Ganghoferlauf 50k and Feeling Like A Skier

At the finish of the Ganghoferlauf classic marathon. (Photo via Ganghoferlauf Facebook page)

Wednesday night I couldn’t fall asleep.

We were supposed to leave on Friday to go to Austria for a Saturday ski race, and the forecast was for rain all day on race day. Would there even be snow left, after the crazy-long warm snap that we’ve had plus even more rain? Would I make it through 50 k of being out in the rain? Should I just bag the trip if it was going to be miserable?

Racing isn’t my whole life so these questions shouldn’t have weighed so heavily, but the next 48 hours provided me with so many highs and lows.

I traveled to Austria. I was disappointed with the ski conditions. I loved our hotel setup! I despaired about the wax. I had a really fun 25 k of racing! I felt so alone and discouraged and stopped dead in the middle of the trail to eat a snack. I got my motivation back and careened another 25 k around the course, stuffing my mouth with Clif ShotBloks along the way.

I felt like a skier. That was the best part, the highest high.

And then, when I crossed the finish line exhausted, a guy asked to take my picture. Sure, why not? I smiled, with the Tirolean Alps in the background. As the shutter clicked, I heard the announcer.

“And this is, from Switzerland, Chelsea Little, she is the third woman to come into the finish after 50 k.”

What?

After all that angst, it turned out to be a very good day.

***

I’m not good at giving up on things, but the idea of skipping the race really was going through my head mid-week. I didn’t know what to do. I’d imagined this classic marathon, the Ganghoferlauf, as my season finale. It looked like it was literally going to rain on my parade.

By Thursday the forecast had changed, and it looked like it would be right around freezing and with a light snow at the start, warming up to the mid-40’s and sunny over the course of the race. How do you wax for that?

I’m not good at giving up on things so I got on the train on Friday, but somehow things didn’t get better once we got to Leutasch.

Midwinter skiing this ain’t. Note all the dirt in the snowbank in the left foreground.

I tested klister on Friday afternoon and nothing felt good. My skis alternately slipped and iced up. The snow was basically slush and as we ate dinner, it rained some more. Completely saturated. Lovely.

I had figured I could buy some of the appropriate wax at the expo when I picked up my bib, but there wasn’t really an expo (or a ski shop within a kilometer). The small collection of the klister in my wax box was all I had to work with: Swix base green, KR 45 purple, and one each of Toko green, blue, red, and yellow. Because I’m not good at giving up on things, before bed I re-applied the KR45 and Toko red to one ski each of my test skis – not at all confident either of these things would work the next day – and a thin layer of base green on my race skis.

“Shit, I really wish I had a riller,” I lamented.

“A what?” Steve asked.

“Never mind.” Right. Riller is not a word used by 99.99% of the human population.

Miraculously, I managed to get a good, deep sleep.

I woke up to the fact that it had frozen overnight, which was actually more than I had dared hope for. The tracks would be fast, so I reasoned that I’d have to suffer for much less time than if it had been slush from the start, like I’d been imagining.

But after eating a quick breakfast and hopping on my test skis, I found that both the KR45 and the Toko red were grabby and iced up. Not good. I was practically falling down on the flats they were so grabby. I tried covering them with a warm hardwax, but then I couldn’t kick up the hill.

I saw a fast-looking young woman out testing wax, but she was discussing with her coach/wax tech and was clearly testing more options. I haven’t had a team in years and this was a problem I needed to figure out on my lonely own.

Thinking about the forecast, I picked the KR45, crossed my fingers that the snow would stay relatively frozen, and heated it into a pretty layer on my race skis using the hotel room hairdryer. And then I went to the start.

The days leading up to the race had been so stressful as the weather forecast changed constantly. I was also mentally exhausted from a very intense three-day retreat with my research group. It was a gray damp morning. I had zero confidence in my skis. I have to say, I really did not want to do this race.

Then the gun went off, and the race started.

***

I’ve had a weird year of ski racing, and really of skiing. There was no snow early, so I bagged the race I had planned to do in December because I hadn’t even been on skis once. Then in January I went to Cortina, Italy, to do the Toblach-Cortina 35 k, but it was canceled.

The Ganghoferlauf 50 k was what I picked to make up for that race. A few years ago I went to Seefeld (just a few kilometers away) for the Kaiser Maximilian Lauf, back-to-back 60 k’s where I did the skating and classic races. They were very well organized, on fun trails with beautiful views. So when I was looking for a late-season classic race in central Europe, it was pretty appealing to go back. I booked a spot in Leutasch.

The race start. (Photo via Ganghoferlauf Facebook page)

And as we headed off the line, I felt like I had made a good decision. There were plenty of classic tracks for the first kilometer or so, and I easily had room to pass people despite starting near the back of the pack.

Very early, after about a kilometer and a half, we hit the biggest climb of the whole race. It was steep and long and much of the field immediately got out of the tracks and started herringboning their way up it, occasionally tangling up with each other.

I stayed in the tracks to the right. My purple klister, which an hour earlier when I was testing had been a disaster, was fantastic. I just strided past people and probably had a big grin on my face because I seriously couldn’t believe my luck. Out of a pretty limited wax box, it seemed like I had nailed it.

A kilometer later on the first downhill, I realized that not only was my wax not so grabby that I’d be falling down, but my glide job was also decently fast.

This was going to be fun. In the space of just a few minutes, my entire perspective shifted.

I cruised around the course, and after skiing through a rolling meadow system for about eight kilometers, we hit the flats of the bottom of the Leutasch valley. I was still skiing with packs of people, and just trying to hold a steady pace. At some point, we started up the hill and into the forest on the other side of the valley, and zig-zagged up and down smaller climbs for a few kilometers.

On the downhill of one of these zags, I caught a woman I had seen in front of me for the whole first 15 k of the race. We double-poled along the flat for a while, and after two more sets of uphill zigs and zags, caught another woman.

For the last seven kilometers of the 25 k loop, the three of us skied together, with the occasional guy trying to jump in between us, as they usually do. It was really fun. Johanna and Sanne – our names were on our bibs, so I weirdly felt like I got to know them – were good skiers. They were fun to follow and we had our own little race dynamics doing on, especially through the “Waldloipe” forest loop that had lots of fun ups and downs, twists and turns. Sometimes one of them would sprint over the top of a hill, but the other two of us would usually catch up.

As we looped back through the start/finish area, Sanne pulled away, and then I watched as she and Johanna turned left.

They were doing the 25 k.

Crap.

***

After I signed up for this race, I was describing it to Steve, and mentioned that it was a two-loop 50 k.

“When you have to ski straight past the finish and go out on a second loop, that’s going to be so terrible,” he said, already half laughing at my future anguish.

And oh boy, was he right.

A view from the 8 k meadow loop, the day before the race.

I’d had so much fun skiing with those two women, and I had worked pretty hard to stay with them over the last few kilometers. Maybe it wasn’t the most clever thing to do halfway though a 50 k, but it had felt good. Except now they were gone, the sun had been out for half an hour, and the snow had turned from ice to slush. I was staring at the big climb again, and could barely see anyone in front of me. I turned around and saw only other skiers turning left.

Yes, this was despair.

I realized that I hadn’t eaten any solid food, and stopped and dug out a Clif bar. On a hunch, I had decided to race with my running vest, something I’d never really done before. I knew it would be hot by the end of the race and that I might need more hydration than usual, and it also gave me the chance to carry some klister in case my wax job sucked as the conditions warmed up.

Now, I was very relieved to have the vest because it had snacks in it. There were a few spectators on the side of the trail who weren’t sure how to cheer for me as I stood there eating a bar, but it was completely worth it.

The calories almost immediately made me feel better, and I tackled the hill. I was tired from my ill-advised battle with two 25 k skiers, but my skis definitely didn’t suck. (I later realized this was because my kickzone consisted entirely of pine needles, not that the KR45 was somehow still working.)

The course consisted of little finger-like loops, the zigs and zags up and down hills. Coming out of one such loop I saw that there was another woman coming out of the next loop. I had no chance to catch her – we were separated by maybe two kilometers – but it was nice to see here there.

And coming out of another loop, I saw two other women just beginning it. They were perhaps another two kilometers behind me. This provided some good motivation: they probably wouldn’t catch me unless I really ran out of steam, but this was a marathon so you never know. I had to keep pushing just in case.

For most of the second 25 k I was in no man’s land. I could see a guy in a pea-green suit ahead of me, and sometimes I got within 20 meters, but then he’d pull away again.

I kept drinking from my vest and eating snacks, and trying to push on through the deepening slush. I was striding on the flats because it was so slow, and it made my back hurt. Then there were the road crossings, where the crossing guards let cars through between racers and only sometimes shoveled snow back onto the road. I cringed for my poor race skis, which were surely going to have a permanent reduction in speed by the time the day was over.

By the time I made it through all the zigs and zags and around the Waldloipe – no friends to chase this time – I emerged into the big field to see that there was nobody behind me. It was a relief, because there was a kilometer of flat to go and I had no sprint in me.

I took a purposeful but relaxed double-pole to the finish, and was smiling by the time I crossed the line.

***

On the podium! (Photo by Steve)

It turned out that I was third (out of just 25 women) in the race, and won my entry fee back. It had been impossible to tell my place when I was racing because of all the 25 k racers mixed in with us. So it was a legitimate surprise to realize I was on the podium.

It was a very nice reward at the end of the season, and I got a funny antler trophy as a prize.

But the result was just gravy. The best part of the day was feeling like a skier.

As I wrote, it’s been a weird year for me for skiing. In some ways it has been great; I have done a fair amount of skiing in some of my favorite places, including making time before work once a week many weeks (okay, getting to work extremely late once a week many weeks…).

But I’ve raced a lot less than planned – the Ganghoferlauf was just my third race of the year. The first race was not a positive experience. The second race was pretty fun, but on my “home” tracks in Einsiedeln and quite low-key.

