Until the Snow Ends

I think it's time to face the fact that I can't cross country ski race worth beans anymore. The less of a "real" ski race it is, the better I do. Mass starts are good for me. Ski-O is good for me. Drafting on a flat course at Weston is good for me. And winter triathlon is definitely good for me. The only drawback to the winter tri is that it requires running. Real running, none of this 6-steps-with-a-bike-and-remount business. In related news, my knee still hurts and it's Wednesday! Hooray! Last year it was five degrees out and we did the run and bike on the same course. The runners chewed it up and the bike leg was really hard, so this year they split the courses for about 50% of the distance. This bummed me out, because if I had my way we'd drop the run and ski from this event and just make people race bikes through loose snow. And Alec Petro would win by an hour. But, it turns out that at a race time of 27 degrees, packed snow doesn't ho...

Relative to last week's Geschmossel , waxing for the White Mountain 30k up in Jackson was pretty damn easy. Everyone pretty much agreed that a heated-in hardwax binder was the way to go, cover it with the kick wax of your choosing, and you'd be good to go. So of course I went with a klister binder, because gosh, I'm so frightfully clever! The reasoning was, my upper body is weak, and I love striding with bomber kick. Thus I should set myself up with awesome kick. And I did have awesome kick... but it turns out that climbing a hill with great kick is only about 5% easier than climbing it with bad kick. And having slow skis for a course with a lot of double-poling (a.k.a. every non-FIS classic race in the world) is really tiring and demoralizing. So I trudged around for 30k thinking about how stupid I was. As usual, I lined up conservatively deep in the field, because it's a 30k and I wanted to start slow. But then the gun went off, and I remembered holycrapitsaraceg...

This Tuesday's Weston World Championships went really well for me, but I couldn't write about it because I had all kinds of other posts queued up. Now it's Friday and no one cares! Except me. So here we go! After two weeks of cold conditions we got some classic Bostonian "falling slush" precip for most of the day Tuesday. Falling slush means wet snow, wet snow in the air means wet ice on the ground, wet ice on the ground means I get to break out the waterskis and flouros and ski 25 kph laps around Weston. I was feeling pretty wrecked from stumbling around Bretton Woods with iced-up skis the day before, but the rest of the CSU masters contingent had also raced on Monday, and they showed up, and were not audibly complaining. So I sucked it up. Also "in the mix" for once was Cary, but he decided to stack the deck against himself by bringing unwaxed skis to a waterskiing race. Then we started and he got crashed on the first hill, and it didn't ...

After a solid month off from racing in daylight, I decided to kick off the 2010 nordic campaign at the 37th annual Geshmossel up at Bretton Woods. It did not go as well as last year . In the grand tradition of amateur racing, it was totally not my fault . After all, who could have predicted that the tracks far away from the start line would be much softer than where the race started, and thus where all wax testing took place? Certainly not me, for I have only been doing my own race wax for 10 years. I am not experienced enough for such advanced foresight. Also, the temperature rose to 31.5 degrees at race time. Given the four inches of fresh powder, it was basically impossible to wax for. These conditions are so unique that there is a special ski made just for them. As I only have 7 pairs of skis, I could not be expected to be competitive in such conditions. Finally, as a cyclist I cannot develop the necessary arm strength for January classic racing, and thus I must wax more ag...

Wow! This took a really long time. That's what I get for trying to raise the bar from last year . Best of Seat Cam 2009 from colin reuter on Vimeo .

I only have so much creativity. It cannot be wasted on post titles. I passed on racing this weekend because I had to work Saturday. Ordinarily this would suck -- wait, it sucked this time, too -- but at least that meant that when Linnea and I headed to Pineland on Sunday, I was so full of energy to do stuff that I didn't need to drink any coffee to be annoyingly hyperactive . But I drank some anyway. It convinced me that I should be in the X Games: Thank god there is no video of this "wicked air" to ruin the illusion. Let's just assume that the hang time was epic, and I held the grab for three or four seconds (while turning a 720) and that the picture doesn't do it justice. Aside from the mad wicked sweet epic air FTW, Pineland was really good skiing . I'd kinda forgotten about it as a ski destination from Boston, but I checked and it's actually three miles close than Waterville. The trails are smoother and have far superior flow to Waterville (yo...

I can't believe I've been racing Tuesday Night World Championships for four years now. It's been an interesting trip. Year one I thought I could jump straight to skis and ski as fast I did in college; I ended up slow and then overtrained for most of the year, never making the front group. Year two I trained less/smarter and was consistently in the front group after the first few weeks, even placing second twice. Year three I raced fewer Tuesdays and regressed a bit, probably because I didn't race as smart or with as much motivation. And this year -- who knows? My transition to snow has been as feeble as ever this year, so my expectations were low. Just before heading out I went back and read last year's entry , which ended up being a really good call. Last year I thought I would just make the front group and throw down, and ended up exploding; note to self: stay away from front group. And they say writing a narcissistic race report about every little rac...

Alright, the holidays are over, I think most of my readers are back to work (hey look, I'm not going to make a pathetic joke about how few readers I have! Or did I?), and the race season starts tonight. Let's finish it up with the only useful topic left: do you need a wax/wax equipment collection that is more valuable than all your skis combined? This wax sells for $3.66/g. It is not a narcotic. You don't need it. Waxing At some point in your ski career (like, now), you'll hear someone else talking about waxing. Waxing your skis is to nordic skiing the way tire selection is to cyclocross; sometimes, it really matters , but people act like it always matters , and you can rest assured that anyone obsessing about the wax they put on their skis would own 5 sets of tubulars if they raced cross. The other thing about waxing is that it's kind of like pumping up your tires. If you don't do it every ride, it's no big deal (sorry, guys-who-pump-up-to-120psi-e...