Until the Snow Ends

A weekend without ski racing! Yes, it sounded crazy to me too. But instead of getting abused by New England junior skiers for another weekend, I was headed to Newport Vermont, which is basically Canada, for a winter mountain bike race. The whole week I was waffling on how I felt about the race. Biking on snow, which I had done a grand total of one time, I remember was fun. Driving 220 miles each way to do a race is not fun. Paying $54 entry fees, gas, and hotel is not fun. So this was teetering on the edge of being not fun. The real thing that had me scared, however, was the terrifying illiteracy of the race promoter. His blog/race info site included sentences like... you should have some newspaper with it in order to help you start a fire if need be? I'm trusting a guy who can't tell the difference between a question mark and a period to be in charge of this thing? Maybe it's years of being nagged by an English major (my mom), but I was seriously concerned by thi...

This is a ridiculously solid video of the Canadian highlights at the Tour de Ski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc8ppRiobus&NR Even if you don't give a crap about the sprints, the first 2 minutes are awesome. The finish line of the final climb is epic.

This probably counts as cheating, but since I don't have time to get the video of this weekend's sprints off my camera yet, I have an old video from back in the college days. It's footage of some people (mainly me and Kris Kebler) jumping on nordic skis at 2004 college club nationals at Sugarloaf. As you might expect, much crashing happens, mainly because Kris really, really wants to do a 720 off a jump that's a foot high at best. The audio got a bit de-synched during the upload, but whatever, it's still amusing. Also, I did three more races since my last blog post. At this point I think it's safe to say that I've maxed out the "race your way into shape" training plan and I'm not going to go faster unless I get a little smarter about training. Maybe next year... So Saturday was the Eastern Cup sprints at Weston. The whole event turned into an impressive debacle due to timing issues, but that didn't really affect me, since I skied a me...