Craftsbury 23k Skate Marathon Race Report

 (You know the drill.  I wrote this for team Slack.  Archived here.  Want to be on our team slack and be part of an awesome community of athletes?  Of course you do.  We're recruiting:  click here. )

This is really a story about how nothing in life means anything without other people.

I have been nordic ski racing since 1987.  I raced in school, I raced in college, and I raced after college.  I was never good-good, but I was pretty good, and I used to spend my entire fall dryland training and my entire winter ski racing.  I was 188th out of 5000 people at the 2011 American Birkebeiner. 

I stopped racing after 2012 because there just wasn't anyone to do it with anymore.  6 hours in the van with your college team to go race other college teams is awesome.  Driving 3 hours by yourself to race high school kids and masters skiers twice your age alone isn't.  Amateur sports are primarily experiential for most of us, and if you have an experience but don't have anyone to share it with, did you actually have an experience?

Thus, I have done exactly one ski race between 2012 and last weekend, and there have been winters where I didn't wax my skis even once.  But in the last couple years, the B2Ski2 energy around here has been growing, and I've been gotten far enough away from my "career" in the sport than I can ski around and just enjoy the movement, instead of thinking "wow, I used to hurt a lot less and go a lot faster."  But that doesn't mean I'm back to loving nordic skiing, and it doesn't mean I'm going to leave work early to skate hilly, lumpy laps at Notchview by myself for fun.  So I had exactly zero days on skate skis this year when Harry started trying to get people to do the Craftsbury 23k two weeks ago.

And man I didn't even REALIZE how bad I needed something to focus on this winter until I had it.  I skied both days the weekend before the race, once midweek, and hit Craftsbury as my 4th day skating for the year.  But MAN was it good to have something I "had" to do for a week instead of asking the question "well, what do you waaaaaaant to do?"

Ok, that was a long setup, but the point is:  thanks Harry (and Luke) for being buds I can go ski racing with.  If I always had buds to go ski racing with, I'd still be ski racing all winter (ahem @Dan Svedberg @Karl @Eugene @David).

Luke is unfortunately too fit and talented to feature much in this story, but he was there and he kicked ass.  Yay Luke.

Harry and I lined up at the back of 170 men in Wave 1 because most people here were good and we were hoping for some traffic-enforced pacing.  Oh, and I did I mention it was 2 degrees or so at the start?  This was the first time in my life that I have raced with my jacket over my race suit.  

The race starts and 170 people try to ski up the first hill and it's pretty tight.  I had given Harry a prerace lecture about how part of skiing in traffic is not stepping on people's poles, but apparently I forgot to tell him how you also aren't supposed to kick people's bindings with your tips because that can flip them open and their ski comes off -- so literally 50 yards into the race, Harry kicks MY f-in ski off my foot.  I've seen this happen before but it's never happened to me.  So I chase my ski backwards through traffic, put it back on, and achieve LAST PLACE position.  Awesome.

Then I ski too hard for the first k so I can get back up to Harry and yell at him (but in a fun way) about those shenanigans.

I got ahead of him on a downhill and then ski mildly hard up the next hill and was like "this kinda hurts me so it's probably enough to gap him" and then he passed me back on the next climb and I was like "ahhh yes today is going to be painful."  

Now that I knew I was not going to casually beat Sir Harold the Mighty, I absolutely SLASHED my way through traffic on long twisty downhill about 3k into the race, weaving in and out of people snowplowing turns, ducking under poles, and praying that I got away with all this sketchy shit, because if anyone went down, it was DEFINITELY my fault and I was DEFINITELY getting yelled at.

But no one did, and thus I put a bunch of bodies between me and Harry, which meant I would at least be able to say stuff like "well I was totally ahead of Harry until I blew up from not training" after the race.  I still checked over my shoulder to see where he was like every 30 seconds, but all I really learned was "wow there's a lot of people out here and lot of them kinda look like Harry."  

So then I skied like 10k with bunch of other dudes trying to figure out if my chest felt super tight because I was sick, or because it was zero degrees, or because I haven't done an effort since Ice Weasels.  I never did figure it out but based on the headaches and nose blowing since the race, I'm gonna say it was all three.  In any case I did not feel like I could go very deep, but luckily in a 90 minute ski race you don't want to go "very deep" anyway.

At the second feed zone, at the top of a hill, I foolishly tried to eat a gel before taking a drink.  But a zero degree gel is a solid block of sugar, so I just stood there going nowhere for a good 20 seconds and (according to Strava flyby) gave away most of my 30 second lead on Harry.  So yeah don't use normal gels for zero degree ski racing... you want the really gross watery ones.  I have been told this but I didn't think it mattered that much.  Oops.

After the feed zone debacle, my quads started cramping on the climb to the course's high point, at about the 12k mark of the race.  So that seemed like a real good sign.

(According to the Strava Flyby, while Harry and I were climbing this hill, Luke was already coming back down the other side and we could have seen him through the woods about 6 minutes ahead of us.  What a guy)

But, you know what comes after high points, right?  DESCENTS!  So I put some time back into Harold with my literally 38 years of ski handling experience and even caught back up to my group from before the feed zone nonsense.  I ate my second gel on the Sams Run descent (this time without stopping, and just gave up on washing it down with anything) and right when I was thinking that maybe I was skiing at a pretty good clip on a rolling descent, the women's leader passed me, having made up 15 minutes in an hour of skiing.  Haha people are GOOD AT STUFF. 

I, however, was pretty content just being mediocre at stuff.  The remaining climbs on the course weren't TERRIBLY long, I wasn't cramping THAT MUCH, and the people around me were ALSO TIRED and NOT HARRY.  So things were acceptable.  When we looped back through the stadium at 20k, I spied Harry 60-90 seconds back, and I realized that if I could just keep the wheels on this bus for another 15 minutes, I would have managed to eke out one final defeat of Harry in aerobic combat after it became clear last season that I'll never do it on a bike in my life again.

So I did that.  I felt like a big sack of exhausted jello but I looked like someone skiing with clean technique, albeit very feebly, which is not a bad place to be in at the end of the race.  So I actually passed a few folks who were Even More Pitted Than I and finished up in a "respectable" 1:31, a mere 30 minutes back from the winning time and a glorious 102nd place in the men's field.  Harry finished 3 minutes later and flexed on me by immediately going to the food truck and getting a chili, while I staggered around saying things like "oh my god my stomach is so messed up from those gels and effort, oh my god how can you think about eating, oh my god"

In case it's not clear this was really fun, even though most people in the race are good, some of them aren't and there was a lot of people.  I beat 12 dudes by over 30 minutes so even if you are not someone with 38 years race experience you probably would have had people to ski race with for at least a while.  If we get another good snow winter in Massachusetts (lol fat chance) I will be peer pressuring more people to come do this next year!!