Typical Friday

 This team frequently gets together multiple times per day for ski practice. It's a big commitment, being on an NCAA athletic team, in any sport. It's a rare occasion when I can make it to practice twice per day, let along once. After all, I do need to go to my office every once in a while and do some work. But on Friday, I felt like I could let things slide at the office for a bit, and I made it to a full day of Skiwolf training - all three sessions. Here's what happened:

Session 1:  Skiing at Kincaid. With new snow, spirits were high. 

Session 2: Afternoon session in the weight room.

Session three: Classroom session with the team's sport psychologist, Jon Osborn. He told us that, just like you have to do physical training every day to gain proficiency at your sport, you also need to do regular mental workouts to build the strong neural connections that allow focused, peak performance. In our classroom session, he taught us how to do these mental workouts.

So there you have it - a day in the life of a Skiwolf.

We're All Smiles Now

 It snowed in Anchorage last week. Looks to me like around six inches at Kincaid Park. (The Ski Club says eight inches.) The forecast for this coming week is stable weather with temperatures staying below 0 degrees C.  So I guess the ski season has begun here in Anchorage! We're pretty happy about it. Rollerskiing was getting kind of old, especially as the roads and paved trails were starting to get icy.

Meanwhile, the alpine team loaded up the trucks and rolled out of town yesterday morning, headed for their annual early-season training camp in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. They'll be there for the next three weeks, getting good quality slalom and giant slalom training every day at Mt Sima.

Wet Pavement

Day in and day out, the roads around here are rarely dry.

Getting ready for a little sprint training. Kincaid Park.

Marlie, Constance and Hedda

Ethan leading the field.

Erling leading the field.

Hedda leading the field.

Marit. At Potter Marsh.

Kendall Kramer. She was never a Seawolf. But she was a Nanook. She trains with us sometimes. She's leaving for the World Cup circuit in a few weeks.

Henry and Erling

Matt

Corbin and Henry

Corbin (airborne) and Parke

Out before sunrise. Potter Marsh. Hermod, Marit, Henry, Corbin, Garrett, Matt, Kendall Kramer, Ethan, Parke, former Seawolf Ari Endestad, APU skier Buster Richardson, Erling.

Li & Erik!

 The duties of the volunteer assistant coach are varied and nebulous. One thing was clear, though. When word got out that Seawolves Li Djurestål and Erik Cruz planned to get married in Catalunya this past week, attendance at the event was clearly a job for the volunteer assistant coach! Especially as we're in the thick of it in Alaska, with fall dryland training going on and the annual Ski Swap this weekend, the other coaches couldn't get away to be in Barcelona for the weekend. Nobody needed to twist my arm to get me onto a plane to Catalunya. Trading out Anchorage's rainy gray weather for the Mediterranean sun seemed all right by me. 

Li & Erik

Erik & Li

I've never been cycling in Spain before. But it seems like wherever else I've gone in Europe and raved about the good riding in France or Italy or Germany, the locals always say, "No, you really need to go to Spain; that's really where the best drivers and the best riding is!"  So I finally got my chance to spend a couple of weeks riding in Catalunya. Girona was everything I'd heard it was, and more.

Just outside Girona. Great roads. Little traffic. Unhurried drivers.

Costa Brava.

Loads of well-paved farm roads near Olot.

Every hill and knoll in Catalunya has its castle. This is Madremanya.

There are plenty of good climbs.

There's good riding on Montserrat.

One of the very best things about being associated with the Seawolves is the chance to get to know and become friends with so many interesting and wonderful people who come through this program. Given the chance to be in Catalunya to hang out with this group for a few days, there was no way I was gonna miss it! Thank you, Li and Erik, for treating us to a week together that we'll never forget!

Seawolf Mike Soetaert

Seawolf skiers at Li and Erik's wedding in Catalunya: Me, Dom Unterberger, Nicole Mah, Charley Field, Alix Wells, Li Djurestål, Erik Cruz, Georgia Burgess, Chloe Margue, Austin Huneck, Didrik Nielssen, Mike Soetaert, and friend of the team Ryan Toney.

