Craftsbury Marathon

The timing crew ready to greet finishers. Photo from NENSA.

Today I only raced 25 kilometers, which is half as far as all of my teammates, so I can’t really pretend to have any great stories. In particular, here is some trivia to describe how un-exciting and un-speedy my race was: my 25K took me more than half as long as Hannah’s 50K, so her split would have been faster than my whole race.

When we woke up, it was -10 degrees F. By 8:15, it had gotten up to -3.9, so we figured we were on for a 9:00 race start. And we were. I wore more clothes than I have raced in ever before, including three shirts under my race top and two neck warmers, and slathered my face with Dermatone.

I was out there to survive and finish, and not get sick again. I was not “going for it” because getting sick is probably the worst thing I can imagine right now. Here’s why, presented as a trio of fun facts:

1) In the last two and a half weeks, I have gotten pummeled by 2 different head colds.

2) During that time, I took six days off.

3) My time for today’s race, 1:36, is longer than any ski I have done those two and a half weeks.

There was no way I could race the 50K, and Pepa almost didn’t let me race the 25K. However, I’m glad she did, because it was fun. I didn’t take things too seriously, so the fact that I was in the last wave to start and had to weave my way through the masters men and women as I caught them didn’t bother me too much. Sure, I complained a little bit, and sure, I fell down trying to switch tracks to pass Linda Ramsdell, but it was an added distraction and I wasn’t too bothered.

One of the funniest things that happened was on my second lap, when I was skiing down the long hill on Ruthie’s Run, approaching a corner. I heard “On your left” and turned around to see Eli Enman approaching me (the lead pack of men had lapped me half a kilometer before). I knew immediately that I was going to fall down. And try as I might to get around that corner with Eli passing me at the same time, I did fall down. I hope he had a good laugh.

I did end up sprinting in the final 500 meters when I realized that I was being caught by an M4 and my place on the podium was in jeopardy. I wasn’t taking the race too seriously, but I was pretty sure I could do something about this. I hauled ass and put 20 seconds on the woman in those 500 meters. I am pretty sure this is not a classy move.

All in all, I had fun.

The gym looked like a war zone after 50K, with Ollie sprawled on the floor muttering something about frozen private parts and Matt hunched over in a chair, eyes closed and dripping huge snot icicles. Ollie had the most epic bonk of the day – read about it here – while Hannah and Lauren had pretty decent ones of their own. Matt is afflicted with some combination of snow blindness and frostbitten retinas, and spent the rest of yesterday lying in his bed with his lights off, unable to open his eyes. He seemed pretty bored. Tim and Juergen came out of the whole thing comparatively unscathed.

They all went for it. I’m exhausted, so I can’t imagine how tired they must be.

As for me, with a little luck I’ll be back to my usual self for next weekend Eastern Cups at Stowe – I can’t wait.

Results here (overall) and here (by age group).

Northland Tales

Sprint quarterfinal at ValCartier.

Matt and I are the only ones home right now, and we were just reading an unnamed skier’s blog lamenting how terrible it was: overwrought, overdetailed, and poorly written. It made me think of the challenges I am facing with this blog. I don’t really do that much these days, and I’m worried that much of what I do is pretty boring to you, dear reader. You don’t care what I ate for breakfast or how I warmed up on the day of my last race.

So, let’s just say that recently, I traveled north to Quebec City with a few teammates to contest some NorAms at Val Cartier. The word “contest” makes it sound like we thought we might win. We didn’t think that. Most of Canada’s best skiers were present, excluding the few who are racing the Tour de Ski. Honestly, we didn’t know how we would do, but nobody expected either Lauren or I to beat Dasha Gaiazova.

The races happened. I broke a pole, I missed warming up for two races, other stuff went on. The most fun I had was the night that Ollie, Anna and I met up with Tim Whiton, the Bowdoin assistant coach, for dinner in the old city. It was great to get out of our comically tiny apartment, and to not think about the racing for some short amount of time. I love the feel of the old city and it was fun to be able to wander a little bit. We found a pub with a completely overwhelming selection of beer – seriously, the list was longer than the menu at most restaurants.

We’re back home in Craftsbury now and I couldn’t be happier. The skiing is fantastic, and with no races on the schedule for this weekend, I’ve been able to do a lot of it without worrying about tiring myself out. I took my first trip around Grand Tour, which loops through various farm fields and the villages of Craftsbury and Craftsbury Common before dropping onto the Hosmer Ponds. I love skiing when you can feel like you are going somewhere – a far cry from the 2.5 kilometer loops that our distance races lapped around in Quebec. It’s snowed every single day since we got back, not a ton, but enough to keep the trails covered and fresh.

