Sierra Ski-o: day 1, Tahoe-Donner XC

Tuesday's race was at Tahoe-Donner XC, and was supposedly the hilliest course we'd see all week. I missed the two races at Bear Valley last weekend, since I was racing Craftsbury and coaching at Women's day, but I was psyched to have a different experience with Californian skiing than last time. We got to the race site around 9:30am, and the first start was at 10, so there was plenty of time. The snow wasn't slushy, but it was sunny and warm out. After testing some skis, the Q1.3 Peltonens with Start LF06 won out over the Q3 Peltonens with the Start LF04. (Start does their numbering backwards, if you're used to Swix). They were pretty quick, but I didn't feel like I should put on higher fluoros, since I wasn't going to be pushing all that hard during the race. Greg and his dad bullied me into racing the blue courses all week, so I left Sharon Crawford to destroy the red course on her own. Apparently, if you're female and skiing the longest-offered course, you are an Amazon. So, I expect everyone to refer to me as an Amazon from here on out. Thanks.

I didn't do a warmup, because I was hoping to keep things no more intense than L2. Being smart, its a new thing for me. With 380m of climb over 10km, it was going to be a hilly course, but I figured I'd use efficiency (in both technique and in navigating) to try to not be last. The first couple controls were pretty straightforwards, and then the fourth one I took a route that involved a lot more climbing than I would have liked - that I could have avoided! The fifth control was at the top of the mountain, and it was a long slog to get up there. Given where the sixth one was, I decided it would be fastest to try and cut straight down the side of the ungroomed mountain, rather than go all the way around on the trail. It was a significant distance and elevation-gain savings, so I went ahead with that plan.

The first couple hundred feet were ok, and then the slope pitched downwards, fast. Undeterred, I tried out a couple turns. Given the depth of the powder and the skinniness of my skis, those weren't too successful. I found that if I snowplowed while leaning way backwards, I could check my speed somewhat successfully, so I did that until I caught an edge and went down in a poof. Man, this stuff is deep. I managed to get up, and continued my downhill, slightly-controlled fall, and then tried out a couple snowplow turns. These didn't work too well, and I was picking up too much speed, so I sat back on my ski tails, hoping to ride out the rest of the steep bit. That was when I noticed that my right foot wasn't really attached to the ski. It looked like the binding was mostly off of the ski, but a wee bit of the back of the front part of the binding was still there. Well, shit. I pulled off that ski, and discovered that clearly the best way to get down the hill was to crouch over one ski, with my right hand holding the other ski, dragging my right knee behind me to control my speed. I could almost even control my direction!

I finally came out to a groomed trail, and I had to figure out what I wanted to do with myself. I was about 3/4 of the way up the mountain, and the next couple controls ranged around that area, including one with a fair bit of climb, but none of them came near the lodge, where I could supposedly switch to a non-broken-binding ski. I knocked as much snow out from under the binding as I could, and decided that if I just double poled, and kept the pressure off that binding, I'd at least make it down to control 6. That worked well, so I figured that since control 7 was a traverse of sorts, I'd keep going to that one. Double poling and snowplowing on one side only (I didn't trust step turning) also seemed to work, so I decided to continue on with the course. I could sort of coach-skate, as long as I didn't do it too powerfully, and luckily for me, I wasn't do much of anything powerfully.

I climbed back up most of the mountain to 8, and then went bombing down to 9. I was taking a shortcut on snowshoe trails when my ski took off down the hill without me. Ack! Luckily, it came to rest not too far away, under a pine tree, so I went to retrieve it. My binding was attached to my boot, but not to my ski. I picked it up, knocked off most of the snow, and saw to my surprise that it wasn't broken. I guess the snow on that initial descent had just pushed up underneath it and pushed it off the NIS plate. I slid the binding back onto the NIS plate, and while I couldn't put it on there securely without the binding key, it was on enough for me to finish up the course, with a somewhat respectable time. Honestly, I don't think I lost that much time fiddling with various binding issues, although it sure was annoying.

Post-race trash talking.

I ended up beating at least two people on blue, I haven't seen the entire results, but as far as I know, there were three who beat me. Not a very big field... So, since the weather was still gorgeous, I went for a relaxed ski up Euer valley. Its so pretty here when the sun shines!
It was this sort of day. The kind of day where you just fall over into the snow laughing because its so nice out and life is beautiful.

They claim its a low-snow winter. Really?

From NH to CA

Sunday was the NENSA women's xc ski day, one of my favorite days of the year - basically, 20 female instructors teach 200 women how to ski, and we all have a great time. I was teaching the intermediate skate group, morning and afternoon, and my afternoon group conferred with each other for a bit and then announced to me, "We like you!" Who knows what I did to deserve that, but it made me feel good. This is even after I made them do crunches in the snow (I've decided I really like that drill).

