Big Sky Country

First RMISA road trip of the year - here we go!

Freshmen.  Ski tuning in the Super 8 parking lot in Belgrade.

There's plenty of snow here.

We saw these locals having wheelchair races on the baggage carousel at the Bozeman Airport.

Squeezing all our gear into two cars and a pickup truck was a tricky problem to solve.

Here in West Yellowstone, we walk from our hotel to the ski trails.

Marine and I made it out for a post-training afternoon ski.  It was heaven.

Here's Michaela in this morning's race.

Hailey. She was fourth today.

Skippy

Natalie. She goes off to World Juniors next week, representing Canada.

Hannah

Sadie

Von Grunenbaum

Tracen.  His first RMISA race. Many more to come in the future. Getting familiar with soft snow and thin air.

Brandon

Tom.

Zacke in full Seawolf regalia.

Jenna. (Actually, this isn't Jenna.  But I wasn't able to get a photo of Jenna today so you get this guy instead. You'll notice that he has his racing bib on backwards. Big mistake.)

We race again tomorrow...

Sprint!

Hannah was just one of many Seawolf skiers to qualify for the World Junior Championships next month in Switzerland. But she was the only one to go out and take photos of the sprint race and show them to me afterward.  

You see, they made a big mistake when they announced the World Junior team.  They announced the team on Sunday night, when there was still one more race scheduled for the next day.  I guess when they dragged Hannah up on the stage and told her she'd qualified for World Juniors, she figured there was no point in doing any more races.  So she showed up for the sprint race without her sprinting skis, but with her camera.  And these are the photos she took:

Brandon!

Tracen!

Zacke!

The Announcer!

Lupua & Jenna!

Sadie!

Skippy!

Marcus!

US Nationals - A Different Perspective

I was busy volunteering at the races yesterday so I didn't get a chance to really figure out what was going on all day.  They gave me a volunteer job that kind of kept me out of the loop. But I'm sure you can figure out for yourself where to find results from the races.  I also didn't have time to take any pictures, as I was too busy scurrying around. But after the race I took a couple of photos for you, the loyal reader.

Here's a picture of the US Nationals race courses about 90 minutes after the races ended, from an airplane headed to Kodiak Island.

Here are the Kenai Mountains and the ocean, about halfway between here and Kodiak Island.

Here is the wing of an airplane, slicing through the ice fog over Kincaid Park this evening.

No Brakes

Back in 1985, when I was a young boy growing up in NewHampshire, my friends and I were obsessed with the sport of bandy. We couldn’t stop thinking about it and talking about it. We desperately wanted to start our own bandy team and travel around northern New England, competing against other bandy teams.  But there was a problem.  There weren’t any stores in the area that sold bandy equipment.  None of the sporting goods stores had even heard of it.  So we had to settle for hockey.  My friends and I played a lot of hockey, but we always fantasized that instead of chasing the puck around with hockey sticks, we were swatting a little orange ball around the ice with one of those curved bandy things.

We followed the sport of bandy fanatically.  And any true fan of the sport knows that one of the world’s leagues is the “Damallsvenskan” league in Sweden.  We knew the teams, we knew the players, and we formed fantasy teams for our Allsvenskan fantasy league.  Of course there was no internet in those days, so we all pitched in for a subscription to “Allsvenskan Åskådare” which was delivered to my friend Mike’s door. And every month, when the newsletter arrived, we’d gather around in the penalty box at our local ice rink and pore over the latest stats and player trades. Problem was, it took a few months for the newsletters to arrive from Sweden, so we always got our Damallsvenskan bandy news long after the ice had melted.  To this day, I’ve been a rabid fan of the Allsvenskan league. It’s the second-highest league in the nation (you might not have known that) and the biggest stars of the Allsvenskan league are eligible to play in the Elitserian league, the top league in Sweden!  

So you can imagine how impressed I was during my daily perusal of Swedish newspapers when I saw that our very own former Seawolf, Hanna Slotte, scored two goals in two matches for Uppsala BoIS! The only thing more impressive is the fact that Hanna found the sport through a Google search.

You can read all about Hanna's icy exploits by clicking on the picture of Hanna below:

Finals Week

To make a long story short, things got pretty busy around here lately. It was finals week at UAA, and while the team battled through their final exams, I found myself under a pretty big workload at my day job.  Then the semester ended, the team scattered to the four winds, and I took off on a ski vacation in Colorado.  Consequently, no blogging was done all month.

But just because nobody blogged about it doesn't mean races weren't raced and everyone took the month off from training.  And here are some photos to prove that we weren't just eating bonbons and playing board games around here all month:

Early December at Kincaid Park

Racing in the Anchorage Cup at Kincaid.

The coaches don't get too many chances to race since they're usually obligated to do all the coaching. Andrew took the opportunity to race the Anchorage Cup.

