Until the Snow Ends

Want more factual, less-seizure-prone Birkie vids?  Check out 2010  and 2011 . So, last year , I showed up to the Birkie with super-questionable fitness having barely ski raced all year.  I ended up having the best race of my life and qualifying for the elite wave in 2012, reminding me for the hundredth time that predicting and controlling one's fitness is way, way harder than it seems. The obvious next step was to ski EVEN LESS and race EVEN LESS this year.  I got back from 'cross nationals in mid-january, looked at the calendar, and realized that I had 6 weeks to the Birkie.  Five years ago, I would've said there was no hope to get 50k fitness in 40 days, but now I know that ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE.  Let's do this! ...and six weeks later, I was in line at the airport with 10 ski days under my belt, with Cary and Lauren, who were on similar training plans -- and we suddenly had a problem even bigger than limited time on snow. Our plane tickets were bo...

Last year's weird winter of training made for such a good result at the Birkie that the only logical progression was to get even weirder THIS winter... by getting on xc skis a grand total of four times in January.  I mean, I still have 26 days until I have to line up against people who get paid to ski race at the biggest race in North America , so I don't see how this could be a problem.  Not like my ego is fragile enough that I could already be losing sleep over getting dropped out the back of the elite wave 5k into the race, no, not at all... ANYWAY the first step to True Nordic Fitness (tm) is throwing down on Tuesday nights at Weston, for 15 minutes of PAIN on a magical mixture of SLUSH and ICE.  The daytime high was a mere 42, aka "normal Boston winter," aka "one of the colder days we've had this year," so the conditions were relatively good... wet enough to not be piles of granular sugar on top of ice, but cold enough to not be puddles of slush....

The Birkie was not only the pinnacle of my season, it was also the ULTIMATE ROOMMATE GRUDGE MATCH. Which I won, by the way. In case you forgot. But, we made a pact that we would also do the Rangeley Lakes Loppet the following weekend, so that whomever lost the Birkie would have a shot at revenge, and whomever won it could spend the whole week worried about getting their fluke victory exposed (that would be me). However, Cary ended up torpedoing this plan on Wednesday night by getting SMOKED by an SUV riding home. He texted me from the hospital like it weren't no thang, but when he was still there 24 hours later and using phrases like "can't eat solid food for 6 weeks," I realized that I had just won by TKO. This was actually really sad, and if you see him you should not jokingly hit him in the mouth. You should also check what your car insurance covers for other people injured in an accident, because he's hitting a six-figure medical bill pretty easily ...

2011 Birkie Cam from colin reuter on Vimeo . I had a GoPro poking me in the back for 50k and all I got was this 188th place finish. Ski marathons are not a fundamentally action-packed experience, but I did what I could with the edit here. For more silly nordic-cams, check out last year .

To say this has been a abnormal winter for me is an understatement. With the exception of a year in Florida, I've been XC ski racing almost every single weekend in the winter since 1996. Winter means skiing. Skiing means nordic. Nordic means racing. This time, though, things had been totally off the rails -- the only "real" ski race I did was Craftsbury , and I got blown out by the old men and college girls, and then subsequently called out for noting this on the internet. Not exactly a confidence-builder. So it was with much apprehension that I headed out to the Birkie last Thursday. Last year, I showed up with my worst legs of the season and Cary, my only real metric/nemesis, put nine minutes over 50k into me. This qualified him for wave 1 this year, and me for wave 2, which only made me more pessimistic about my chances for revenge -- he'd be surrounded by fast skiers to draft, I'd be surrounded by a bunch of people who didn't ski fast enough t...