Our main excitement has been watching live results stream in from Anchorage, where Ida, Hannah, and Tim are competing at Nationals. I was so proud yesterday at how many of my former teammates made the rounds in the women’s classic sprint: current Dartmouth students Ida Sargent, Rosie Brennan, Sophie Caldwell, Katie Bono, and Steph Crocker as well as alums Audrey Weber, Hannah Dreissigacker, and Kristina Trygstad-Saari. Counting freshman Megan Killigrew, almost 30% of the women in the heats were either Dartmouth undergrads or alums. What a day for the program- I am so lucky to have had the chance to train and race with these ladies at Dartmouth!

Last night, there was a staff party at the touring center. Quite often our team is gone for these events, which is a bummer. Matt and I got to attend this time, and we spent the whole evening playing hockey against the staff. Neither of us had skated in years. We got schooled. It was a fun evening, though, and I’m thinking of buying some used skates so I can play more often and next time, we won’t get beaten so badly….

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finally, some reading: an awesome article in Mother Jones about a guy who studies mushrooms.

Post-holiday funtimes

Putting up window quilts in our living room.

I had a very lovely Christmas break at home with my family. It was great to be home, sleep in my own bed, and generally be taken care of. (I spent a fair amount of my time working, though, sewing insulated window curtains for our house in Craftsbury – Lauren and I put them up today!)

Unfortunately, it didn’t last long, because Pepa insisted that we return to Craftsbury on Saturday for a time trial. The race did not go well, possibly because driving in the morning and not eating a good lunch is not good preparation. Also, though, it felt like I had just finished racing, and once racing season starts it’s hard to take time trials too seriously. I’d honestly rather just do some nice max intervals and save the race efforts for, you know, races, where I can easily find the motivation to go hard.

Then, this morning it started pouring. It poured all day. The previously great skiing has really deteriorated, although we are supposed to get a little bit of snow tomorrow so maybe things will improve. We have another time trial tomorrow, so hopefully things harden up!

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some reading:

1) Andrew Revkin will no longer be writing for the New York Times, which is a big ol’ bummer because he does great climate writing and the mainstream media needs that.

2) A cool bit of research from Nature which quantifies how far, per year, species will have to migrate to keep up with the changing climate. For some species, the distances – a global mean of .42 kilometers/year – aren’t too troubling. For others, that might as well be from here to the moon. Lots of issues are brought up.

3) I would highly recommend the book Bread by Jeffrey Hamelman. I make a lot of loaf bread but when I was home, I made two beautiful pairs of round loaves – one Rustic Bread and one Roasted Potato Bread. Yum.

4) This article by Grist’s David Roberts about behavioral barriers to energy efficiency gets to a lot of issues we’ve talked about at the Green Racing Project – why will or won’t people change their habits? There are some interesting next steps mentioned.

5) This Science story is back from July, but it’s an interesting look at evolution and the comments are fantastic.

Equipment failure, repeat, equipment failure.

(most of this was originally posted on the Green Racing Project blog)

I spent the weekend in Presque Isle, Maine, a part of the country that most people don’t even realize is part of this country. Its proximity to Canada aside, it was actually pretty great. The Nordic Heritage Center has great trails and an amazing lodge, and it made for great racing at the Eastern Cup openers. What made for less good racing were my repeated problems with things falling off.

Saturday really suprised me as I am usually very bad at sprinting – I mean, not just not good, but actually bad. Luckily, Pepa has helped me grow some fast twitch muscles and I was shocked to see that I qualified in 7th. The real excitement began in my quarterfinal, though, when about two strides out of the start the basket came off my right pole. This was completely due to my own stupidity since I knew it was loose when I left Craftsbury and had just forgotten to find pole glue and fix it. That threw me off and I was in 5th coming up the first steep, awkward hill. Luckily, on the rollers on the next part of the course, I was able to do some really quick V1 and get by a lot of girls, ending up 2nd in my heat and advancing. Every time I planted that pole, though, it sunk into the snow and I was terrified that the bottom was going to just snap off, which would have been a big problem! Before my semifinal, Janice from NENSA was nice enough to find a new basket, some pole glue, and a heat gun, and fixed me up. Thanks Janice! I had never made a semifinal of any sprint before so it was an exciting day. I’m still learning how to ski heats, and I ended up 10th – not as good as I qualified, but, a start for sure.

