Swedish Ski-O Tour

Last year, I found out about the Swedish Ski-O tour, which was going to be held on terrain very similar to that of the Ski Orienteering World Championships (Ski WOC) that will be held this March. Ali, Greg, and I signed up, excited to get on some of these famously technical Swedish ski-o maps. Unfortunately, Idre Fjall (location for ski-o Tour) didn't have enough snow, so they moved the races to Högbo Bruk, which is not at all like the Ski WOC terrain, but still technical and hard anyway. Our trio of Americans convened at the Arlanda airport, in Stockholm, and we headed to the Erik Brote's house - Erik was a CSU junior whose family moved to Sweden last summer, and they had generously agreed to host us on our way up north. Will took us for a ski at a local park, and then we were fed delicious dinner.
Mary Poppins!

Team Macintosh.

At a jetlagged version of "early", we drove up to Högbo Bruk, and attempted to obtain some ski-o maps. Failing that, we picked up Nick, a British orienteer who is trying out this ski-o thing and knows Ali, from the train station. Back to the ski area, and we went for a short ski, before waxing for the night race. A team sprint relay, in the dark! Ali and I were one team, and Greg and Nick were the other.
Also, we found ducks.

I was the lead leg, and things were going ok at first, but I was having issues seeing branches before I'd run into them. And when I ran into a branch, it would either attempt to pull off my headlight, or knock me back on my ass. Woooo narrow trails.

My first leg was fairly disastrous - I started out a bit rushed, as I thought we had 10 minutes between the men's start and the women's, and still had all my warmups on, on the wrong side of the stadium, when everyone else was lined up. I got there (skiing through two mesh fences - I can't see ANYTHING in the dark!), just in time, and I even had my poles on when they handed me my map.

I was pretty quick to find the start and #1, so when we took off, I had a good idea of where I wanted to go. My skis were running fast, and when we got to the first fork, I was in second behind one other girl. Shortly thereafter, I noticed that my EMIT brick was feeling floppier than normal - the way to attach these things is to put them around your index finger, safety-pin the hell out of it to your glove, and let it flap in the wind, if you don't have some other system previously worked out (I had a mix of dental floss and duct tape in Japan in 2009). We only got the cards about 30 minutes before the start, so there was no time to work up an elaborate holder-on-ner technique. The Swedes have cool glove fixtures, we're trying to obtain some of those before WOC.

Anyway, I noticed the brick getting floppy and then all of a sudden my hand felt way lighter. Wheee, so much easier to ski! Oh, wait. I need that thing. About 3-4 minutes (it felt like an hour) lost digging in the snow and swearing a lot, and I saw a tip of red elastic sticking out of the bank. Phew! I stuck the thing in my mouth and slobbered over it for the rest of the race - ever notice how you produce a lot of slobber in one race? No? Well, you do, but normally you can swallow or spit or gag or something, instead of just drooling.

Things went pretty smoothly for the next few controls, one 45s bobble, I passed back two more girls, and then I took a "creative" route choice to #7 - probably should have changed course earlier when there were no other ski tracks, but I figured I'd started, so I may as well continue along this route. It would have been fine, maybe only losing 15-30s, but I missed a junction in my head, and got really confused after climbing a hill. I skied down the wrong narrow trail, and luckily it looped around and shot me back to the big trail, which it shouldn't have done, and alarm bells went off. Eventually I figured it out, but that was frustrating, especially in a relay, when there is someone else waiting on you!

I tagged off to Ali, duct taped the entire brick to my glove, and then she went way too fast and I still had my warmups on as she skied into the stadium. Managed to get untangled, but I left the stadium without poles. Sigh. Someday, I'll get my shit together. It would probably have helped if I'd asked somebody the Swedish for "41", our team number, since they were announcing who was coming by number, in Swedish. Once my poles were on, though, I had a much better race. A couple hesitations, but no overtly-stupid route choices, and no huge mistakes. Much more boring!


Skiing!


This is the room Ali and I are sharing. When Nick leaves tomorrow morning, we have to fit Greg and all his stuff in here, too. Yea ski trips!

Applying fluoros.


I have a ridiculous fuzzy warm purple thing. Its wonderful.
Portapotties, swedish style. Also, the bin for sanitary napkins is called sanititteepussi. Is that not hilarious?

3pm.

London

As is often the way, I spent a couple days in London to visit family before heading on to Sweden. We've had a lovely couple of days, mostly I just do whatever Roger normally does each day - we went to the club (his gym, which is the fanciest gym I've ever been to), to his art class, spent a good bit of time reading (although in my case I was working on my statistics take-home exam), and seeing my uncle and cousins. A good way to recoup some energy and drink lots and lots and lots of tea. Do the English ever not want a cup of tea?