In this 50 k, I felt like I was competing. I had a blast skiing with the sixth- and seventh-place women in the 25 k. I was engaged and focused, using my technique and my strength.

And then came the hard part: going another 25 k alone. It was hard, but I did it!

I did it because I’m decently fit and I planned my training to be rested (physically, if not mentally) for this race.

I did it because I used my experience and logic and a little bit of luck to make good skis.

I did it because diagonal stride is my favorite.

I did it because I wanted to use every tool I had to get to the finish line fastest.

In that lonely loop, I still felt like a skier.

I live in a city where it rarely snows, but skiing is what I love. Sometimes I feel like I’m not a skier anymore because I can’t ski out the backdoor and I don’t have a team or skier training buddies. Sometimes I get to the ski trail and I feel uncoordinated and floundering. Or I get to a race and I look at all the skinny, strong, fast-looking people in trendy ski gear with this year’s skis and boots, and I feel like I’m not one of them.

Those aren’t the things that define who is a skier and who isn’t, but sometimes it feels like it.

When I get to feel like an actual skier – which I am – it’s the best feeling.

Planoiras Part 2: Seeking Confidence and Resilience

Note: This is the second of two posts about my racing in Lenzherheide, Switzerland, this weekend. For the first post, click here.

Saturday morning I woke up to one of those emails you don’t want to get at the start of the weekend. A paper I had submitted was rejected. Argh!

This happens all the time if you are an academic, and I think I have generally gotten slightly better at dealing with it. I was able to find some positives: the paper did go out for review (rather than getting rejected by the editor without review, something that is quite common), and all of the reviewers and editors agreed the premise was interesting. It’s not like they were telling me I, or my science, was garbage.

But it was still very disappointing. It was the chapter of my dissertation that I felt the most ownership over: the thing I felt like I had come up with all by myself and then convinced my supervisor and co-author to pursue, and that had turned out to have really interesting results. I had sent it to one of the journals I admire most in my field, and to have it published there would have felt like an incredible milestone.

Luckily, I was meeting some friends for a ski that morning, so after reading the reviewer comments over breakfast I hopped on the train and got some beautiful, sunshiney snow time. Glide. Good therapy.

Later in the day, I skyped with Steve, who is traveling for work. We chatted about a bunch of different things before I even remembered to mention the paper rejection. Then he asked if I was ready for my ski race the next day.

“I’m trying to be,” I said. “But it’s hard. The weather is going to be pretty terrible. It’s just blah.”

“You’re paper got rejected and now everything is painted gray,” he responded. “I know how you will be. The weather is gray and I don’t like it. The skiing is gray. This breakfast is gray, yuck. Gray gray gray.”

I laughed, because he was right, kind of. I definitely get that way. Sometimes when one bad thing happens, it leads me right down a chain of negativity until everything seems overwhelming, bad, and unsolvable. I can’t seem to see anything good in the world.

But I also laughed because it’s something I’m working on. For Christmas I bought myself Kara Goucher’s new book, “Strong.” It’s about building confidence. Some of the presentation is a little too girly for me, but there are aspects of the book that I love. It all works because Goucher is completely honest about her struggles, and she’s easily convincing when she relates how mental training helped her.

One section is about reframing negative thoughts and turning them into strengths, and this is something I really liked.

Here’s an example. These days when I go to a ski race, I’m aware that I probably don’t train as much as most of the people who are around me – people who look all pro in their shiny suits, who own the newest skis and boots and poles, and who probably poured a couple hundred Francs into their wax jobs. I certainly don’t have as much time on snow, because I live in Zurich, and most of them live much closer to the mountains, if not actually in the mountains.

As I see all these people warming up and putting their skis on the line, sometimes I feel like a complete imposter. What am I doing here!? These people are so much better prepared than me! Look how fit they all look!

And, well, some of them are better trained. But physical preparation is not the only thing that makes you go fast. You could have done the best training this year, but if you show up at a race and don’t work hard, you’re probably not going to reach your goals.

I work really, really hard in races in order to make up for my lack of ski-specific (or some years even total…) training. I try to target my effort in the ways that will help the most, take advantage of my love of downhills and corners, and attempt to finish the race having spent every bit of energy I have.

And so when there was an exercise in “Strong” to write down a common negative thought you have and reframe it, this is what I picked.

“Everyone here has done better training than you,” I wrote down for the negative thought.

“You know how to get the most out of the training you’ve done,” I wrote down as a new mantra.

I hadn’t really thought about things that way before, but it felt good.

Did it help me in my race on Sunday? I don’t know. The race still wasn’t that fun, but I did stay focused even though I was performing worse than I had hoped. N=1. Maybe I would have anyway.

A few days later, I was listening to the Science of Ultra podcast when an episode came on about mental training. The host describing the RISE approach: recognize, identify, switch, and execute. His example for recognizing your emotions hit home.

“First, recognize the thoughts you’re having. Be aware of negative, unhelpful, and destructive thoughts…. maybe you’re going much slower than expected, and disappointed that you’re not going to make your goal time, or embarrassed that so many people are passing you.”

As I wrote in part 1 of this blog post, I need to clarify why it is that I race. Skiing doesn’t really have goal times (one of the things I love about it!) and you never know who will show up at a given marathon. Setting results-based goals seems particularly futile when you’re in a field of competitors you don’t know anything about, and I wouldn’t say that I am driven to race because I think I’ll do “well”. I don’t train full time. I’m getting worse at skiing. I know that.

And yet, that embarrassment when lots of people pass me is real. That’s something I need to recognize. Even though results are not the main reason I do this, it feels bad.

What’s funny about all of this is that I have been thinking about mental resilience a lot lately, but not because of sports. Instead, I’ve been thinking about it in my life as a scientist.

Finishing my dissertation was really hard, and I still don’t feel like I’m fully recovered. It took a lot out of me intellectually and emotionally. Two months after handing it in, I sit down at the computer to write on one of the other papers I owe my boss and I just can’t. The words don’t come out. The ideas I had disappear.

And even before that, sometimes I get into these negative spirals. Everything gets painted gray. Science has highs and lows and sometimes I feel like I’m swinging wildly between them from one day to the next. Going through something like a dissertation doesn’t help you deal with all the “normal” lows like getting a paper rejected.

I love science, and I want to keep doing it. But I need to do everything I can to be healthy.

And so when I was at the British Ecological Society annual meeting in Birmingham, England, in December, I headed to a lunchtime workshop about mental resilience in academia.

I was relieved to see that the room was full of people. I wasn’t weak for thinking I needed help in this department. Apparently, this was something that everyone thought sounded like a lifeline. Including people I recognized and admired.

Some things we talked about I already knew. Others I hadn’t thought about, or not in the same way. One of the latter was the instruction to recognize and accept your emotions.

“Sometimes we think that resilience is bouncing back, getting over it and soldiering on,” the workshop organizer said. “But there’s a danger in that. You need to recognize and deal with your emotions, with how you feel about the bad things you’re experiencing. If you bury them in an effort to just ‘soldier on’, that’s not going to work in the long run. That’s not resilience.”

All of these things – confidence, recognition, resilience – seem tied together for me, even though I’m not doing a good job of explaining why. But even though I’m exhausted by my PhD and frequently overwhelmed, I think that thinking about all these things has made me more balanced in the last month or so.

Kara Goucher’s book is about keeping a confidence journal. The premise is that every day, you write down something specific, that you will remember immediately, and that will make you feel more confident when you go back and read it later.

I’ve enjoyed keeping a confidence journal so far. I always write something about the training/exercise session I did each day (or what was good about resting instead of training), and some days I write about science, too. Both sides of my life are places where I need to go back and find some extra confidence sometimes.

My weekend started off with a rejection, but it didn’t have to end that way. I recognized my disappointment and frustration with racing, but found the positive side in my journal entry.

My Ford Sayre ski coach, Scottie Eliassen, always had us talk about one thing that went well and one thing to improve on for next time after every race. This is what I channeled.

“I didn’t go fast, but dang I worked hard. My threshold HR is 177 and my average for the 25 k race was 175. Despite the snowstorm and feeling bad, I hit my process goal of not getting complacent and giving up. I kept pushing.”

Next time I’m about to race and I begin worrying that everyone is more fit than I am, maybe reading that message will help. I’ve been doing this for a long time and I know how to get the best out of the training I’ve done.

Planoiras Part 1: This Doesn’t Feel Fun (A Pity Party)

Note: this is the first of two posts about my racing in Lenzherheide, Switzerland, this weekend. It’s going to be a little negative. Tomorrow’s will be positive though, so stay tuned! (Edited to add: Part 2 is posted here.)

Every year, I have a giddy feeling as the snow starts to fall. That means it’s ski season! Usually I’ve been waiting more and more impatiently for months.

This year was no different. I had trained for a marathon and completed it in late October. After a few weeks of minimal exercise to let my body recover (and to let me finish writing my dissertation), I couldn’t wait to get on skis. I wanted to get moving again, but while running less than I had been in the months leading up to my marathon. I sought glide.

Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate, and it was a very warm early winter in much of Europe. The skiing got good about the time I headed home for Christmas. Back home in New England, folks had been skiing for weeks – but it rained the day after I got home and much of the snow melted, so I didn’t ski much there, either. Of course, there was a huge snowstorm the day I left. I just had horrible timing.

In the last month, I’ve had a few skis here and there, about two of which have been in good conditions.

Just as I had been dreaming, gliding on skis was bliss.

***

Every year since 2003 I’ve done at least a couple of ski races, and it would feel weird not to plan some into my winter. My first race of this year was the Planoiras 25 k skate point-to-point in Lenzerheide this weekend.

I’ve done the race a few times before. Last year, I was recovering from a major ankle injury. I entered only to realize partway through that my injury still significantly limited my range of motion. I couldn’t get the ankle flex I needed to skate at speed. Worse than that, by halfway through the race skating was getting painful, including acute sharp twinges in my ankle whenever I slipped in the icy conditions. I slowed way down and limped my way to the finish.