I entered Sunday’s mass start confident that my poles were all set, and caught a lucky break in the start. I was in the second row, but the girl who was supposed to start in front of me never showed up. In addition, I was on the inside lane for the turn at the top of the hill. So I got a good start. By 2 1/2 kilometers in, I was skiing in a lead pack of 8 girls. Then, somehow, I don’t know whether it was from me skiing up on Rachel Hall’s skis or Olga Golovkina skiing up on mine or some combination of the two, but the binding on my left ski opened. WHEN HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED, IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, TO A SOLOMON PROFIL BINDING???? It was on an uphill, so by the time I noticed that my skiboot was making direct contact with the snow, my ski had already started sliding down the hill. I stopped and frantically turned around to go get it, shouting to the spectators at the bottom of the hill, “Grab my ski! My ski!” and also, perhaps, cursing. I managed to get the ski, put it on, turn back around and ski up the hill again, but the damage was done. Sprint as I might, I couldn’t catch the pack – the closest I ever got was within 8 seconds going by the shooting range, although I did catch Rachel when she dropped off the back. I still had my best Eastern Cup result ever (7th), but it was frustrating because I think if I had been able to stay in that pack instead of wasting my energy trying to sprint up to them for a few kilometers, I could have had a really excellent result. Oh well, at least I have more confidence for next time, because I know I can ski with those girls!

So, here’s to getting equipment malfunctions out of the way early in the season….

Results here.

Back to Business

Getting ready for a race in West Yellowstone.

After a long time of being AWOL, I’m back in cyberspace. Our last accommodations in Bozeman had no internet access, but before that, I guess I was just being lazy. Sean yelled at me about not blogging. It really sucked. Anyway, here’s a long recap of what I’ve been up to.

In the last 24 hours: writing! You can find an article I wrote about the transition to on-snow training over on FasterSkier, as well as a new blog post about my awesome friend Ellie Johnston, who is attending the Copenhagen climate negotiations, on the Green Racing Project homepage.

Monday: traveling! It was a long, long day. When we woke up at 6:30, it was -32 degrees outside our little cabin across from Bohart Ranch, up the valley from Bozeman. We surfed down the long driveway, which was quite snowy. Then, going through airport security, Pepa took off her overalls, sent them through the scanner, and walked through the metal detector in a spandex race suit. That pretty much made my day. Unfortunately, things went downhill from there: from Bozeman we flew to Minneapolis, where we had a 3-hour layover. Then to Detroit for a 4-hour layover. Then we were late departing for Burlington, and didn’t get back to Craftsbury until 2 a.m. LONG. DAY.

The weekend: racing! Saturday was a skate sprint in Bozeman’s Lindley Park. The course looped around a whole lot, and you could basically see the whole thing from the stadium. I felt pretty good, fast, and powerful, which is unusual, because I am not a sprinter and usually feel, well, lost, struggling, and frantic. I ended up 35th, just under 2 seconds out of qualifying for the quarterfinals in a SuperTour. Not bad! I spent the afternoon watching the heats, where my teammate Ida won her quarterfinal, made a good but ultimately unsuccessful run in her semifinal, and then tired in the B Final, finishing 12th. Hannah and Tim didn’t advance out of their quarterfinals. Perhaps the most exciting run of the day belonged to my former teammate Pat O’Brien, who was last in his heat coming into the final two hills and managed to pass four skiers, with a ridiculous V1 across the finish line to advance to the semis. Go Pat.

The next day I woke up feeling just really crappy and sick and didn’t race the distance race. It was probably ok, since the temperatures were almost certainly below the legal limit and a lot of people really struggled. A few teammates got serious frostbite, and there was a lot of vicious coughing going on in our cabin afterwards.

Perhaps one of the highlights of Sunday was our trip up the valley from Bozeman in the evening, after we had hung out at Montana Ale Works with a bunch of other skiers. The driving wasn’t too bad until we got to the driveway. I really gunned it up the long, winding hill, which was covered in at least six inches of snow, and the 15-passenger van drifted all over the place. When I made it to the top, I let out a long sigh of relief before realizing that I had to turn the van around. This turned into an ordeal, at least a 50-point “turn”. I was fine until I had to back uphill, and then the van got really stuck. The rest of the team piled out and pushed. We had to try three different strategies before we finally got it moving. All this at 11:30 at night when it’s -20 degrees outside. Thanks for pushing, guys!