Skier fashion show - this is why skiers don't make it to high fashion.




I got back to Boston around 7pm, and began some packing chaos - I had a flight out to Reno for the Sierra Ski-o week at 11am on Monday. I managed to get all the skate skis I was bringing cleaned and waxed with an appropriate temperature of LF (so that I could just scrape them, test them, and race), and everything into a ski bag, with plenty of time to spare for getting to the airport. I had a brief moment of panic when the TSA lady told me that my waxing iron was considered a power tool, and thus couldn't take it on the plane.
TSA: This is considered a power tool. It heats up.
Me: Yes, if you plug it in.
TSA: Right.
Me: There aren't any outlets on the plane.
TSA: You can't fly with this.
It was like two idiots trying to convince each other of something. In the end, she won, because, well, she had the badge. But seriously. A powertool? I could understand if they said it was a blunt object and therefore a weapon, but what am I going to do, brand someone?

Luckily, they let me take it back out and put it in a cardboard box to check. Phew. And, I arrived safely with no delays and with all my baggage. Crazy!

Now I have five races over six days at altitude to deal with. My plan is to take the first day pretty conservatively, so that I don't have a repeat of West Yellowstone where I lost 6 pounds in a week. Taking things easy... not my forte.

Craftsbury Marathon

I've done this race twice before, and both times, I forgot how to wax my skis, or something along those lines, and I did NOT have fun. In fact, the race in 2008, I really would have shot myself if I'd found a loaded pistol by the side of the trail, it was that miserable. So, I had a couple goals going into the race this year: Wax my skis so that they'll work for 50km, have fun, and don't be a grouch afterwards even if I don't manage to have fun. Notice how none of those are results-related... this race seems to be beyond results, for me. Its survival.

Anyway, Craftsbury got the same rain that we did last week, and then it froze up nice and hard, so I (and everyone else) was a little worried about things being super icy and the race being unable to go off. Luckily, because Craftsbury and their hordes of volunteers are amazing, the course was in superb shape, with rock solid tracks and no dirt showing through. I was thoroughly impressed, no way would Weston have been able to do that. Because of the previous weather, the course was four 12.5km loops, on the relatively flat bits of the outdoor center, for which I was definitely grateful. Its nice having a classic race where you can ski the hills, herringboning just messes up your rhythm.

Standing on some good stiff skis with a chola binder and a couple layers of extra blue, I wormed my way into the front of the women's pack - somebody was peeing in the woods when they were calling folks to line up. Whoops. All of the men's waves (including the slower men) had gone off, and we got a 5-minute break before we followed, which meant that we were quickly catching men from the back of wave 3. It was nice having a constant stream of people around, but some of them were rather obnoxiously in the way. I guess thats what you get for doing four laps, but it is race etiquette to cede the track to the faster racer - not to stand over the track in a herringbone so that nobody can get by and watch people approach over your shoulder. Anyway, the first 1.5km or so were nice and relaxed, and I was thinking to myself, hey, I can do marathons. This ain't bad at all! And then I heard Anna behind me saying "Alex, can I get by? I think I want to set a slightly different pace". Dammit.

So, Anna took off, and we strung out the pack a bit, so that by the first feed station there was a solid group of six, and then a small gap. Anna, Hannah D, Susan D, Dorcas W, Lauren J, and me. We started into some of the rollers heading out on the course again, and on a downhill, that was quite crowded with snowplowing, slow, old men, I got boxed in between two snowplowers and behind Anna, and with nowhere to go, I tried to grab Anna's poles to push her forwards, except that she had her poles up because she was running into a slow old man in front of her. So, I grabbed her butt instead, and that didn't work, we went down, with Anna on top, but luckily there was no broken equipment, just a sprained thumb on her part. Whoops. She got up and caught the front group but a gap had opened between the top four and the next three, so going up Ruthie's run (a 1.5km uphill), I just followed Dorcas as she pulled us up there. It felt fast, but not unsustainable. By the bottom of the hill, we'd caught the lead group, dropped the other woman who'd been skiing with us, and shortly thereafter, dropped Lauren.

The second lap was similarly-paced, but going up Ruthie's run I decided to go a little slower. This actually kept me within sight (~15s) of the top four, and I'd caught back up by the bottom of the downhill. Then the course climbs a bit into the finish, and a master guy jumped into our group (small rant - if a pack of girls is passing you, THEY'VE ALREADY GIRLED YOU. Don't jump into their pack. Ski behind them. Please), and I was behind him. And he got gapped. And I didn't want to burn matches to close the gap, and told myself I'd catch up on the flat bits. Well, you can guess how well that worked. Dorcas was a little off the back of the lead three going through the start/finish, so I could see her for most of lap 3, but I just couldn't seem to catch back up to her. At this point, I was remembering two things I'd forgotten - four lap races give you three golden opportunities to drop out, and, marathons are hard. My arms and shoulders were starting to get a little tired, so the flatter parts involved a bit more kicking than they had before, and constantly passing old slow men meant that you got the illusion of moving fast even if you weren't.