That was a super frustrating day – one of the most frustrating in my rehab process. It had been six months since the injury, and I thought I was recovered. Turns out, I wasn’t. I skated only minimally for the rest of the winter, licking my wounds and (luckily) enjoying classic skiing pain-free.

This year, just signing up for the race was a reminder of my injury. But I feel like I’m legitimately healed, so it actually brought a smile to my face. I am still a little bit wobblier on the left side when I do balance drills, but I haven’t had pain in months.

I recognized that I haven’t been on snow much this season; when I tried doing some skating intervals last week, I was floundering all over the place. So I didn’t have super high hopes for the race.

But I thought it would still feel triumphant: I would do a lot better than last year, and be able to actually ski an entire race without having to pull up short and walk it in.

***

There was basically nothing about the day that felt triumphant.

The weather forecast called for a major snowstorm, and I did my best to psych myself up. “You can’t just wait around for a race with perfect conditions,” I admonished myself. “You have to go race anyway. Enjoying nice weather is not what this is about.”

I think I did a pretty good job with my mental attitude. I had accepted that it wasn’t going to be a beautiful day in the mountains, and that things were going to be slow and sloppy. I was just going to make the best of things and ski hard.

I did try my best. But everyone just kind of skied away from me. I felt slow and ineffective; my legs felt like lead. The climbs were such a drag. The way my legs were burning, I felt like I should be moving like Jessie Diggins. But, ummm, I wasn’t. (Let’s leave it at that.)

At first I wondered if I’d just picked the completely wrong skis. I might have, but that couldn’t explain the way that I just felt weak, heavy, and slow. I didn’t have any zip.

And at some point, I started wondering, is this fun? Why do I do this?

I managed to push that question from my mind and stay pretty focused. I pushed hard, even though it didn’t make me go fast. Looking at my heart rate data afterwards, I was hovering right around my anaerobic threshold for an hour and 39 minutes straight, often going above it. I can’t say I didn’t try hard.

I crossed the line to no fanfare, not happy with how I skied technically or speed-wise. I had been snowed on for more than an hour and a half and I was wet and cold and bedraggled, the top of my head actually covered in a crust of snow.

The sun was literally not shining on my face.

***

A lot of things about the day didn’t make me feel happy. But the feeling afterwards, as I struggled through a 10-minute jog, developed a race hack, and then proceeded to fall asleep on the train (narrator: this never happens, she’s terrible at sleeping), did make me happy.

One thing I love about racing is the feeling of completely emptying the tank and knowing that you worked as hard as you possibly could, that you are physically 110% spent. That might make me a crazy person, but it is a rewarding feeling. And I think it’s one that a lot of people don’t experience often if at all. When I push myself that hard, I am proud of myself, proud that I can do it.

Regardless of how fast I go, having this relationship with my body. I can ask it to do this massive effort and it delivers. To me, that is an accomplishment.

***

As I skied around the course, I had pushed the questions out of my mind. But on the way I kept mulling over that question: is this fun?

It’s been a few days, and the mental tricks we play on ourselves have already come into force. I’m painting the race all rosy, proud of how hard I tried, thinking it wasn’t so bad.

But I do remember. While it was happening, it didn’t seem fun. At all. Except for a few scattered moments here and there, I wasn’t really enjoying myself.

It hurt, and not in a good way. I wasn’t getting any power or speed out of the burn I was laying into my legs. Pushing hard is rewarding especially when it gets you somewhere, but it didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere.

Then there’s the reality of racing as a woman in Switzerland.

I don’t want to offend anyone with what I’m about to write, but sometimes it is less fun than it could be.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great that everyone is racing. Keep racing, masters men! Start racing, folks who are just getting into skiing! It’s fun and healthy and I am all for more people ski racing.

But just 40 of the 313 finishers in this year’s Planoiras were women, or 13%. I would go long stretches without seeing another woman, and men just ski and race differently than women. In my experience, we women are more likely to set a steady, even pace (don’t @ me: this is backed up by research). In my part of the race, we also often have better technique to go the same speed as the men –we aren’t as big and strong , so we get to go that fast by other means – and so it’s nicer to ski behind another woman. I will never get passed by a woman who sprints by me in an effort to not get “girled”, only to run out of steam in the middle of the trail later and then try to block me from passing once I catch up. It’s men who do that. The same ones who repeatedly ski over your skis and step all over your pole baskets, but then turn around and yell at you if you accidentally do the same thing to them even once.

Look, there are lots of great men racing out there who excellent to ski with. In fact, I ski around a lot of them a lot of the time! Thanks, guys! It would be lonely out there without you.

But what I mean by “it’s less fun than it could be” is that for the men who are maybe prone to ski like idiots or jerks, I don’t think that the gender imbalance in these races contributes to bringing out their best behavior.

The numbers of women are better in the U.S. in many long races. I checked some data and at last year’s City of Lakes Loppet, between the skate marathon and 20 k combined 166 of 684 racers were women, or 24%. In the Tour of Anchorage 50 k, 43 of 172 finishers were women, or 25%. In the Rangeley Lakes Loppet, 25% of the 80 finishers were women. And in the Boulder Mountain Tour 34 k in 2017, 178 of 534 finishers were women, or 33%.

That might not seem like a big difference – in none of these cases are anywhere near equal numbers of men and women competing in ski marathons – but the difference is meaningful.

Think about if one out of every four people around you is a woman, versus one out of every eight. You’d notice.

So as my legs burned and I floundered in the sections of soft snow, I’d periodically get annoyed at unnecessary, impolite race behavior. Like, chill out! We are not at the front of this race. We are the slow people. We’re all out here trying as hard as we can, and it’s just unnecessary to make other people’s race experience worse in your pursuit of that goal.

Afterwards, the thought stuck in my mind. If I could ski in a pack like this for an hour and a half – worrying all the time that my poles are about to get broken and I’m about to get tripped and land on my face – or I could go have a nice quiet ski by myself in the mountains somewhere, which one sounds like more fun?

***

Then there’s the fact that I’m only going to get slower.

I trained a lot more when I was 23 and 24 and well, kids, it’s all downhill from there. Especially when you live in the city and there’s no skiing within an hour.

I’m probably never going to improve at ski racing again. And despite all the process goals I can make and all the other reasons that I race, that might mean that ski racing is a little less fun. I’m a competitive person, and as hard as I try to let go of that and detach, it’s a little brutal to watch yourself do worse and worse. It’s embarrassing to admit that I have a little bit of ego in this. I’m mediocre, so there shouldn’t be vanity involved. But I’m only human.

***

This is a passing hissy fit. Okay, so I did a race and I felt slow. Grow up.

But as I kept thinking about it – does this make me happy, and if so, what about it does that? – I decided maybe it was important to actually consider those questions, instead of just doing a couple ski races every year because that’s what I’ve always done.

If I think about the answers to those questions – really think about them – then maybe it will feel less disappointing next time I feel slow and weak, or finish twenty places worse than the last time I did a race.

Maybe my next race will be in the sunshine, with perfect kickwax, and I won’t have been too incredibly stressed about work all week, and I’ll feel great and have fun! I sure hope so.

But even if that’s true, too, having the answers to those questions won’t hurt. I don’t have them yet. But I’m working on it.

Why do you race?

Maybe it’s a good conversation to have.

***

Part 2 is posted here.

birken.

Well, this is not as exciting of a post as I was anticipating. I spent Friday evening waxing up my skis here in Lillehammer. Nothing fancy, just some HF7 and binder ironed in to the kick zone. After extensive consultation with Erik, who I am staying with, we decided that for the Birkebeiner it was impossible to tell whether it would be klister conditions or hardwax, so I packed a bag of goodies and figured I would wax once I got to the start and could scope out the situation.

I woke up at 4 a.m. to eat some yogurt, and Erik was up half an hour later and drove me to catch the 5 a.m. bus from Håkans Hall in Lillehammer to Rena with the Lillehammer Skiklub. I slept most of the way there and we arrived shortly before 7 a.m. I was set to start around 9 a.m.

As we got in the car in the morning, Erik had said something like, “just so you know, NRK was reporting that a meteorologist said there were such high winds that organizers should think carefully about whether they were going to send people over the mountains.”

You see, the Birkebeiner is not like the Vasaloppet – it is an extreme experience! The course climbs to almost 3,000 feet and spends a lot of time in the mountains. Bad weather there is not atypical. Participants have to carry a 3.5kg backpack to symbolize the weight of the baby in the old story the race is based on, but also because they must carry food, drink, an extra shirt, pants, jacket, and wax with them. Things in the mountains can get crazy.

Anyway, when we arrived in Rena we learned that the race had been delayed an hour so organizers could continue to assess the weather at the top of the course. I was somewhat dismayed because I hadn’t planned for this and an extra hour meant an extra hour of when I should be eating, only I didn’t really have any “extra” food, just what I had brought to tide me over to the normal start time.

After the hour of deliberating, though, the race was canceled completely. I was sad but at this point honestly I had sort of begun expecting it, so I didn’t feel quite as dismayed or furious as the Norwegian skiers around me seemed to be. We waited for everyone else to come back to the bus and headed back to Lillehammer. Erik picked me up back at Håkans Hall around 10 a.m. As I walked back in the door of the house, I told his daughter Greta, “it only took me an hour to ski back here! I won!”

All day she asked me whether I was really, really sad. I kept saying no. I mean, yeah, I was sad. I was really looking forward to the Birken. But this wasn’t the defining point of my season and honestly, while I feel a lot better than I did before the Vasaloppet, I’m still not very fit. Instead of racing, I have been hanging out with the Stange family and Erik and Emily have made sure that I have the opportunity to ski every day. It’s a different trip than I was envisioning when I hopped on the train, but it has been perfectly lovely in a different way.

Many Norwegians don’t feel the same way. I wrote a short article for FasterSkier summing up the controversy around the race cancellation, which you can read here. Wind gusts reached almost 50 mph and the wind chill was at -14, but there were windows of more okay weather and some people skied over the mountain anyway. They said it was fine, and that is what is pissing people off – the idea that maybe everything would have turned out okay.