Racing in West Yellowstone.

Earlier: West Yellowstone! We spent ten days there, skiing and racing. It was great to finally get off of pavement and onto real skis. Plus, it was beautiful country, and I got to catch up with a lot of friends from Dartmouth. Most of the country’s best skiers come to the Yellowstone Ski Festival, which is quite an event. I spent one evening manning the SkiErg table at the expo, where I got to watch tons of little kids really go all out to see how many watts they could generate in exchange for some Concept2 ski ties. Pretty entertaining. The races didn’t go well for me, but, eh, you’ve got to start somewhere, and hopefully I’ve gotten bad races out of the way to some extent. We also had a great Thanksgiving with an absurd amount of turkey. Yum.

Right now: I’m happy to be back in Craftsbury, where I can sleep in my own bed. It’s been snowing all day and there is plenty of the white stuff to ski on. We’re hosting our first race of the season this weekend, as well as a clinic for the kids’ program. We’re also running a vigil of sorts on the common on Friday night, calling on politicians and world leaders to make real, meaningful progress at the Copenhagen climate negotiations.

It's snowing outside the window. Yay!

In terms of Chelsea’s book club, I’ll try to keep it short. I read Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help, which was excellent. I’ve been reading about food issues on Barry Estabrook’s blog and his Gourmet archive. And, there were some cool op-eds in the New York Times in advance of Copenhagen.

Ski Incline!

For the last ten days, the Craftsbury Green Racing Project has been holding a training camp at Lake Tahoe. Why? People keep asking me if we’re chasing snow. Nope. The main goal of the camp is to get some altitude training in – ideally, we’d be skiing at altitude, but doing dryland at altitude is the next best thing. Tickets were cheap and we have a free place to stay in Incline Village, so things are working out well.

We’ve had many beautiful, sunny, warm workouts – exactly what one would expect in California. This makes it all the more surprising when things turn nasty.

Last night, Hannah and I sat in the hot tub as tiny snowflakes fell all around us. It had been cold all day, but at least sunny, and we merrily imagined snow piling up on the neighboring golf course. After all, there had to be some place we could dig up skis, even if they were kind of clunky.

In the morning, we faced reality. Not much snow had accumulated on the ground, but the roads were covered in a layer of black ice and snow had piled up on the shoulders, swept there by the passing cars. Motivation for our two-hour rollerski was low. Perhaps nonexistent. I crawled back into bed after breakfast, and thought over and over about how tired I was. Maybe I should just take a day off…

But no. I correctly recognized that while I was tired – the last week has been big on volume – I mostly was just being a wuss. I strapped on my skate boots, my warmest spandex, several layers on top, and actual ski gloves. We hit the streets.

I almost immediately found that I couldn’t skate on large sections of the road. My skis slipped out as I kicked, leaving me unbalanced and, mostly, frustrated. We double-poled the iciest sections, and even then, it took concentration to keep our skis upright and moving in a straight line. The challenge did have its benefits: before I knew it, twenty minutes had passed. I didn’t have time to complain about the sub-freezing temperatures or how tired I had been. I was just out there, skiing.

We tried to ski up the pass, but after half an hour, gave up. It was just too icy. Instead, we skied through residential neighborhoods along the lake. Adapt and overcome, as Ruff would say….

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The tabs open in my browser are getting quite numerous, so here’s a link dump of, as Ollie says (hi Ollie) “things Chelsea has read and wants you to read.”

- One of my cabinmates from the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, when I was working on my thesis, is headed to Copehagen for the climate negotiations! Here’s a little bit about what she has to say. Go Ellie!!

- On energy: Obama can give a darn good speech. But, as climate legislation keeps getting bumped back and as Copenhagen looms, what’s his vision? Come on, buddy…

- On the other hand, apparently doing simple things like changing lightbulbs could actually make a big difference. So everyone, do the 17 things this Science article suggests.

- Closer to home, a Vermont program offering incentives for sustainable energy installments is inundated with applications. Hope all those things get built!

- I suspect that Meatless Mondays would have a similar reception on our team as it did in the Baltimore School System. We may try to sneak it past the boys somehow anyway.

- And finally: “Why Sleepyheads Forget.” We are definitely sleepyheads. Except Ida and Lauren, who wake up early.