I've done a lot of classic marathons over the years. Well, like five. 250k of skiing, I'll call it a lot. Our good buddy New England winter *usually* makes these a klister-binder affair, because there's some nice transformed ice mixed in with the powder and with hundreds of skiers going through each track, the ice has a way of overcoming the powder. USUALLY. But I still can't explain why I thought it would be a good idea to use a klister binder. It was Thursday night, I was tired and in a hurry. The tube of KR20 was right there. So I just...did it. And then only brought one pair of (klistered) skis to the race. Because I am not very good at taking ski racing seriously, anymore. When I woke up to see fresh snow, I realized I might have a problem. When the snow squalls started during the race, I knew I had a problem. Since I registered day-of (online reg closed 7 days before the race... sneaky) I ended up in wave 2, which had exactly zero fast people in...

I made my traditional jump back into ski racing before actually having any kind of fitness, just like every year, on Tuesday night. It was my 6th time on skis for the year, but more importantly, my first change to repay ROOMMATE CARY for abusing me all cross season. I strategically lined up deep in the field, to intentionally miss the front group, and thus not taste my lunch until at least the ten minute mark. And it totally worked! After a few minutes things settled out, my equipment was intact, and all the fast guys were cleanly up the trail. But not Cary. I caught onto Cary and Luke's group and pretended I wasn't winded by making a joke about it being the washed-up-college-skier group. Then I went to the FRONT because I was so STOKED to be skiing NON-TERRIBLY. I believe this dispatched Luke. However, someone was very audibly skiing close behind me... one guess who it was. Jamie Doucett was out on the course blinding people with his flash, but also taking some r...

Being an insufferable racerhead has some benefits. Let's say you skied terribly on Saturday, and almost decided to bag the rest of the ski season, and not race a bike until April 10th. That would be a rough 6 weeks, wouldn't it, with "I skied the worst race of my life in the biggest race of the country" as a sendoff to your 2010 nordic season? But wait! Why not take one more shot at ski racing, when there's 20 minutes of pain just down the street every Tuesday night? The pro thing to do would obviously have been a proper rest week, but I decided to mortgage my recovery a bit in exchange for a bit of sanity. It didn't help that (pro skier) Alex was talking trash after beating me by 22 minutes in Wisconsin, and made it known that this would be her lone Tuesday night appearance. I figured the standard for hanging up the skis would be "can't beat Alex in a 7k," and headed off to see if I should continue my season. It hasn't been below freez...

I've been squawking about the Birkie for the last two months here. It's the biggest ski race in North America and the automatic focal point on my season, since it's the only ski race I'm paying $600 (airfare,lodging,entry) to do. After all the anticipation, did it live up to the hype? Let's find out! Unless you're a big-time skier, skilled sweet-talker, or someone who did a qualifying race, your first Birkie involves a wave 10 start. I met none of the above criteria wave 10 it is! Wave 10 is the last group of skiers to hit the course, about 2 hours after the elite wave goes off. Joining me in this inevitable mess was Cary. Starting about 7000 people ahead of us were most of our travel companions, John, Nick, Aaron, and " pro skier Alex Jospe ." Aaron is a Birkie vet so we got some good intel from him. The first race is actually to the front of the staging area, so when wave 9 starts (ten minutes before wave 10) you're in position to sprint...

After getting beat down on at the Eastern Cup on Saturday I headed north, back to the safe confines of citizen's racing for the Flying Moose up in Bethel. With an Eastern Cup being run at Holderness that day, it was a good chance to try to reassemble some ski-esteem with the Birkie looming. Due to low snow (although a lot more snow than Holderness, I heard) the race was run exclusively on the Gould Academy trail system. Usually the race loops through there before ultimately continuing to the Bethel Inn for the latter half. Every time I've done this in the past, I've lost places after leaving the Gould trails, so I wasn't gonna complain about the change. The feel-good-about-yourself plan was in full effect so I took it out s-l-o-w. With only about 60 people in the mass start it wasn't like I needed to throw elbows, and I certainly didn't need to stake out a spot at the front just to blow up after 5k. So everyone who wanted to race immediately went up the t...