Here's wishing the best to the newlyweds, Li and Erik, and their happy future together!

A Little Rain Won't Stop Us

September and October aren't always the most comfortable months of the year to be in Anchorage. The days get shorter and there's usually plenty of rain to keep us hydrated. This September has been no exception. Nevertheless, the training goes on, improvements are made, and new personal bests are achieved.

Strapping on the helmets for a little rollerski interval action at Potter.

Henry

Erling

Murphy

Hermod and Corbin

Again, Hermod and Corbin.

Trond wants to make sure nobody's overdoing it (or underdoing it) so he takes a little blood sample to test its acidity.

Dashe

Marit. At Arctic Valley

The team that plays together stays together. Hedda leading the group.

A coachable moment. Trond and Murphy (Note the snow above.) Sorry about the hazy photos. When you start the workout by leaving the van at the ski area and biking all the way down from Arctic Valley on a muddy road in heavy rain, your camera lens might get a little wet and fogged over.

Talking it out in the AAC parking lot. Note the differences in clothing preferences. We've got everything from shorts and t-shirts to winter parkas in this group.

The Wedding of the Summer

The place was Hope, the setting was the Chugach Mountains, and the event was the wedding of the summer - the union of Alejandra Legate and Sigurd Rønning.

The UAA Ski Team was well-represented in the wedding party.

If you were looking for a big group of cross-country ski racers, concentrated in one location, at the end of June, you needed look no farther than Hope, Alaska. Sigurd skied for UAA, of course, as did half of his groomsmen. And Alejandra skied for the University of New Hampshire Wildcats. Almost half of the attendees flew in from Norway for the occasion, and included lots of family members, aunts and uncles with plenty of elite ski racing in their resumes. 

Sigurd must have been pleased to have the opportunity to spend a little time here in southcentral Alaska; it seems he's spent virtually the entire rest of the summer, before and after his wedding, working in Nightmute, in the southwestern part of the state.

There was no place I'd rather have been on June 26 than in Hope, celebrating with Ale and Sigurd and their families and friends. It was a wonderful day, and I enjoyed catching up with old ski friends, some of whom I hadn't seen in years. Here's wishing Ale and Sigurd the very best for their future together!

For Your Summer Reading List

Being the diehard superfan of the UAA Nordic Ski Team Blog that you are, I know that you are already aware that my old ski team at the University of Wyoming was cut in 1992. But you might not be aware that Grace Erholtz got herself a college degree by researching the events and dynamics surrounding the elimination of the team and writing her master's thesis about it. 

Under normal circumstances, us common folk would never be able to get our hands on a research paper such as this one. We'd probably have to enroll in a university and then get a library card and learn how to use the dewey decimal system or figure out how to look things up on microfiche... all of which we'd be pretty unlikely to manage. But since you're all friends of mine, and since I'm friends with Grace Erholtz, you now have access to this fascinating work of literature, by extension, just because you're avid readers of the UAA Nordic Ski Team Blog!

Though the events described in Grace's research happened over thirty years ago, they are nevertheless as timely and relevant now as they were back then. Many NCAA ski teams have been cut during the intervening years, and some of those teams have even have been reinstated. Our UAA Ski Team was almost cut - twice - in recent years. And with the current hijinx playing out in the federal court system surrounding the Dartmouth men's basketball team and the proposal to share revenues with team members of major college football and basketball teams, there's no small amount of trepidation about what's in store in terms of Olympic sport development in the USA, and its reliance on the NCAA athlete development model.

Anyway, let's not worry about all that for now.  Let's find a comfortable chair, ease back, maybe pour yourself a glass of your favorite beverage, and read Grace Erholtz' case study about the elimination of an NCAA Division 1 ski team.

And if you want to find Grace out on the ski trails next winter, you can find her with Team Birkie, where she just got herself a new job as their development coach. Congratulations, Grace!

Grace Erholtz' Masters Thesis Can Be Found Here

Grace Erholtz

(ps. Yes, there will be a quiz. And it won't be open-book)