They have this cool rent-a-bike program in London - you can get the first 30 minutes free, and rent a bike, and leave it at any of the little rent-a-bike stands all over the city. Then its something like 4 pounds an hour, but, its an expensive city.

I can't NOT take pictures of myself like this. Laughing.


I like desserts. A well-known fact.

The desserts at my favorite shop - Ottolenghi's, the caterer around the corner from Pitt St.


From the art class. Re-remembering how to do it. Haven't drawn a live person in quite a while.

I was given a fun hat.

Double deckers!

Pitt st at night.

Myself and Olivia, cousin.

Double pole time trial 2010

I suppose you can't only write about the good races. Bad ones happen, too. I may have psyched myself out for the double pole time trial, but I think my poor performance was not just in my head - I hurt. Who knows why, could be any myriad of reasons, the biggest one is simply that I was tired.

Ali drove over from Amherst to join me for the test, and we got a bit of a late start because I was having trouble getting my butt in gear. After a barely-adequate warmup, we did the first interval, and I discovered that my poles were occasionally skipping, which was annoying. I was leading up past the steep bit, and then Ali came around, and I was all set to stay with her. But I discovered that my arms just wouldn't go. Neither would my legs - its amazing how much of your legs you have to use when you're double poling uphill. I went quickly into the red, and by the time I reached the top, just after Ali, I was sucking wind and feeling the lungburn. Also close to 20 seconds slower than my first one last year. Not good.

We headed down the hill and started the second, and it was going even worse. I just couldn't GO. Recognizing the incoming negative slump, I started pep-talking, reminding myself (forcefully) that I LOVE double poling, and I love it even more when I its up hills! My brain saw right through this scam, but I just kept repeating how much I loved double poling up hills. It didn't get me going much faster, in fact, I was another 20 seconds slower than the first one. Not good.

Third time up, I managed to talk myself into actually trying, but, that didn't amount to much, as I was only 4 seconds faster than the last hill. Not good. Luckily, at that point Corey showed up, and I had my excuse to stop.

That was certainly disappointing, but I'm not going to let it get me down. I know I'm a bit overextended right now, and with the semester done, and work wrapping up, I should be bouncing back soon, hopefully in time for the races in Sweden next week. But it still sucks to do a test that much worse than the year before. Sigh.

Ski season, incoming!

Winter sort of snuck up on me, and all of a sudden I'm about to head to Europe for the first ski orienteering world cups of the season, at the Swedish Ski-O Tour. I leave Sunday. Yup. Couple days in London to visit family and then on to Sweden, where Ali and Greg are joining me, and we'll attempt to out-ski and out-navigate the Swedes... highly unlikely.

In the meantime, there is a double pole test to contend, two or three coaching sessions, possibly a cyclocross race, possibly some orienteering, a good bit of ski waxing, some packing, and some take-home-final-examining. At least I can't say I'm bored.

Wahoooo skiing! Snow at Weston! Snow up north! 'Tis the season!! (but not that silly holiday season people are always talking about - its SKI season!).

3000m time trial

I try to do at least one of these a year, to get some indication of where my fitness is. Since I've now been running 3ks since 2002, I have many years of data, which makes my inner nerd pretty happy. Given the knee injury that wouldn't go away earlier this fall, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to run this year, but I'm mostly all-clear for running now, so figured I'd give the 3k a shot. Over thanksgiving week, I ran some 1000s on the track, just to get the pacing down, and see how my body responded. Turns out, 4min/km was quite taxing, and my legs felt like they were going to explode. Not a good sign. I set my sights on hitting 12min for the 3k, expecting maybe 10s of variation, mostly likely towards 12:10.

Luckily, I had company this year - the US orienteering team has to run a 3k as a team performance indicator thing, so most of them were running one before the superstars events started. We had a good crew, about 15 runners, some from the US team and some ardent supporters who are not on the team. My mom was on hand with Tira to give a couple "go sweetie!"s, and Peter and Claire and Ian were cheering/timing as well. I had the light shoes on, hoping for every advantage I could get.

A ragtag crew on the start line.



I knew I wouldn't be able to run with Sam or Ali, but that I'd be faster than Katia and Kseniya, the other two girls. I was hoping there would be some guys going my speed so I could draft on the windy backstretch, and it turned out that Giovanni was going just the speed I wanted. The first 200 felt effortless, 42s, and I was able to bring the pace back to something slightly more realistic coming back around the lap. Giovanni took the lead going into the second lap, and was running very consistent 95-second laps, so I tucked in and tried to stay relaxed. Things felt nice and controlled until about 4.5 laps in, when I noticed a gap growing between me and Giovanni. Knowing that the windy backstretch was coming up, I surged to get back in his draft, and hung on for another 400m, but with 2.5 laps left, I popped, and couldn't close the gap. At this point I was no longer running smoothly; the fat-kid-with-asthma breathing had made an appearance, and thoughts of lying down at the finish line were overwhelming my brain, which was taking a full 200 meters to add 48 seconds to my current time.