- This article is about some really cool research calculating Amazonian forest biomass from planes. Sign me up!

Green Racing Project’s 350 Day of Action, Donner Pass

“Green” and 350

Today we hiked/ran from Squaw Valley to Donner Pass. Beautiful!

When people ask me what it means to be a green ski team, I sometimes struggle to answer. We haven’t changed the world (yet). But we’ve done a few things, we’ve tried to do a few more things, and we organized the Team 350 Challenge.

The idea of the challenge was to get people to think. Our earth’s atmosphere currently has 387 parts per million of carbon dioxide floating around in it. In order to avoid catastrophic environmental effects – which, more than just wrecking the “environment”, which a lot of people don’t really care about, would wreck people’s lives – this level should drop below 350 parts per million. One of these catastrophes is that there would be no snow, and we’d be out of luck for skiing.

We challenged our community, along with the rowing community, to cumulatively train 350 million meters over the course of a month. While our goal was to get as many people signed on as possible, and to log as many meters as we could, I imagined that if 1,000 people each logged 350 thousand meters (350 kilometers), we’d reach our goal. That’s not much more than 10 kilometers per day. There is quite a large number of athletes out there who train that much or more.

While the Team 350 Challenge doesn’t include any specific action to lower the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, each person that signs onto the challenge is aware of the issue. If we could get athletes to think about climate change as they logged their meters online, surely we could make a difference, or at least a statement.

As I write this, nearly 1,500 people have taken up the challenge. Among the names on the honor boards are Green Mountain Valley School coach Justin Beckwith and his team; NCAA All-Americans Rosie Brennan, Susan Dunklee, and Caitlin Patterson; and, of course, all the members of our team. Nearly 100 athletes have completed 350 kilometers of training.

Regardless of the fact that we will not reach our goal, we have reached out to a significant number of people. And this ties back into our goal, into my answer to the first question, into what makes us a “green” racing team. Although acting is undeniably better than thinking, at the very least, our goal is to raise awareness about sustainability issues.

Tim sometimes refers to “the hypocrisy of being a green ski racer.” We will never be a zero-waste, zero-emissions team. It’s not possible. You can’t walk to every race on your own two feet. You can’t train at altitude in Vermont – hence we’re in Lake Tahoe right now.

But we can do as much as we can make sure we are not wasting resources unnecessarily, and to make sure that our competitors are aware of their own effect on the environment. We can do our workouts from our house whenever possible instead of driving somewhere. We can eat as much local food as possible. We can write letters to our legislators and politicians and try to make sure that the Copenhagen negotiations are fruitful.

There is a lot of buzz around 350 right now. We hope that you’re paying attention to what so many people are saying – thanks Andrew Gardner, thanks Steinbock, thanks Sara Renner, thanks to so many others – and we hope you continue to think about it for the rest of the year, too.

Training notes: Autumn in Vermont

Pepa has been in Bulgaria for the last two weeks. Ida, Hannah, Tim, and Lauren have been in Lake Placid for the last week. The rest of us have just tried to hold down the fort.

Training without Pepa is bizarre – I never thought I would say that, because I am proud of the fact that for the last three summers I trained almost entirely by myself. I also just enjoy being alone – there are training days where I like to ski along chatting, but there are also days when it is a relief to be able to use that time to think your own thoughts and be inside your own head. When some of my teammates expressed dismay that we would have to train without Pepa, I basically told them to grow up.

But, really, I miss Pepa. Now there’s nobody to tell us “Good morning, my sleeping beauties,” and nobody to make sure my technique is good when I’m skiing. Some days it was hard to motivate ourselves to go train. It’s especially hard when it’s gray, rainy, and less than 50 degrees out. Those days are toughness training. On one such day, I decided to run our negative-split workout instead of rollerskiing. Ollie decided he was sick, and Matt didn’t decide anything. Instead, he sat around in his training clothes in a perpetual state of indecision about whether to go rollerski, and at the end of the day said, “I blew it. I really need Pepa to come back”.

One of the amazing things about Vermont is that each town seems to have its own weather system. This morning, we started rollerskiing in sunny East Craftsbury. By the time we got over Johnson’s Hill, it was hailing, which wasn’t so bad since it didn’t get us wet. In Greensboro the hail turned to a cold rain. Ida and I, soaked and freezing, turned around to go get jackets and gloves; coming back over Johnson’s Hill it was snowing, but in East Craftsbury it was still sunny. We put our jackets on anyway.