As for me, I went for a pretty blustery ski today and was distinctly glad that I wasn’t racing, especially not in conditions that were significantly worse. Eh, well. You win some, you lose some, Norway.

I joked to U.S. biathlon coach Per Nilsson this weekend that I seem to be some sort of curse on races in terms of weather and snow conditions, and he wrote, “We see if it’s bad in Oslo, then you are not welcome to World Cup Biathlon anymore…”

daily diary

Yesterday was an easy day. With one phenomenal North American result between the two races, we didn’t have to do particularly intensive coverage. It was in fact the easiest day we’ve had so far, except for the day before when there was no races! So here’s what it looks like on an easy day:

8:30: wake up. yeah it’s not super early, you’ll see why later. First I read and respond to e-mails and correct mistakes we have made in articles we posted last night.

9:00: go for a jog. It’s not the most inspiring jogging up here, you can do a loop all the way around Gorki Village in about ten minutes. It takes you through the village plaza, which is nice, but also past a lot of ongoing construction. There’s a few building projects on such steep slopes that Alex and I are certain they won’t last five year. As I was running by one, a pile of rocks literally fell off the retaining wall and rolled down the hill. So much for that. Alex and I jog together about half the time; this day I was alone.

9:30: take a shower and pack for the day. when I go to bed at night my stuff is usually exploded all over one side of the room because I’m too tired to organize it, so packing means picking all the pieces back out.

10:00: go down to breakfast. Nat arrived shortly after me so we ate together. It is an amazing buffet! Everything you could imagine, even maple syrup. The scrambled eggs are amazing and they often have smoked salmon. I want to eat everything, every day. This is the only square meal we get each day so it is not something to rush through – it’s something to savor. The buffet is included in our hotel fee but we aren’t getting reimbursed for other expenses and of course, food at the venues is incredibly overpriced and not all that good. You can’t even get free water in the media center – a far cry from what I’m used to on the biathlon World Cup where they serve amazing food for free to all media workers. So, we take our time and stuff ourselves at breakfast, then sneak apples into our bags as well as little sandwiches we have made with the bread and other goodies from breakfast. So far nobody at the hotel has yelled at us.

10:30: Nat and I leave the hotel.

10:33: we arrive at the top of the gondola in Gorki Village and start heading down.

10:41: we get off the gondola and start walking up towards the mountain.

10:58: arrive at the base of the gondola to the Laura biathlon and cross-country ski venues. Go through security.

11:01: get on the gondola heading up.

11:07: the gondola stops…. we are all nervous.

11:09: the gondola restarts! thank God!

11:16: get off the gondola

11:18: get on a bus to the biathlon venue.

11:20: the bus stops at a weird place where I guess some volunteers sometimes get on or off, but there is absolutely nothing around there so we don’t understand where these people are coming from.

11:24: arrive at Laura biathlon venue! Phew!

11:26: sit down in the media center

11:35: walk out to the shooting range to try to snag Susan for a hug during training – it’s her birthday! Unfortunately she did a short training so I missed her. She had invited me over to the athletes’ village but I didn’t have time to go on this particular day and I felt terrible for abandoning her on her birthday. Happy birthday to my favorite biathlete! Anyway, since I’m out there, I have some useful off-the-record conversations with Matthias Ahrens, head coach of the Canadian team, and Max Cobb, an American who is the TD (basically, head organizer) of the biathlon races at the Olympics. The course conditions are very difficult to prepare for and Max really has his work cut out for him. We talk off the record about twice a day and it’s great to have an American in this job so that they are available to us – for the ski races it’s a Czech guy, and obviously it’s not anywhere near as easy for us to get constant updates about what is going on from the officials’ side of things!

11:57: go back to the media center. work a little.

12:15: start walking up to the cross country venue.

12:21: arrive at the shuttle departure for athletes and staff next to the venue. I met up with Pepa Miloucheva, my old coach from my days on the Craftsbury Green Racing Project. Pepa is here coaching Tucker Murphy, a fellow Dartmouth grad (much older than me) and ecologist (much better than me) who is originally from Bermuda. Tucker trained with us in Craftsbury off and on before the Vancouver Olympics, where he was the first skier ever to represent Bermuda. He’s at it again this year and Pepa is here as his coach – she walked with Tucker in the opening ceremonies as he carried his flag, and they all wore great Bermuda shorts. Anyway, it was SO FUN to see Pepa! We got to catch up a little bit over a coffee before we both had to scramble back to work. It’s amazing the different ways people find to get to the Olympics.

12:45: leave the coffee place

12:52: arrive back in media center. Get to work on publishing an article. Pretty much every day, we all publish something before racing begins. Often it’s dealing with the leftovers from previous races – Alex was working on something using all the quotes we had from the sprint day, since we were so busy covering Kikkan and Sophie and the actual race winners that we never wrote much about the other Americans and Canadians. Other times, it’s things that aren’t directly connected to the racing, just other fun Olympic stories. Nat was working on a “reporters’ notebook” piece about making the trip down to the Black Sea on our off-day, and I wrote something about the flagbearer nomination process, since Susan was the voting representative for biathlon and told me how it worked. It was pretty cool actually. But it was a hurry to….

1:46…. publish it before…

2:02: walking up to the cross country venue.

2:08: The race actually started at 2 p.m., but the first loop was off in the woods on the other side of the venue so we went up a few minutes late and stopped lower down on the course. We watched people go by, tried to keep the best track we could of splits for the racers we cared about, and I took some photos. We ended up standing next to these two guys from North Dakota who came to watch hockey but were taking an off day to come up to the mountain. They had just randomly decided to come to cross country skiing – one of them was a recreational skier but the other had never been skiing in his life! They asked lots of questions and it was sort of fun to explain cross country skiing to them. Credit to these two guys for checking out an entirely new sport!

2:55: Ida Sargent skis by, the last American bib in the race and after the top-seeded skiers. After taking a few more pictures, run up to the mixed zone.

2:57: Arrive in mixed zone. Alex is already there and Nat arrives soon. Talk to Sadie, Ida, and Holly. Stick around while we look for U.S. and Canadian coaches – eventually Alex runs off to look for them. Nat runs off to look for Vidar Lofshus, the Norwegian coach. I stick around even longer as I wait for Marit Bjørgen to finally leave the extensive broadcast area – seriously she had to give so many interviews – and make it to the written press section. Then wait longer while she talks to the Norwegian press. Finally, she makes it to the English-speaking press section. Get a few quotes.

4:00, roughly: head back to the media center. On the way down I run into Nat and Alex who are talking to Reto Burgermeister, the Swiss guy who coaches Alexander Legkov and Ilia Chernousov. Have an off-the-record chat.

4:15, roughly: arrive back in the media center. I download the photos I have taken and quickly upload a dozen photos to our facebook account. Nat says he will go to the press conference but it turns out we’ve missed it already… whooops!

4:35: start transcribing the interviews from the American girls.

4:45: realize that it’s way way way too hoot in the media center. we move outside and are working on our laptops sitting on the terrace of the biathlon building, with the beautiful mountains in the background.

5:20: go back inside to finish writing the article on the American girls.

5:48: publish the story about the American girls. Nat is still working on the international race report and Alex has the challenging task of putting something together about the Canadians, none of whom did well. They keep working.

5:55: grab a start list and run out to the shooting range.

6:00: arrive on the range just as the first starter of the men’s biathlon 20 k, Evgeniy Garanichev of Russia, leaves the starting box. Watch some of them start, take a few illicit photos while trying to hide my point-and-shoot camera. Move over to the range as Garanichev comes through, and begin the tough task of trying to track how many shots each racer misses over four stages in an interval-start race. I quickly jettison the stats for people I don’t think have a good chance of ending up on the podium, but I’m still trying to keep track of about 25-30 racers, who are scattered throughout the field. Sometimes I will have two on their second prone shooting and three on their first standing all at the same time.

6:15: am approached by Dr. Jim Carrabe, the head medical guy from the International Biathlon Union. I interviewed him a few days ago so we watch the results scrolling through and we have an off-the-record chat. I really appreciate it and it’s great to have these connections. He’s also a nice guy. However, during this time I lose track of shooting for quite a few racers! Tough to multitask!

7:10: Tim Burke has finished up his final shooting and is out on course. I leave the shooting range and head in so that I can catch him in the mixed zone.

7:14: pit stop in the media center to grab my puffy coat, because I am freezing cold. Alex is still in there working (Nat had long ago headed out on course with his photographer credential to take photos) and says she’ll join me soon.

7:20: arrive in the mixed zone. It’s a while before anyone comes through. Eventually, Nat comes and he talks to Tim and Lowell. Alex talks to Russell Currier. I talk to to JP Le Guellec and Brendan Green. In between, we chat with the other reporters and watch the results trickle in on the jumbotron in the stadium. From the mixed zone, I had to stand on my tippy toes to see anything other than the top two lines of the results as they scroll by. But you want to know – for the later starters, I had already left the range so I don’t know how they shot, which is good information to have before you start talking to them!

7:55: take a few minutes to enjoy the sunset.

807: back in the media center.

8:15: head down to the press conference. we are determined not to miss it so I decide to go. Lowell had a great race and Nat has a lot of material from him, so he will head up that effort, and Alex will try to put something together with the material from all the guys who did not do as well.

8:34: press conference is over so I head back upstairs and start working.

9:25: Max Cobb wanders through the workroom and stops to chat. More off-the-record conversations. Nat asks what this weather situation is doing to his job and he says something like “it is making my life a living hell.” we talk a lot about what else can be done to fix the course situation, but the answer is not much. Max says that the last resort is to change the times of the races, since the snow is still cold and fast and nice to ski on in the morning. But at the Olympics, with all the tickets and broadcast arrangements, you can’t really just change the time of a competition unless you have a darn good reason. It seems that the powers that be don’t consider a huge percentage of the field crashing horribly to be a sufficiently good reason. As I said before, poor Max.