With one lap left I tried my hardest to rally, it felt like running was taking way too much coordination, and my legs felt like they were moving through jello, injected full of lactic acid. So hard to keep driving, but I finally crossed that line, in 11:47. 11 seconds faster than my PR two years ago, but I'm not sure how much of that is due to the light shoes. A good bit better than my expected 12:10! It is always relieving to perform better than you expect - maybe the fitness is there, after all. Now all that remains is to see how I do at the double pole time trial this weekend... I might be more race-ready than I previously thought.

Previous data:
2002 sept 13:38?
2002 nov 12:45?
2003 sept 12:45?
2003 nov 12:36
2004 oct 12:36
2005 nov 12:18
2006 aug ?
2007 oct 12:36
2008 june 12:38
2008 nov 11:58
2009 Nov 12:10
2010 Dec 11:47

Year-to-year fitness is pretty cool.

The other thing that's pretty cool (nerd alert), is the heart rate correlation to speed - Through about 6 laps, my heart rate was steadily climbing - it took 2.5 laps to break into L4, that zone just below your LT. Then I had about 2.5 more laps right at threshold, and by 5 laps in (where I lost Giovanni), I started popping above my LT, though not consistently. I made it another lap above threshold, and the last 1.5 laps, my HR started dropping, back into threshold-land, despite the speed staying pretty high. This probably correlates pretty well with where I started taking much bigger steps, sort of lurching down the track instead of running, but I don't have a video or anything to prove that. Its cool, though, to see what happens once you cross threshold - I apparently have about 3-4 minutes of grace period where I can deal with that much lactic acid, before my body can't flush it anymore, and shit hits the fan. Should probably work on that a bit... But it is fun to see how HR relates to that "comfortably hard" feeling.

CSU Orienteering Superstars

A long, long, time ago (20 years), Peter Gagarin held the first ever Orienteering Superstars event. It was modeled off of some sort of tv show that had been going on back then, and basically it was a bunch of events that made fun of certain runners for various traits. Peter and Ali and I were talking a while ago, and decided it was time to revive the Superstars event, and model it off of the current crop of orienteers' quirks. We talked about having the Samantha-speed-talk (Sam talks at a million miles an hour), the Ross Smith call 'em in (Ross is an awesome cheerer), the Boris Granovskiy pole dance (Boris' wife, Kat, has taken up pole dancing, and we're sure that's how he threw out his back a few weeks ago), and more along those lines. We ended up with the following events:

-The Boris Granovskiy pole dancing competition
-The Alex Jospe Anybody Can Ski O' race
-The Peter Gagarin Mountain Bike race (extra points for falling off)
-A mini-golf tournament
-A special sprint jig-saw puzzle race
-Ten-pin bowling
-The Ali Crocker Axe Throw
-Stair-stepper biathlon
-Post-race angry compass-throw
-Wife-carrying race
-Crutches race around the ski-o course

Basically, this was a bunch of barely-controlled chaos, in the vicinity of Peter's house. No event was longer than two minutes, unless you were particularly bad at it, and only weenies took it too seriously. My mom was here for the weekend, and she had an absolute blast, playing around with all the different events.

Here, Giovanni is pictured in the biathlon - you did 100 stair-steps, then you had three balls to throw into a bucket. For every one you missed, you had 40 penalty steps. First you threw standing, then you ran down, collected the balls, ran back up, and did another 100 steps. Then you threw kneeling. And did you requisite penalty steps, if you are short like me and can't see over the railing.

My mom about to start the ski-o: you had to carry all sorts of shit (skis, poles, boots, a map board (literally, a wooden board), and a punch card, and then you had to run around a very short course and punch four controls. I went early, and didn't know the course, so was trying to use the wooden map to navigate - not fast. The trick was to memorize the course, and then punch one-handed.
Ian attacking the ski-o course with all he's got.

Ali starts off on the mountain bike course. Peter put some flat pedals on his bike, to go around a 45-second loop around the house. Not very technically challenging, but the uphill hurt like a bitch when you're not warmed up and suddenly pedaling a bike as hard as you can!

Boris and Kat tackling the mini golf. Peter had dug some holes in his lawn, and those were what you aimed for, negative points if you hit the house. Keep in mind that he has a very small yard, and all the events went through the same sections of lawn. Semi-controlled chaos.