It's been 3 years since I last did an Eastern Cup. There's a reason for this. Eastern Cups are basically the UCI race of nordic skiing, minus the B field that might allow one to salvage their self-esteem or even have a little fun. Nope, an Eastern Cup is basically an experts-only race, made even more aggravating by the fact that most of the "experts" are high school boys. So that's why I'd been avoiding them for the last 3 years, but hey, as part of the "Birkie Build" training program (patent definitely not pending... ask me next Monday) I needed a big weekend, and I train most effectively with a number on. Thus I registered for the Eastern Cup under the guise of "training," as if that would make me feel any better when the results went up. The weather was beautiful for riding, and gross for classic skiing. 40+ degrees with slush in the sun and glazed tracks in the shade? LOVELY. It was a 3-lap 15k and I was seeded near the back, as...

Man, I am so out of Tuesday night blog titles. This week's Tuesday night race at Weston was especially exciting because it's the "vacation week race," where everyone with kids doesn't show up, because they're stuck at the police station after chaining their kids to a stake in the yard, because they were bouncing off the walls for the last four days. Also adding some excitement to the mix was the "Whistler Olympic Park" conditions -- 32 and snowing. Warming up, I thought I had atrocious skis, but it turns out that no one's skis were actually gliding. As soon as the race got going, I was like, "oh, we're all going slow tonight. Phew." And sure enough, race time was about 3 minutes slower for a 20 minute race. So despite the standard prerace whining, I made it into the front group pretty easily. Cool. It was weird because mentally, I felt like we were going really slow, but I was still poling and skating pretty hard, so it wasn...

It's been 13 months since my last interval start ski race, so I was inexplicably pumped for a 10k skate race up at Pineland. "Man, I can't wait to ski alone for half an hour! Just me and my pain, out in the woods for a ski, interrupted only by the occasional terrified glance backward to see if anyone is catching us." It's gonna be great! With the Birkie looming in 14 days there was no way that Cary could afford to let me get in any extra training in, so he joined me on the drive up through the snowless coast of Maine. Of course the race was close to said coast, and as a result there was virtually no snow to be found at the race site, either. We parked in a field that had been plowed, but if you climbed over the plow banks -- grass. The only snow in the whole field was at the edge against the trees, where it was slightly shaded from the afternoon sun. Oh, this is going to be great. Glad I brought my rock skis. Once in the woods, though, everything changed. ...

I think the best thing about the winter season is that even when I get sick and take a weekend off, I can always hit up the ol' Tuesday Night smackdown at Weston and get in something blogworthy. Before we get to the "action" (spoiler alert: there was drafting), I want to call your attention to a new race on the New England calendar. Last year my dad and I were kicking around the idea of trying to make a single-loop 50k "Dixville Loppet" up at the Balsams, you know, that place with the giant trail system and amazing snow that never has races, and thus is unknown to the nordic racer dork crowd? I don't want to give my INTERNET PRESENCE too much credit or anything, but they are finally hosting a race at the Balsams this year, and it's a single lap 30k classic race, aka a moderately more sane version of exactly what we proposed. The great irony it's the same weekend as the damn Birkie , which I signed up for and bought airfare for back in November. ...

I realized the other day that I had virtually the exact same January 2010 as January 2009. Same races, same training, same results. I think I'm turning into solobreak . And now it's February 2010, and I have the same head cold that I had for the first week of February 2009. Creepy. Of course, I did do one thing differently in January, I finally hardened up and did a 50k before March. Sentences like that one prove that I'm not a real skier, because it's past mid-season for most people at this point, and they've been on snow for 2+ months, rollerskis since September, and are trying to "hang onto their form" as the season drags on. Meanwhile, I'm congratulating myself on the fact that I skied for a whopping 3 hours without breaking down completely. Craftsbury is the "big" New England marathon, which isn't saying much compared to actual big marathons like the Birkie . But since I'm registered for the Birkie (wooooooooo) I figured i...

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...