10:10: publish my story after I have gone through Nat’s hundreds of photos and pulled out a few of the best ones. It’s a pretty interesting one – my favorite part is that Erik Lesser, the German biathlete who took silver, was doing it in part for his grandfather, who raced for East Germany in the 1976 Olympics. Axel Lesser was the second leg of the relay and was skiing in second place when he somehow crashed into a spectator and either due to injury or equipment breaking had to withdraw. Anyway, the silver medal came back to the family after all thanks to the grandson. Erik Lesser also talked about his 93-year-old great grandfather. It was a fun story.

10:15: relax a little bit and post some photos on facebook.

10:30: put up a short blog post about the biathlon mass start start list, which has just been published. The mass start is limited to 30 men and remarkably, three Canadians and two Americans have made the cut. Their spots came at the expense of Tarjei Bø, the Norwegian who is the reigning World Champion in the discipline but has had an abysmal Olympics so far, and Germany’s usual top-ranked biathlete, Andreas Birnbacher. Lots of interesting stuff in there.

10:57: publish.

11:01: we begin packing to go home as Nat and Alex have also finished their stories. Yay!

11:07: actually walk out of the press workroom. we have made a mess and our brains are mush so it takes us a while to get our shit together.

11:10: we are about to get on a bus to the gondola when Nat realizes that he has left the camera on the workroom table… he runs back inside.

11:10 and 10 seconds: the bus leaves. we aren’t on it.

11:12: we get on another bus.

11:15: the bus actually leaves, with us on it.

11:17: bus arrives at the gondola station.

11:18: get on the gondola. we ride down with some Russian volunteers who speak basically no English. They are very friendly though so we have a fun and strange conversation on a variety of topics, using a lot of hand gestures, simple words, and basically we all end up laughing at each other. It’s fun to talk to them.

11:30: get off the gondola and begin walking back towards Gorki.

11:49: reach the bottom of the Gorki gondola!

11:59: get off the gondola at the top.

12:00: we are walking down the steps from the gondola when a guy lounging beside a golf cart insists on driving us to the hotel. This has never been an option before. Frankly it’s nice to stretch our legs but he seems pretty insistent so we get in. The guy proceeds to tear through Gorki village taking the corners at top speed like a rally car driver! Alex is sitting in the last row of seats facing backwards and I’m a little worried we are going to lose her. It’s pretty fun and we are laughing like maniacs. I wonder if the driver is drunk.

12:01: arrive at the hotel. Nat is tired and goes to bed, but Alex and I are way too jazzed up from the day to fall asleep. We’re also starving as all we have eaten is snack food since breakfast. So we make ourselves a little supper: crackers and cheese, apples and nutella. And we drink a beer. There’s nothing on television so we look up a few videos on YouTube and respond to a few more e-mails. I read a couple of pages of my book, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared. It’s a great book! You should read it. Anyway, we slowly decompress from the day.

1:15: go to bed. We continue to chat about things with the lights off as we’re falling asleep.

This is the earliest we’ve gone to bed in days – on the sprint/women’s pursuit day, when we arrived back in the hotel we couldn’t relax and instead had to keep working (although we did pop open a few beers as we continued to transcribe, write, and sort through photos). That day I think we didn’t go to bed until almost 3 a.m. That’s more the normal situation, which explains why I sleep until 8:30, which is far later than normal for me, and then struggle to pry myself out of bed.

And then the process starts all over again.. usually by realizing that one of those stories that we published at midnight has some major typo or mistake in it. A great way to start the day!

editorial decisions, and difficulty making them.

Sometimes I write things that accidentally turn out to be incredibly relevant. This happened twice in the last 48 hours. First, I wrote a story about course conditions in the men’s biathlon pursuit, where there were several high-profile crashes. I had asked a couple different athletes and coaches whether they thought the course was safe, and talked to the race TD about what was being done to improve the course. I mentioned in passing that maybe the same issues would crop up on the cross country course.

Ha!! I have never seen so many crashes in a single day of racing as I did yesterday. Heck, Dario Cologna, who had won the skiathlon a few days before, crashed twice in the same heat. (“Dario Cologna what is wrong with you?” the stadium announcer asked after the second crash – one of my favorite things a stadium announcer has ever said.) The men’s final was marred by a major crash that allowed a Swede who had completely given up on the race due to back pain, to overtake several athletes (including a Russian whose ski broke and had to double-pole around the course until Canada’s head coach Justin Wadsworth handed him a new ski), and earn bronze. That’s not the way a Olympics should be decided. (Nat wrote a great article about the men’s race.)

Secondly, I wrote a blog post which you’ll see below, a large part of which is about how difficult it is for me to interview athletes who have had a bad or disappointing day. I wrote:

“I think this makes me a bad journalist. I have a bit too much compassion, I’m a bit too connected to the athletes, and I’m a bit too emotionally invested in both their performance and their feelings. People scoff when I start to back off out of sympathy – what are you, Chelsea, a wuss?”

To say that this turned out to be relevant would be an understatement. Kikkan Randall failed to advance out of the quarterfinals, and I think every American in the stadium, no matter what their interest or profession, was left speechless for a few minutes. This wasn’t even in the realm of scenarios we had imagined or planned for.

Randall was obviously incredibly disappointed, and it was tough to watch. As I wrote about the more general case, her sadness was out there for everyone to gawk at. Kikkan was gracious, and her incredible responses to questions from the media even garnered their own headlines (including this great story in the Christian Science Monitor, co-authored by Christa Case Bryant, who I raced against in a ski marathon once).

And, of course, it was a story that we had to cover, even if I wish everybody would have just let poor Kikkan alone. Alex was the one doing the interview, and she did a great job. I’m proud to work with someone who shows compassion and respect for the athletes, and it proves that you don’t have to be a former elite skier yourself to understand basic human emotion and treat these guys well. (why would you?)

The other half of that blog post had been about media coaching and how it sometimes makes interviews bland. And I gotta say – all the U.S. athletes yesterday were great. They were very on-message, but they were also speaking from their hearts and saying great things. In that sense, it was an easy day to be a reporter – just not in a lot of other senses.

I could write more – in fact I just wrote a long bit about our schedule yesterday, the on-the-fly editorial decisions and priorities we had to set, and how external factors ended up maybe giving an impression about our coverage that was different than the one we, or at least I, intended to convey – but it seemed very self-interested and like I was trying to justify something that was probably not a big deal. So I deleted it.

The short version is, Sophie Caldwell had an amazing race. Sadly, Sophie was overshadowed by what happened to Kikkan, both in mainstream news and, somewhat unintentionally, in the timing of our coverage. She didn’t deserve that. Sophie was a star yesterday and it’s amazing that she can do this just two years out of the college racing scene. Go Sophie, you kick ass, and you’re a lovely person too!

To some extent we have to make editorial decisions based on what our readers want to see. Disappointingly for me, many more people have read our story about Kikkan missing the semifinals than have read our story about Sophie setting a new American record.

But at other times, we have to stand up and say, you know what? I don’t care what you want, we’re the editors and this is what you’re getting, and you’ll like it, damn it. This is what we’re writing about today. If I could do that, I would, and I would focus on Sophie rather than rehash Kikkan’s tears over and over again. But it’s a complex situation and it’s not always my decision to make. (It’s also a reason why I would be a terrible businesswoman.) It has been a good reminder to try to just maintain that compassion as much as I possibly can, do good work, and hope that some people appreciate it.

tough work.

We’ve been working hard and today will be our biggest day yet: the cross country ski sprint, an event where Kikkan Randall is favored to win the first gold medal by a female American ever, and the first medal at all in two decades. If she wins, we’ll be busy. If she loses, we’ll be busy. Almost immediately after the sprint final, a women’s biathlon pursuit starts next door. I’ll probably be the only person we send over to that race – where an American, Susan Dunklee, sits in 14th at the start. It’s possible she’d win a medal, too. We are going to be working very, very late tonight.

But it’s not the hard work that gets me. I’m a worker, it’s in my genes. I will work myself to the bone. What is hardest for me is the emotionally difficult work.

Yesterday’s men’s biathlon pursuits was a day like that. JP Le Guellec of Canada was in the lead about halfway through the race, on an absolute tear with clean shooting and the fastest shooting times. He is a great guy and one of my favorite interviews. We were so, so excited. Then he crashed and lost the lead. Next, he realized he had broken a ski, and had to stop and get another one. Needless to say, concentration was broken and he started to make mistakes on the shooting range (though he had lost so much time that it was not like he would have been able to get a medal at that point anyway). All in all, it was a disaster.

When JP came through the mixed zone, I was nervous about having to ask him about his race. But then I remembered all those things that make JP great. Was he frustrated? Yeah, definitely. He said he wanted to punch a wall. But he actually talked to us, was honest about what happened and how he was feeling, and wasn’t either surly or resentful that we were bugging him when all he wanted to do was go find that wall to destroy. He was also honest about the fact that he had maybe made a mistake (people have said that skiers need to respect the downhills and take them with less speed), and that being in first place at the halfway point didn’t guarantee him a gold medal by any means. He wasn’t overly dramatic, and he didn’t make himself out as a victim as many people would probably have been tempted to do.

The way that JP deals with bad situations is partly with his sense of humor, and he lets that show through in his interviews. I didn’t include this in my article, but JP is retiring at the end of this year and he joked, “well, I’ve never broken a ski before, so I guess that’s something I had to do at least once in my career.”

It’s refreshing. I remember one time I asked him about a pretty bad race, and tried to pick something positive out to start off my questioning with. He immediately called me out by saying something like, well, I totally raced like shit. But he didn’t leave it at that: we had a personable conversation about what had gone wrong and what was to come next.

Working with someone like JP makes me think a lot about a two different things.

