everywhere. Maybe we'll get to go off racing a lot this winter.  Or maybe this will be the winter when everyone, everywhere around the world, mostly just stays home.  

The ski touring on the Anchorage Hillside has been excellent lately.

So far this winter, our skiing conditions have been an absolute early-season dream.  I've lived in this city since 1992 and I can't remember another year when the fall skiing was this good.  Maybe we've had better November skiing, but I don't remember it. We got some snow at the end of October, and then an inch or two here and there, with plenty of cool weather and no rain, and the result has been mid-winter-type conditions all through November. There's enough snow to use your best skis, and solid, deep classic tracks at Hillside (Thanks Matt Pauli!).

Karly & Espen

If I had to choose a year to be stuck in Anchorage with a global pandemic keeping me and my teammates on lockdown, this would be the year I'd choose.  Of all the places to be, this November I'd choose Anchorage for sure.  That's not to say that a chinook couldn't blow into town in the coming days and wipe out the great skiing. But so far, there's only more of the same good weather in the forecast.

Intervals the other day. Espen and Toomas in mid-interval; The Tuvas and I have finished and are going back to our warm-ups.

For today's time trial, Coach Toomas was wearing a bib from a race that took place before he was born.

And so was Espen.

Today's time trial.  And look who has finally arrived in Anchorage - our new coach Trond Flagstad!

Toomas

Sigurd

With this Coronavirus pandemic, I haven't been flying very much for work lately - only a couple days per week. I guess our local airline missed me because they sent me this box in the mail recently.

My very own jetliner!

If you haven't been ski touring on the hillside lately, you're missing out.

Anchorage. Last weekend.