Peter and JJ about to start the crutch race, in honor of Ian, who broke his leg earlier this spring, and was on crutches for a long time. I did this one with the larger pair of crutches, which was basically impossible - it was faster to hop, because the crutches would continuously pop out from under my shoulders, being too big for me. The course went through the woods, which didn't help matters.

The start of the wife-carry race. I should mention that we were all in teams, mostly in couples. Ed was stuck in Boston fixing his truck, so I was in the "surrogate wife" category, along with Ken, Ian, Greg, Neil, and Ali - everyone else had their very own wife. Being teamed up with Ali, we determined she should carry, and we had the right technique, but unfortunately, she isn't really built for carrying heavy things, and I'm not really built for being carried, and about 3/4 of the way through, she just collapsed... the video is fairly hilarious.



Yeah, we actually did the "wife drop" instead of the "wife carry".

Peter, posing by his successful axe-throw.

I've forgotten everything I learned when I was a woodsman at Colby, plus the axe was way too heavy, I could barely get the thing over my head. No, I did not hit the target with the blade-side forward.

The speed-puzzle competition - Ian is working hard, but I beat him, by at least 30 seconds.

And the bowling - Ken broke out the silver spandex. I didn't break 100, but I came close with 97. I think I've long since accepted that I am just not a good bowler. Sigh.

Last, but not least, there was the pole dancing competition - Kat is really into pole dancing, and brought along a pole. She tried to show us how to do "transition moves", i.e., shake your booty, but most of us were just interested in learning the different spinny and upside-down moves. Good times.
Kat showing us how its done.
She's actually a monkey.

Neil put on a good show.
Most of the guys figured out that they could hold themselves horizontally, not fair.

In the end, Sam won the women's category of the Superstars, and Joe won the men's category. In the team competition (I was paired with Ali, for lack of a suitable wife in town), Kat and Boris won (mostly, because they destroyed the wife-carrying competition). But really, the point wasn't about winning. It was a barely-controlled chaotic evening of good fun, good food, good drink, and good people. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I hope this becomes an annual thing, rather than every 20 years.

Thanksgiving... with a turkey!

I don't remember when I last had a turkey for Thanksgiving - usually I'm somewhere with snow, and no turkeys. Or rather, turkeys-a-plenty in the grocery stores, but only a toaster oven and a microwave in the hotel kitchenette with which to cook the turkeys. So the fact that I got to stay home and eat turkey this Thanksgiving is actually kind of a big deal, even though I don't particularly like turkey. We decided to not bother with traveling, so stayed home and had a wonderful evening with Leo and Jenny, definitely the right decision.

Leo massages the turkey. I stole Ed's iphone and took silly pictures all night until they took the camera away from me.

What's going on here is that our roasting pan (we brought the turkey over, with a roasting pan, because Jenny is vegetarian, so they don't roast meat in a roasting pan ever) didn't fit in their oven. It doesn't fit in our oven, either, but we were hoping Leo and Jenny had a bigger oven. Luckily, we're talking about Ed and Leo, here, so they came up with a solution, which involved a dremel, a fire escape, and eventually, a smaller roasting pan.

Plotting their mischief. I feel like I'm in highschool again.

Also, Ed had the genius idea to inject bourbon into the turkey. It didn't actually make the turkey taste at all like bourbon, which was a bit disappointing. Because that would have been GENIUS, had it worked.

Apparently, I am a glutton. You know what? Its thanksgiving! I'm allowed to be gluttonous!

West Yellowstone may have had snow, but it was totally worth staying in town for this evening.

And did I mention the pecan pie? *swoon*


Things have been kind of hectic lately on my end, I've been trying to get all the temperature loggers out into little headwater streams at my study sites before everything freezes up, which happens, oh, right now. I don't mind the actual activity of standing in cold water tying these loggers to underwater branches so much, although you'd think I'd hate it; what I mind is the opportunity cost of wasting all your daylight hours driving from study site to study site. Just because I spent 9 hours in the field doesn't mean that I don't still have 7 hours of real work to do, too. Whine whine whine, but seriously, I don't deal well with work-related stress anymore these days. Training has taken a serious hit! Luckily, the semester is almost over, I can see that light at the end of the tunnel (does that mean I'm dead?), and I leave for Europe in 13 days for some ski-o racing action!

I wanted to do some racing over the weekend, but instead we headed to VT, where I spent another 12 hours driving around and standing in cold water. But, it was SNOWING! Like for real snow, they closed the pass on rt 100 through Dover/Wardsboro, which was problematic because I had to go that way to get to my next site, luckily I found a way around, and slipped and slid my way down the mountain, a nice reminder of how to drive in snow - turns out, snow is really slippery when they haven't sanded the roads yet!