1: The effect of media coaching. I know a lot of the other athletes we talk to pretty well at this point. I know that almost all of them also have great senses of humor. They are nice people, professional, interesting. Some of them, however, have had extensive media coaching about what to say and what not to say. They act quite differently in interviews than they do in friendly conversation. Their humor might not come through. Their personality might not be apparent. You might not realize how interested they are in a wide variety of issues inside and outside of their sport.

And that’s to be expected. It’s a part of being professional. It’s a way to not offend people, to seem humble when you’re actually confident, to seem positive when you’re actually heartbroken, to project an image that people can look up to when you’re actually reacting with the emotions of a five-year-old. Part of being a role model is to be a gracious competitor, but I doubt that anyone is actually gracious all the time. Your first reaction, especially when you are exhausted and have used up all of your physical and emotional energy in a race, might not be a mature one. I’m not an Olympic athlete, but I’ve had plenty of races where I acted like a total jerk afterwards (this one time at Rumford for nationals where they screwed up my bib number comes to mind). I’m glad there was nobody sticking a microphone in my face. I probably wouldn’t have handled it as well as these athletes do.

Other athletes just aren’t that psyched to be speaking publicly. It’s not something they like or are interested in. And that’s totally fine, too. They got to the Olympics by being really ridiculously good at their sport. An interest in public speaking is neither a natural accompaniment of natural athletic talent, nor a necessary prerequisite for success. Some athletes are naturally chatty, charismatic people. Others aren’t. Who cares?

But all of this does affect their brand. Part of the reason people love reading about American skier Kikkan Randall is that while she’s diplomatic, polite, and gracious, she’s also honest. She’ll let on if there’s problems. She’ll make a stand. She has worked really hard as the athlete representative to the International Ski Federation, and so she both knows and understands the problems in skiing and is willing to talk about them. She’s a great, fun, interview, which makes for good reading. The same is true of JP with his honesty and sense of humor.

Did both of these athletes start off this way? I’m not sure, as I wasn’t even ski racing yet when they began their careers. I have no idea how their personalities and personas have changed over the years.

(I can imagine that if at some point along the way, some media guy told JP he had to tone it down and stop lacing his comments with profanity, he would have mostly ignored them anyway. He’s one of the few people I have seen who can say “it was just fucking downhill from there” and not seem even remotely like an asshole.)

But I think about some of my friends and the acquaintances in the ski world, and I wish that they’d be just a little more open and honest when people interview them (I’m not even talking about me: I’m not frustrated with our working relationship or anything, not in the least. I ‘m talking in general). That’s their decision, of course. But they are great, fun people, and I’m not sure that always comes across. By sterilizing things a little less, they might gain some more fans.

(If they want them, that is. Maybe it’s all part of a sophisticated strategy to avoid having to waste too much time dealing with the media, which of course takes time and energy away from other parts of their jobs as professional athletes.)

2: My least favorite part of my job. When someone has a bad race, I feel conflicted and nervous when I approach them to talk. Sometimes, they are literally overcome. Yesterday Lowell Bailey, who had simply a mediocre race, nothing disastrous but certainly not what he was hoping for, looked at us, looked down, and walked away. He couldn’t talk about it. I really felt for him, and I don’t want to push it.

I’ve had even worse reactions from at least two other athletes over the years, who didn’t even stop and sometimes swore under their breath at me when I tried to snag them for a comment.

Plus, talking to a sad athlete just isn’t that fun. All of their disappointment is right out there for you to gawk at, and at least for me, some of it even transfers to my own emotional state.

I think this makes me a bad journalist. I have a bit too much compassion, I’m a bit too connected to the athletes, and I’m a bit too emotionally invested in both their performance and their feelings. People scoff when I start to back off out of sympathy – what are you, Chelsea, a wuss?

Or maybe it’s because I have no formal journalism training. I don’t know how to handle these situations! I’m a professional by experience, but nobody has really ever taught me much of anything.

I was really happy yesterday when I was able to take the JP story, and my colleague Nat did a roundup of the American performance. He did a great job calling up the coaches and just talking and talking to them until they said some interesting things about what might have gone wrong for the guys. And it wasn’t an antagonistic conversation – it was friendly, it just required a lot of banter to break through and get to the point, which turned out to be an interesting one. You can read Nat’s excellent story here. I really admire Nat for his ability to go get it in situations like this.

Anyway, though, a story is a story, and if the story is that something bad happened, then we need comments on whatever the bad thing was just as much as we would need comments about a gold medal performance. I know that just as much as the next guy. We aren’t PR workers, thank goodness. I never, ever want to do PR! Writing positive stories all the time and doing damage control would be super boring. Yuck.

But when I dig in to tough situations, I want to have time to work on them, to digest and understand what’s going on, and to get thoughtful comments from people. If their first reaction is heartbreak, it’s hard to be the one demanding that they pull themselves together and say something. They risk either saying something they will later regret, or having to make a huge mental and emotional effort to be gracious and thoughtful.

This is the Olympics, where everyone has high hopes for everything. I think I’m going to encounter a lot more of these situations. And I’m going to make myself deal with them. But in my heart of hearts, in the back of my mind, I’m going to be apologizing to the athletes for having to do my job and not just leaving them in peace. Thanks, guys, for putting up with us media folks!

first day of (real) work: triumphs and tribulations.

Yesterday (Saturday) we had our first day of work! Okay, I had been doing work before: going to a press conference, snagging Rosanna Crawford and Matthias Ahrens for some interviews, taking photos. But basically, that was just a warm-up to stretch my legs. Yesterday, the racing began! First cross country:

Then, at night, biathlon:

It was a big day for us. When we thought about the Olympic schedule and started planning things out, we figured that we would be able to do some triage in terms of things that needed immediate, full-scale coverage versus those that did not. Yesterday, though, every race had a couple of big, important, interesting angles, so there wasn’t much we could let go. Check out FasterSkier.com to see our handiwork, but here’s a summary:

1) In the women’s 15 k skiathlon, Norway put three women in the top four, including the gold and bronze medals. The younger brother of Astrid Jacobsen, one of their top skiers (but who was not planning to start the skiathlon anyway) died unexpectedly on Friday. This had a huge effect on the team, who dedicated their performance to him, and rippled through a close-knit women’s field including Charlotte Kalla of Sweden, who earned silver. When gold medalist Marit Bjørgen of Norway and bronze medalist teammate Heidi Weng were crying on the podium, they weren’t all tears of joy.

2) American skier Jessie Diggins, in her first Olympic appearance, skied a gutsy race to finish an astonishing eighth place, tying the best Olympic performance by a U.S. woman at the Olympics. Teammate Liz Stephen, who has been in it for the long hall and sorely deserves an amazing Olympic result, finished 12th. This was far and away the best day a U.S. women’s cross country ski team has ever had at the Olympics.

3) In the men’s 10 k biathlon sprint, Ole Einar Bjørndalen of Norway, 40 years old, beat competitors half his age to earn the seventh Olympic gold medal of his career and 12th medal overall. This tied him with legendary Norwergian skier Bjørn Dæhlie as the most successful winter Olympian of all time. Bjørndalen is a super cool guy and a total beast of an athlete. It’s an incredibly story and everyone we talked to was impressed, happy for him, and proud to compete against him. Some of his own teammates said he’s been their role model since age 10.

4) In the same race, Jean Philippe Le Guellec of Canada finised fifth, just seconds away from a medal. He increased his own record for best Olympic performance by a Canadian man by one spot and set himself up for a possible medal on Monday in the pursuit, where the start order and time gaps are based on finishes in the sprint. Furthermore, Canadian rookie Nathan Smith started in bib number one, shook his nerves, shot clean, and finished 13th. Brendan Green was 23rd. An excellent day for Canada.

So there we were: four really big stories, plus the hours it takes Nat to download and go through the photos he takes, the long time it takes us to transcribe all of our interviews (even after the earlier long time it takes to wait for athletes to come through the “mixed zone”, where they are led through a maze of media by their press attachés), and the fact that we still have to put up SOMETHING about the rest of the North American athletes who did not have record-best days, because fans at home still want to read about them.

It was a long day. We went to bed around 2 a.m.

A few comments on working:

I work at a lot of World Cup races and World Championships, so I consider myself a pretty seasoned on-the-ground reporter for these sports. But the Olympics is entirely different. Two things jump out immediately. The first is that there is actually other press there to talk to the Americans and Canadians! I’ve never had to fight to get my questions heard, but all of a sudden we’re competing with the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CBC, Globe and Mail, and a host of local reporters (I met one guy from Lake Placid, and Peggy Shinn is here covering the Vermont beat). It’s fun, in a way, and I think I’ll get to know these other reporters well, which is pretty nice. But it’s frustrating, too. I’m used to having almost unlimited access, as long as the athletes have time to talk. Here, they are led away by their press attachés after just five minutes, and all of the media outlets are supposed to get everything they need in those five minutes. Hint: it doesn’t happen. I don’t want to be a jerk, but we get frustrated when reporters who aren’t familiar with these sports ask really bad questions. We want to be asking important questions about the race, like, the waxing looked really tricky today and you were slipping, how much did that affect your race and how can it be fixed?

My favorite was a reporter who asked Liz Stephen about the Norwegian dominance in the skiathlon.

“What makes the Norwegians so good at this discipline?” he asked.

She looked a little bewildered and said something like, well, it’s not this discipline, they do this well in every race….

Come on. Cross country skiing. Norway.

The second huge difference is just the way things work on the ground. There are so many more rules here. On the cross country World Cup, I can wander basically anywhere. I’m used to being the one to take the photos AND do the interviews, so I head out on course to snap some shots and watch the race, then go back to the mixed zone. As long as I don’t go to the special “priority” photo positions where access is determined by a lottery, and as long as I don’t get in the way of the racers, nobody cares. It works out well for us because we get really high-quality race coverage.