On a less cheerful note, I have developed tendonitis in my elbow. It’s from rollerskiing. It first appeared after our 5-hour classic ski a few weeks ago. I’ve been liberally applying some Bulgarian anti-inflammatory gel, and I thought it was getting better; this turned out to be because I took a break from training, and now that I have skied four days in a row, it’s back with a vengeance. It’s in my left elbow, and Lauren’s theory is that the roads are crowned so the inside pole is planted slightly above the outside pole every time you stride. I am hoping I can make it to ski season without it getting much worse, and that snow will provide a nice low-impact cushion. Until then, I hope to avoid 5-hour rollerskis…

Yesterday morning’s rollerski also left me pretty wet. My boots were literally full of water, to the extent that I could pour it out of them (note: I need to make fenders for my rollerskis). Then in the afternoon, when it was beautiful and sunny, we had BKL practice. I really didn’t want to put my feet back into my soaking-wet boots, so instead I broke out my brand-new pair of Salomon S-Labs, which I had been saving up for when we got on snow. When I went to put them on, I looked in the left boot and saw…. fluff. A mouse house. Apparently nothing is safe from the mice. Luckily, they hadn’t chewed up the boot at all, and also luckily, there weren’t any actual mice in the boot. I was still bitter though.

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This is the part that Ollie calls “Chelsea’s book club”:

- Nature published a commentary on planetary boundaries (i.e. the limit of the effect we can have on the planet without sending it into a tailspin). The original commentary wasn’t too interesting – fairly obvious, although it is nice that they quantified things I guess – and for each of the limits, there is an accompanying commentary from a different scientist. Most of them shoot down the suggested overarching global limits by calling them oversimplified; one good example is the commentary on freshwater use, which points out that local circumstances are far more important. Here’s a great thought:

“What scientists persistently ignore is the unpleasant fact that a good scientific concept isn’t necessarily a good communications platform.”

and, of course, the flip side is that a good talking point isn’t necessarily scientifically sound. In many of these cases, it depends which 4,000 cubic kilometers of freshwater you use, or which 15 percent of the world’s land you clear for agriculture, not simply if the the single-number human effect is higher or lower.

- I don’t know much about Nike but was impressed when they left the Chamber of Commerce due to the Chamber’s opposition to climate change legislation. This article in Mother Jones makes it seem like the Chamber isn’t such a great place in any regard – a little like the Bush administration?

- This guy is facing the possibility of 10 years in jail for disrupting oil and gas lease auctions at the end of the Bush administration. He is impressively brave.

- As a NH native living in Vermont, I find it odd that the two states differ widely in terms of carpooling, with more than 80% of workers driving to work along in NH but fewer than 75% doing the same thing in Vermont – especially since NH has more population centers, so you might think it would be easier to find someone carpooling to the same place as you. Rural/suburban/urban nature of each state was not one of the variables examined by the Atlantic.

- This New York Times article on Jamie Oliver is kind of doting. That said, I have one of his cookbooks (it was abandoned at one of my college apartments, so I just stole it) and it’s pretty great. I like his attitude and hope he can achieve as many cultural changes as he’s aiming for.

- Gourmet is no longer publishing? WHAT? What am I going to do? Eff. Besides some good recipes and gorgeous photography, that magazine actually featured good writing. Conde Nast wants to send me Bon Appetit instead, but it is no substitute at all.

- Kikkan Randall decided to give up 5 foods until the Olympics. Example: soda. This is good. I overheard a rower saying she was inspired and was going to try something similar. Example: bread. I want to hit my head against a brick wall.

Inspiration

unrelated: Lauren presses cider as I watch at an event at the Outdoor Center. Photo: Judy Geer.

At lunch today we were sitting around, listening to coach Larry Gluckman and our housemate, Shay Seager, work on a training plan.

Shay is a rower and, although our sports would appear to have much in common, we are still completely mystified whenever the rowers talk about their training. They train at specific stroke rates or wattages; we train at heart rates, which seems much simpler.

We asked Larry why this was. And then we realized that skiing has many fewer variables than rowing: namely, there’s only one of us on each pair of skis. If you have two guys in a boat, you have to give them something in common to shoot for during training. A coach’s job is figuring out how to get each guy to work equally as hard while they row at the same stroke rate.