I kept telling myself to push hard, because I would rather ski alone than get caught from behind, so I kept skiing as best I could. I was noticing that my heart rate was dropping, compared to the first two laps, which probably just meant that I was getting tired - it was hard to push through some of the hills. By the end of the third lap, I could no longer see Dorcas, and I'd pretty much gone into survival mode. On the loop around the field, I saw Hannah, and tried to speed up, but realized that I'd found one speed, and that one speed was what I was going to do for the rest of the course. Hopefully she'd just crack a little more... I was definitely running and herringboning a lot more of the hills, not because my wax was slipping, but because I was just too tired to stride. My arms felt tired, which meant that forcing something to work was not an option. By the top of Ruthie's run, I knew I was almost done, and despite an unfortunate tangle with a master after an icy corner, I made it back to the finish without seeing another girl. Woot! Fifth, second in my age class, and no bonks, no lost wax, really, no bad things at all! Hannah was only 1.5 minutes ahead of me, which was too bad, but I don't think I could have sped up by that much on the last lap. Stupid marathons. But it was a beautiful day to be skiing, with great tracks and great skis, so overall, life was pretty good. (Although it was pretty cold, -2F on the start!)

Of course, now I'm left wondering if I should ever do that marathon again, now that I've conquered my wax demons. It can only go downhill. We'll see what happens next year. Now I'm just hoping that I forget how much that hurt before the Birkie.

I leave for Lake Tahoe today, for the Sierra Ski Orienteering festival. Gotta love getting on a plane two days after a marathon... I'm a wee bit sore. Nothing that a bunch of skiing won't fix!

January thaw

I love our Bill Koch League skiers - the little guys, zooming around at mach 4. But I am starting to get really annoyed with how they take over the ENTIRE ski track. Last I checked, Weston was open during their practices. Its one thing to have a small group to the side where you're instructing, but I almost took out a significant group of 8 year olds last night when they were spread out across the entire width of the river-side snow at the bottom of the curvy hill by the lodge. Way to stand in a blind spot, taking over the entire trail, on a super fast night. Now I know why our CSU skiers tend to take over the entire trail when they're skiing, too. Start 'em young...

BKL-interactions aside, I had a great interval session last night. The snow was super fast, if deep - only so much you can do with completely transformed sugar slush, but I'm trying to figure out how to ski relaxed in that crap. Kudos to Weston for blowing a ton of snow and having something to ski on after our thaw/torrential rains, though! I was doing 40 second intervals, with 20 seconds of rest, and boy did I feel fast during the ON bits. I realized, as I was zooming around, that I'm psyched to race again. It took almost two weeks, but I'm back in that mindset where work is just what you do in the five days between races. Hopefully I can carry this enthusiasm into a frigid, icy, four-lap, crashbury marathon. Here goes...

I also figured out a way (ok, I copied and pasted some html) to put a picture link to my training log at attackpoint.org. I think thats way cool, although most people just find it dorky. Its all about the colors!

Weston Ski Orienteering meet

Ed is doing all of the epunching for the US Ski-Orienteering Champs, so he wanted to have a dry run just to make sure that everything works. We turned it into an actual ski-o race, at Weston, and the only minor issue was that we didn't have a map yet. Ed took over mapping duties from me, because, in his words, I wasn't willing to sacrifice sleep for it. Well, no, duh. Anyway, we went and set up the controls after the highschool skiers were done with their race (Mass. state qualifier for EHS/J2 championships), and actually got some people to turn up, some of whom weren't just my friends who I'd begged to show up. Impressive. The advanced course had a map exchange, because its impossible to do a race at weston without going out to the flats at least twice, and things get too confusing if its all on one map. The two advanced maps are below.



The beginner course went well except for the fact that I forgot to put two controls out there that were supposed to be there. Luckily, we only got three beginners, and none of them got lost. Its a little hard to get lost at Weston.

I skied the course just to make sure everything was in order, and to set a benchmark time. Granted, I designed and set the course, but I still managed a 1-minute victory over the guy in second place. Go me, woo!

The beginner course. #3 and #5 sort of got forgotten, whoops.

So now I'd say we're all set for the champs, at least on the control side of things. Registration should be up later today... its gonna be a good one, don't miss it!

Ski like a girl!

A while back, I think around September or October, Anna Mcloon and I decided that we wanted to host an event at Weston that was run by women, for women. We were hoping to tap into the highschool-girl-potential and make them love skiing and become awesome racers, but as it turns out, we got all adults. Which is totally fine, and often much easier to teach, but next year, if we do this again, we'll probably hold two events - one for girls, and one for women. Anyway, we didn't really have any sort of plan for this, but I roped Sarah Holton and Linnea Koons into agreeing to be instructors. I managed to get our information up on Weston's website, and then we just sat around and did nothing for a few months.