...As did Marine.  She's number 324 here. And that's Hannah behind her. Coaches can learn a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of their athletes by racing against them head to head.

We didn't have enough snow in Anchorage to host the Besh Cup races as scheduled. So the races were moved to Fairbanks. Here's Tracen in one of his heats in the sprint race.

Sadie and Jenna.

Skippy and Natalie.  Skippy went through to the final and was in the running to win the overall, but a spill in the final third of the final derailed her.

Donna and Denny DiFolco were kind enough to house some of our skiers over the Fairbanks Besh Cup weekend, and invited us all over for dinner on Saturday night. Saichi & Connie Oba also hosted some of our skiers at their house. The Seawolves really appreciate their hospitality!

Stories told 'round the dinner table...

...and then around the wood stove.

I found this dog.

More racing in Fairbanks. Here's Zacke.

If you can identify this former UAA Seawolf racing in Fairbanks, you might be eligible to win a special prize.

A lot of Seawolves in this group in Sunday's mass-start race. That's Michaela leading the group.

Hannah

Rollerskiing The Dempster

I know rollerskiing season just ended a couple weeks ago, but we're going to talk a little more about rollerskiing now...

Schalli in 2010.

A while back, we had a guy on the UAA Ski Team who went by the name of Schalli. A few years after he left UAA for other pursuits, Schalli contacted me and asked if I wanted to rollerski north to south across the USA with him or something like that. Of course it was easy for me to say no, because no matter how I fun I tried to imagine it being, there was no way rollerskiing thousands of miles seemed like it could be fun at all.  But this isn't a story about Schalli and me.

Heikki Kanerva. UAA zoot suits used to look like this.

Back in 1987, when I came to Alaska for the first time to compete in the junior national championships, I was having a great week. And near the end of the week I was invited by UAA's ski coach to take a look around UAA's campus. Ultimately I decided to go elsewhere for college, but I was impressed by what I saw during my tour of UAA. The moment I remember most vividly, though, is when I was being shown UAA's weight room, which at that time was inside an old raquetball court in the old athletics building.  Having never seen a college weight room before, I didn't realize that a weight room inside a raquetball court was not a very big weight room. I was impressed by how many weights and machines were in there. (And the weight room was a lot bigger than what we'd had at my high school, where the weight room was inside a closet. Literally. Two people could work out in there at once. Maybe three if they were small people or couldn't lift much weight.) But what impressed me even more than the huge, racquetball-court-sized weight room was that, in the weight room, pumping iron, was Heikki Kanerva. He was a big deal on the college circuit at the time, and I knew his name well. I have to admit I was a little starstruck, meeting him there in the tiny doorway of that little weight room / raquetball court. Heikki later went on to be a bigwig with Microsoft, becoming the program manager and designer of the Microsoft Office system. So it's pretty fitting that I'm writing about Heikki using MS Office, a program he had a big part in designing.

Raimonds Dombrovskis

But this isn't a story about Heikki Kanerva either. Heikki started his UAA Ski Team career in 1984, and in that first season he had a teammate named Raimonds Dombrovskis. Raimonds is from Latvia and was a UAA Seawolf for the 1984-85 season before moving on to other things. This is a story about Raimonds Dombrovskis. If you want to find out what Raimonds is doing lately, you can watch this video (and if you don't understand Latvian like me, maybe you can get Martins Onskulis to translate it for you). But if you want to know what Raimonds was doing in the years immediately following his year as a UAA Skiwolf, you're going to have to get yourself down to the Alaska Experience Theater downtown next week and watch the movie that was made about him.  I don't want to tell you what happens and spoil all your fun, but I can give you a couple of hints:  He was a member of the 1988 US Olympic Biathlon Team. He didn't actually get to ski in the Olympics due to a burst appendix. And he rollerskied from Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada to Mexico.



(You can click the photo to see the trailer.)

I can already see the questions popping up in your mind.  How was he on the US Olympic Team when he was Latvian?  How did he rollerski on those rough dirt roads?  Aren't there better places to rollerski than down the Alaska Highway? Did Raimonds know that the Dempster Highway is a rough gravel road, and it's really, really long?  Does it hurt when you have a burst appendix? I have the same questions you do, of course. Dita, the film's co-producer and editor, told me I could ask her any questions I want. But I haven't asked her these nagging questions which have been keeping me awake at night, because it would ruin the movie if I knew all the answers. So I think I'm just going to go downtown to the theater, lean back in one of those plush velour seats, and let the magic of film make everything clear to me.

The Dempster Highway on a typical summer day. A nice place to rollerski?

You can go watch this movie on Sunday the Third at 1:45pm or on Friday the 8th at 9pm at The Alaska Discovery Theatre.  See you there!