The biathlon World Cup is a little more strict – it’s run by Germans, after all. I will definitely get yelled at if I walk onto some parts of the course where you should only be if you have a special photo bib (not even a “priority” bib, but just one showing that you are a photographer and not a journalist) or a team staff bib. But I can also often weasel my way around, climb over a fence somewhere around the corner and walk back. Once you are actually on the side of th trail, people very rarely kick you off. I also have amazing access to the athletes because the U.S. and Canadian High Performance Directors, Bernd Eisenbichler and Chris Lindsay, are super nice guys who try to help me in every way. Bernd even lets me come over to the hotel and hang out and have dinner with my old Dartmouth teammates.

Anyway. The Olympics are not like this.

For the cross country race, Alex and I walked out to the spectator area and had a great time watching the race. I was able to take pictures, albeit not great ones because we were behind the spectator fence (Nat has the photo credential for us and was stuck dealing with a million photos).

It was once we headed to the mixed zone that the trouble began. They have it divided up by broadcast (television and radio) and print, and you absolutely cannot go to the wrong area. Team staff also have to be able to move through the mixed zone. In theory, there is an area and an entrance for each group, but really the whole thing is connected and often, the fastest way to get to your assigned spot is just to enter in a different part and walk behind everything (you are NOT in the way when you do this). The volunteers were not down with this, though. And worse, they were a little confused. You would try to enter in one spot and they’d tell you no, you can’t come here, go over there; you’d go “there” and you’d get yelled at for trying to go in where you didn’t belong. This got really bad about 60 seconds before the finish of the race, where a lot of media and team staff were coming from different parts of the course trying to both get to their assigned spots and, in doing so, to be able to look at a TV monitor so they could see the finish of the race. Instead, they were getting bossed around by firm but somewhat confused volunteers. There were a few shouting matches as the seconds ticked down before the finish and people who really needed to know what was happening were being turned away from certain entrances.

It might seem simple, just go where you are supposed to go. But when it’s totally unclear where it is that you are supposed to go, and when at every other race it’s not a big deal at all and we all get along fine and are friends and there’s nobody enforcing these rules, well. People get touchy.

This got even worse at the biathlon venue. The volunteers were much more zealous in enforcing the different zones. And they were just as confused. There is a huge tunnel under the stadium that allows access to the shooting range. I was coming back from the range and trying to head to the mixed zone, and at an intersection in the tunnel system, I asked volunteers which way to go. They pointed me one way and I walked, walked, walked…. and popped up sort of in the middle of the stadium with some IBU officials who made it clear that I wasn’t supposed to be there. But they had told me to go this way!

I also made the mistake, I guess, of carrying my camera out to the spot behind the firing line. I was taking a few photos before the race started when I was approached by a volunteer. “You can’t take pictures,” she said. “You only have the E credential, not EP.” So apparently, if you don’t have a photographer credential, you aren’t even allowed to carry a camera. I tried to point out that my little Pentax was in no way going to compete with the fancy-pants cameras of actual photographers, who have zoom lenses which are bigger than my head. She didn’t care. I put my lens cap on and said that I wasn’t going to waste my time putting my camera back in the press center, but that I promised I wouldn’t take more pictures.

Later, a second volunteer approached me and reminded me that I wasn’t allowed to take photos. To reiterate, my lens cap was on.

I even saw them chastise a team coach who pulled a small point-and-shoot camera out of his pocket and started to take a photo of his athlete. Really!? You aren’t even allowing team staff to take personal photos of their own teams!?

It seemed like overkill.

Anyway, a lot of lessons learned today. Things finished off with a long trip down from the venue. One problem with situating your race courses on top of a mountain is that there is pretty limited access up and down. In this case, it’s just a gondola (and then a bus to and from the other media centers or hotel complexes). It wasn’t so bad on the way up, but on the way back, everyone who had been at the race – media, spectators, volunteers – tried to leave at once. The lines were huge to get in the gondola and we wasted a lot of time. Time that we didn’t have, due to the amount of work we had left (we published four more stories after getting back to the hotel). We have to try to time it better tonight – I think if we had waited half an hour, it would have been less busy and then we could spend those 30 minutes working instead of waiting in line.

Anyway, the first day of work is done. Here’s a sunset to send you off.

on brand new venues.

Yesterday we checked out the biathlon and ski venues for the first time. We wanted to sort out the logistics before race day, and I’m glad we did. To get to the Laura endurance sports center, we need to take the gondola down from our hotel to Gorki City, then walk the ten minutes to the Gorki Media Center, go through security there, get on a bus up to the Laura base station, get on another, bigger gondola to the main station at the top, and finally take a van ride to one of the two venues themselves. The whole thing takes between an hour and an hour and a half – each way! It’s good to know that we need to build this time into our schedules.

(Additionally, here’s an amazing security story: we were waiting for the bus, and when it arrived it had a sticker sealing the door shut. We kind of laughed that once the bus driver was in there, they sealed him in. But it’s not a joke. A security officer inspected then broke the seal. As we boarded the bus, they scanned each of our credentials – then as I looked out the window I saw them put a fresh sticker over the door. When we arrived at the Laura base station, another security officer inspected and broke the seal, and then they scanned each of us off. It’s not like this on every bus ride, which is a little strange – but it does make you feel like they sure are keeping track of where everyone is, at least for bus TM18….)

Anyway, the biathlon venue is amazing. We were awestruck. The views of the mountains! The sheer size of the thing! Alex had never been to a World Cup biathlon race and Nat only to the ones in Fort Kent in 2011, so they were perhaps even more amazed. Even your standard World Cup biathlon venue is pretty darn impressive. But this was a whole new animal in terms of scale, and I was pretty amazed too. It helped that it was a bright, bright sunny day and everything was gleaming and sparkling. Here’s Nat’s reaction, and some more shots:

We did a quick interview with Canada’s Rosanna Crawford and chatted with her coach, Matthias Ahrens, too. More on that later. We checked out the press room – palatial! – and then walked over to the cross country venue. It’s a five-minute walk and we also caught a ride on an awesome snowmobile coach.

By comparison, the cross country stadium is pretty tame. If I hadn’t seen the biathlon stadium first, I would have thought it was beautiful. But it lacks a lot of the grandeur that we had just seen – it looked more like any old World Cup venue.

Biathlon is, after all, a signature Russian sport. It’s not surprising that the Sochi organizers really put their best into this particular venue. As I’ve written on FasterSkier before, for a long time the biathlon relay was considered the most important winter Olympic event for the Russians to get a gold medal in. Even today, even globally, cross country skiing is not as popular to watch and is definitely not as big of a television phenomenon. Hence the smaller, less grandiose stadium.

Another amazing thing about the venues is that just a few years ago, they didn’t exist at all. You can sort of tell: they are draped on top of this amazing mountain. It’s not exactly a logical or easy place to build cross country ski trails. The terrain is pretty intense – big downhills where the U.S. women clocked themselves hitting 45 miles per hour, a speed I never wish to attain on cross country skis; grinding uphills that last a long, painful time. The whole thing is at 6,000 feet.

That makes for good panorama views of the Caucasus and amazing spectating.

But we chatted a little bit with the USOC’s Luke Bodensteiner yesterday, a former Olympic skier himself who has been doing site visits here since 2008 in preparation for the Games. He said that the first time he visited, there were no cross country ski trails. There was a stadium, but it was kind of on an awkward slant and didn’t have any of those characteristics we require for a high-performance venue: flat stadium, straight lines, etc.

Famed course designer Hermod Bjørkestol designed the courses, looking at GIS maps and imagery and using site visits to try to finagle the best way to cross country ski on the side of an exceptionally steep mountain. The results are beautiful courses that are very difficult. After all, that side of a steep mountain thing. Nevertheless, Luke reported that some of the looks ski very well, flowing with the uphills and downhills such that skiers can carry a lot of momentum. He said they were fun. That’s pretty much the best praise you can get for a race course. The Laura area has been completely transformed since Luke came here the first time. It’s unrecognizable.

But it’s a little crazy to build courses here. First of all, they are so difficult that it’s hard to picture people coming here to ski when they are on vacation. The downhills are a bit scary even for the best skiers in the world. The uphills, especially at altitude, are tough even for expert athletes. Your recreational joe schmoe probably wouldn’t have much fun here, and someone trying to learn to ski for the first time? Forget about it. So what are these venues going to be used for?

“Come back in five years, and tell me what’s here,” Nat said as we rode the gondola down. “I bet nothing.”

It’s also interesting that the biathlon venue was designed a little differently than any other I’ve seen (it’s not like I’ve seen them all, but still). Alex remarked on how far away the stadium seemed to be from the shooting range, and I agree, it seems a little more removed than most venues. I chalked it up to the fact that most venues have been in use for years, sometimes even decades, so they are from a time when biathlon was a more intimate sport. In Sochi, building from scratch, there was plenty of room to make a huge, expansive stadium. But I think it will be harder here for spectators to really see what’s happening on the range, which is the whole point of watching biathlon from a stadium in the first place. It’s exciting! It will be interesting to see if this extra space diffuses the usual biathlon atmosphere at all.

All the seats will be full today, but here’s Alex checking out a funny ground-level seat in the now-empty stadium – seriously, you wouldn’t be able to see anything, not even over the fence!

Then there’s the range itself. As we discussed with Rosanna and Matthias (article here), it is carved into a hill. Now, I’ve seen ranges build into hills before – it’s kind of a common strategy, so that any stray shots go into a hillside instead of flying out into the distance. But this is different. There is a huge retaining wall, many stories high, which rises behind the range. (Athletes have to leave the range and then climb a long sweeping turn to ski up along the top of this wall as they leave the range and head out on their loops – it is a monster climb and one of the hardest on the course.) The retaining walls also extend along the sides of the range, with the effect that the range is protected from the wind on three sides. That makes it an exceptionally calm and “easy” shooting experience.