As of Monday last week, we had less than 10 people signed up. Since we'd just lost an instructor (Linnea decided to do the Jackson 30k race on Saturday), we were down to three instructors, with 9 people, thats a pretty nice ratio. I sort of took it upon myself to do all the registration compilation stuff, and since last week was a wee bit busy, I just kept putting off compiling the registration stuff until Thursday night. And then I realized we had ~15 people signed up, which was still fine. And then Friday, we got 20 more registrations. I figured this out at 9pm, at which point, I was close to a panic - a lot of these women had never skied before, and its really hard to teach people how to ski when you have 10 people in a group. Some frantic phone calls and emails later and we'd convinced Erin Dubinski, an ex-CSU skier, to come down for the day, although she could only help in the afternoon. Phew!

We didn't have much of a lesson plan, but we had enough of one, and more importantly, Sarah has these ice-cream-making balls that you can ski around with - you put all the ingredients for ice cream into the ball, and ice and salt goes around the outside of where the ingredients go, and then you ski around (shake it) for 20 minutes and you get ice cream! Everyone there seemed to have a great time, and maybe even learn something. We had three lunchtime talks - Callie Gordon came and gave us a talk on nutrition for women, Anna did a waxing demo, and I gave a talk on sports psychology and what to wear while skiing. Then it was back outside. The sunny weather and warm temperatures helped, too, rain or snow would have been miserable.

Callie and me soaking up the sun during a short break from the outside technique bits.

The group of us, minus a couple people (10?) who'd had to leave already.

I'm getting the ice cream started - we hooked the bag's string around our ankles and skied around for 10 minutes to get it going. It was really obnoxious to ski with this thing around my foot, but we'd forgotten to bring any string to tie it around peoples' waists.

I was making people do crunches to learn how to properly do V2 alternate... they loved me for that one!

Anna giving her waxing talk.

The ice cream ball relay.

That was a super fun day. If a bit tiring. Big thanks to Sarah and Anna and Erin for helping out, and to all the women for participating!

The things keeping me busy this week

1. Coffee, in a somewhat constant stream.

2. Work - supposed to be working on one grant, and I managed to make a mistake a while back on a different grant that I'm now trying to fix by Friday morning and I'm having massive work-related-guilt about working on the wrong grant, and not getting done what needs to get done under the grant I'm supposed to be working on (most people would not be bothered by this. maybe I'm just too ethical, or something.)

3. Running two events this weekend - Ski like a girl! on Saturday, and a ski orienteering race on Sunday.

4. These events require a little prep work. Lets talk about the ski-o meet first - there is no map of Weston. A map is sort of a prerequisite for an orienteering meet. Since Weston is a small area and its all out in the open, you'd think it would be really easy to make the map. I guess to an experienced mapper who is comfortable using ocad (the orienteering mapping software), it would be easy, but to someone who has rarely if ever used ocad, I'm still on the steep, lower part of that learning curve. Simple tasks seem daunting. At least I am really good at downloading the data and putting it in the right formats... then once I get the basemap (basically just contours and an aerial photo), I get to go out and field check everything - trails, large individual trees, fences, you know, all those things you could possibly run into while skiing. Luckily for me, Ed likes doing stuff like this, and will probably save my ass when I can't finish the map in time.

5. Once I get the map done, I have to design some courses. For the most part, designing orienteering courses is fun and easy, but when its a ski-o meet on a golf course, it actually takes quite a bit of thought to make it interesting, so people don't feel that they're just skiing in circles.

6. I have to acquire all the various bits and pieces for e-punching for the event - luckily, Ed is running all of that, to iron out the kinks before the US champs on February 13-14, where he is doing all the e-punching. Poor Ed gets volunteered for so much crap 'cause of me...

7. Then there is the Ski like a girl! event. Luckily, I have Anna and Sarah helping me out, and they're both super competent and good instructors, but Anna and I both suffer from the problem of only ever coaching people who already know how to ski. So, we have to brush up on how to teach true beginners how to ski, come up with a lesson plan, and make this whole thing run smoothly. Anyone want to donate a whole bunch of hot chocolate? I feel that hot chocolate is a very necessary part of learning how to ski.

8. Lets make things a little more complicated, and teach the rest of the CSU orienteers how to ski right before the ski-o! This means I have approximately half an hour to set all the controls for the event, since there is a MA state qualifier ski race at Weston in the morning.

9. I have three athletes right now who after last weekend contacted me wanting to get together some time this weekend and talk about training plans. I don't know when that will happen, but training plans can't really wait, when JOs are on the horizon...

10. Grad school applications... I just finished those. But, it deserved a mention, since that was where most of the related stress came from.

I feel better now.