One thing led to another and soon Larry was telling racing stories. In 2005, he took his Trinity College team – a D-III club which had finished second at their national championships – to the Henley Regatta in England. Henley racing is match racing, a bit like March Madness brackets – each race features only two crews, and the winner advances. Trinity was seeded seventh, and in their second day of racing, they faced the number one seed, Cal’s undefeated freshmen crew (who, Shay pointed out, had beat Cal’s own first varsity that year).

Even though we knew the outcome of the story, we were all on the edges of our seats. Two of our friends, Tom and Peter Graves, were bow and stroke in the boat.

Larry described how they had done scouting. There is a cattle guard on the trail that runs around to the river at the 700 meter mark, and they knew that the Cal boat covered the distance to the barrier faster than they had in their first race. They also knew that their crew was faster over the next part of the course, until the Fawley Farm mark.

“I never told them what to do,” Larry said. “I always let the boys make their own race plan.”

The crew decided that they needed to get out fast, because if they Cal got ahead, it would be very tough to make up time. Then, they would just do what they always did, and hope they could hold it together.

Larry described, a little bit, the scene at Henley. Each team has a few tickets for launches – boats that can drive along beside the race. They are usually used by coaches, but Larry gave the launches to parents and watched from the grandstand instead. At several intervals along the course, there are placards that are updated as the boats pass, showing the relative position of the two crews. It was mainly through these placards that Larry could tell how the race had started.

Trinity rowed out harder than they ever had before, balls to the wall, and after two minutes led by ¾ of a length. Larry was watching from the stands at the finish, and he was pleasantly surprised when he saw the placards.

The Cal crew had never been behind before, but they stayed calm and didn’t panic. Gradually, over the next three minutes, the Cal crew crept up on the Trinity boat. At the second placard, they had made up a quarter of a length, and at the last placard before the finish, it was almost even – in fact, nobody could really tell who was ahead.

“I thought it was over,” said Larry. “I thought that when they rowed to the finish, Cal was just going to slip right by. Plus, the guy in the 3 seat had really bought the farm. He was slumped over his oar, just kind of moving back and forth and maybe – maybe – putting his oar in the water on some of the strokes. He was the strongest guy in the boat, and I have no doubt that he was the main reason we got that ¾ length lead in the first two minutes – but he had spent all his energy.”

As they pushed toward the finish, both crews were rowing harder than they had all season. The giant crowd – ten or twenty thousand – was yelling. Larry isn’t quite sure what the cox told them, but they didn’t lose much ground. Soon there were only 40 or so strokes left, and the crews were still neck and neck.

Larry says that his crews always practice the last 40 strokes, and, in particular, the last 10. You never want to drift over the line; you want to have more momentum than your opponent. So when it got down to here, his crew dug in (the guy in the 3 seat may have even started rowing again) and pulled.

The boats crossed the line and nobody knew who had won. It was quiet. There was no announcement. Larry started walking down to the water, sure that his team had lost.

Then there was an announcement. “Trinity.” Not “Trinity College of Hartford Connecticut of the United States,” like usual (since there are also other Trinity Colleges, like the one in Dublin). Just “Trinity”.

As Larry got down to the enclosure, he saw why. The guy in the 3 seat had completely collapsed and partially fallen out of the boat as they crossed the finish line. His head was in the water, and the guy in front of him was trying to hold him up. A referee’s boat came out to take him out of the boat, but he insisted he was fine. As soon as the boats reached the dock, one on each side, both crews tumbled out and lay down, completely wasted.

“It looked like a war zone,” said Larry. What the men had accomplished was absolutely incredible, and they had paid a serious price for it.

As is sometimes true in tournaments, the next day’s race was much easier. Then, on Sunday, they were in the championship. The number of boats in the boat tent had been reduced from a few hundred to maybe twenty. Half these boats would be champions.

As it turned out, Trinity was one of them. They beat the Yale lightweights. At the end, Tom and Peter stood up, at opposite ends of the boat, turned toward each other, saluted, and sat down. The moment was captured and used as a centerfold in Rowing News.

It was a good race, and they worked hard (the 3 seat again bonked beyond belief), but it was no Cal race. That race garnered them attention and respect. Although they are a D-III team, they now race almost exclusively D-I schools, and based on that one regatta alone were invited to Stanford’s annual invitational.

Listening to the story, we were all completely enthralled. It got our adrenaline going. It made us look forward to racing – in fact, we wanted to go race right then and there.

Get me my skis, the snow is coming.