I am sure we will see plenty of high-pressure mistakes, but in my mind, blocking the wind on the range kind of defeats the point of biathlon! And as I discussed with Matthias, some athletes have a special ability to read and adjust to the wind. Famously, earlier this year when a World Cup race was canceled midway through in Ostersund, Sweden, due to gale-force winds that were knocking down trees, Norway’s Ann Kristin Flatland – swaying in the wind herself as she stood on her shooting mat – somehow managed to muscle her way through hitting her targets. It was one of the most amazing feats of shooting that I have ever seen. Megan Imrie of Canada is also an expert at reading changes in the wind. Biathletes who rely on this ability to get onto the podium are at a distinct disadvantage here in Sochi, since wind won’t come into play so much. That doesn’t seem fair. Everywhere else, this is an established and important part of the sport.

Amusingly, Rosanna also discussed how the shots also sound different because of the echo created by those huge retaining walls. She called missed targets “more heartbreaking” because they make a big “thunk” sound.

(There have also been some issues with the Organizing Committee laying out the courses wrong. At one point they put the starting line in the wrong place. Max Cobb is the technical delegate at the Games biathlon races and in charge of ironing out these problems when people notice and complain. Poor Max.)

The venues were also built in a pretty ecologically special area. After all, it is the summit of a mountain in a protected mountain range. We cracked up (but also cried inside) when we saw these signs on the cross country course:

Umm, what does that even mean? Spectators aren’t supposed to… walk their? Drop their trash? Sorry, you already built the stadium and the trails here. Putting up a sign isn’t going to fix the fact that you ruined this area. In fact, it’s almost a sort of embarrassing advertisement: look! An environmentally sensitive area! Let’s show off how we wrecked it!

Anyway.

The biathlon and ski venues were beautiful. I think they will be excellent for the competition, something that hasn’t always been true in the past for these sports (people complained about the trails in Vancouver, for instance). In that sense, I really salute the organizers for getting it right. Who can argue with this?

But it just brought up a lot of interesting issues that people have been mumbling about in the run-up to the Games. The venues were built so specifically for the Olympics – none of them existed before. That doesn’t seem like the best way to organize an Olympics. Can’t we use existing venues, instead of making a mess somewhere and then, as is true here and at the endurance venues from Vancouver, likely never returning again?

I was reminded of this again at the Opening Ceremonies. The Fisht stadium is being used pretty much just for the ceremony. Supposedly it will turn into a training and competition venue for the Russian soccer team, but Sochi is a pretty far-flung place and the city itself is quite small. I can’t really picture it getting a lot of use – it’s not like the national team is going to move its base to Sochi, no way! The design of the stadium, too, seemed specifically suited to the ceremony choreography. The huge set pieces were pulled across the stadium on cables, through the middle. So the stadium had roofs on two halves, and then a weird different section running through the middle like a racing stripe. This was where all the cables and machinery was to move these set pieces. I wondered if the stadium came first and then the ceremony, but I suspect that they were designed hand in hand. Who makes a $779 million stadium just to match your opening ceremony design? Russia, that’s who.

It’s just a shame to imagine so much money spent, land wrecked, and work put into something that will never get used to this extent again. Even if it’s a great Games, which I have a feeling this will be, we have to ask whether it’s worth it. That gets into questions of the IOC and the Olympic bidding process, which as I mentioned I will expound upon sometime soon.

Even as the Games begin, there is last-minute building and touch-up at the stadiums. We saw a guy in a climbing harness washing all the windows on the biathlon stadium building (it’s a lot of windows). I’ll leave you with a few pictures of behind-the-scenes at the ski venue, which I snapped as we waited for a shuttle down to the gondola. It’s from an area restricted to press, volunteers, and teams, so spectators will never see it. There’s a certain amount of this at any World Cup, as each race definitely needs a staging area. Here’s what it looks like in Sochi.

Okay, now I’m heading off to the first races of the Olympics! I’m so excited for everything to get started! At World Cups sometimes I get this overwhelming rush of adrenaline as I watch. I guess that’s why we watch sports – but sometimes it’s so exciting, I’m so nervous to see what happens when an athlete I know or like is in the lead, I swear it’s more of a rush than I almost ever got when I was racing myself. I expect the Olympics might be like this several times a day for two weeks. It’s going to be incredible and it all starts NOW!

Hello old friends.

Hi there. Are you still there? Anyone? Have you missed me? Probably not. I’m afraid you’ve all given up permanently on reading anything here.

But, as my good friend Tim pointed out when I was home for Christmas and mentioned that I was giving up on the blog and even considering deleting it, “But Chelsea. Then the least thing people would ever see would be you coming out of a portapotty. Is that how you want to be remembered?”

Well, now that you mention it, not particularly. So now, only one cover letter away from the grad school application finish line, I’m coming back and offering you a picture of me skiing, inside a giant inflatable snowman lawn ornament with armholes and eyeholes cut out of it.

This didn’t happen recently. I flew home for Christmas and was so happy to be back in New England, seeing my family and my dog (who was recovering from surgery like a champ) and many old friends. And then all too soon I had to come back to Oregon to do some fieldwork – we have weekly tasks, and while I could skip out on one week, I couldn’t miss two in a row. So I arrived on a Monday night, worked three days, and then took advantage of our New Year’s vacation and headed over to Bend with the South Eugene High School nordic ski team.

The team is surprisingly large considering that there isn’t actually any nordic skiing to be had in Eugene. It’s a really fun group of kids, parents, and coaches, and so when they said they were doing an on-snow camp over in Bend over the New Year, I signed up to help out. The first surprise was when I woke up in the morning, saw that a blizzard was forecasted for the Cascades, and promptly received a phone call telling me that Janice, the head coach’s wife, had broken a crown and needed to get emergency dental work, so she couldn’t drive the van. I was the only other coach with experience driving in snow, so all of a sudden, I was going to be captaining an unfamiliar minivan full of giggling teenagers through a huge storm. Awesome.

The drive was actually fine – we slid around quite a bit, but never going too fast, and I was somehow able to stay calm and hide my occasional freakouts from the kids. As we went over Santiam Pass, it was clear that there was going to be tons of snow at Mount Bachelor. We were scheduled to skate this afternoon and I began mentioning that this probably wasn’t going to be very much fun, in six inches to a foot of new snow. Maybe we should classic ski, I suggested. This idea was met with opposition as “waxing is hard and takes a really long time.”

So, we slowly inched our way up to Mount Bachelor to find that they were not grooming due to the blizzard. It was windy and there was a lot – a LOT – of new snow. Wonderland, sort of. I was assigned to go on a jaunt with our star skier, Trevor, and impress some of my technique knowledge on him. We set out and it immediately became clear that technique work was NOT going to happen. Since nothing we could do would have been “good training” anyway, we went on an adventure, slogging around a six or seven kilometer loop down through the middle trails. We were essentially trying to stride, step, herringbone, or do anything to move forward on our skate skis through what was now almost a foot of new powder. It took us about an hour.

It was fun, but I really wish we’d been on classic skis. I was silently cursing the other coaches and thinking, oh, right, waxing would have been hard but this isn’t!?

The worst part of the afternoon was when we finished skiing and tried to pack the skis back into the roof boxes of the vans. It was blowing really hard – the temperature was about 25, but with the wind and snow and ice, it felt like it was 20 degrees colder. The boxes had iced up and were impossible to open, then impossible to close. Kids were shivering, yelling, in some cases almost crying in their wet workout clothes. I was almost crying. I was frozen.

Luckily day two was sunny and the fresh snow had been packed down into perfect corduroy. We had a great day of training. That night was New Year’s Eve and I went into town to meet up with some college friends, Matt and Anna, who I hadn’t seen since graduation. The three of us had run together at Dartmouth before one by one quitting the team. Matt and Anna are married now, and were visiting Matt’s family in Bend for the holidays. It was great to hang out.

The next morning I woke up not exactly hung over, but thinking that I probably should have skipped that last beer because wow, I didn’t feel awesome. The team was supposed to head up to the mountain for MBSEF’s annual New Year’s Relay, a fun event where costumes are encouraged. We figured all the kids would make teams and it would be great. The problem was, on Sunday morning none of them seemed very enthusiastic. We went from having every kid on a team – many had even brought costumes – to all of a sudden not having a single three-person team.

Another coach and I charged in, saying we wanted to do the relay, would just one person do it with us? And got three responses. That gave us five people. We recruited vigorously and managed to get a sixth so we could field two teams.

My team consisted of me, Natalie, and Langdon. Natalie had skied the year before and was pretty athletic. Langdon was tall and athletic, too, but had never skied before this weekend. He also had a costume, an inflatable snowman of the sort that people put on their front lawns, which he had cut armholes and eyeholes out of and dismantled the bottom so you could move your legs a little. There were also a series of small holes around the mouth so you could breathe a little bit. He was too embarrassed to wear it, though.

So guess who did. That’s right. I’m pretty sure that I’ve never met a costume I didn’t like, and this was no exception. In a matter of minutes I was no longer Coach Chelsea, but…. Snowwoman!

The course was just three kilometers, but it was deceptively hard – three one-kilometer loops going up and down and twisting around. I was the leadoff skier and given that I had no peripheral vision inside the snowman suit, at first I just tried not to get tangled up with anyone. Then I realized that I had extremely limited mobility – I couldn’t open up my stride and was stuck taking very short steps. When I double-poled, my arms bashed against the bulky middle of the snowman so I had to have a very wide stance.

I also realized, pretty quickly, that the mouth holes did not line up with my mouth and that I was essentially trying to race with my head inside a plastic bag.

It was hard, and I felt a little lightheaded, but it was fun. A lot of people cheered for me – “Go Snowman!” and “Wow, here comes the snowman already!” Apparently they don’t expect snowmen to be quick on their skis. And I wasn’t, particularly – I think I tagged off somewhere in the middle of the field, maybe the front of the middle. I quickly took the costume off and enjoyed sucking all the oxygen I could out of the thin 6000-foot-high air.

My teammates did the best they could. Langdon really struggled, which was understandable given that he had basically never skied before. We dropped to last, but we didn’t care. Natalie and Langdon both said they’d had fun, and they had a sense of accomplishment that their other teammates, who hadn’t raced, couldn’t have understood.

And me? I had a slobbery snowman suit. What a prize.