But so far in 2011, I have already cried twice. I’ve used up my quota of tears, and I’m at risk of regressing to the days when I was a small child throwing fits in the grocery store.

The first time was on January 25^th. It’s not like I wrote down the date- I mostly remember it because it was the Tuesday before the Craftsbury Marathon.

For a long, long time, I had been wondering if I would keep ski racing after this season. I’d discussed it with a few of my teammates and in every conversation, I had said that I thought I would know when the time came to leave. What I meant is that my results would bad enough or good enough to guide my decision. But so far, that time hadn’t come. My results so far had been far from strong, but I’d also had very few races where I felt good. I was sure that if I felt good, I could ski faster.

But I finally realized that I didn’t want this question to dominate my season. I had to choose one way or another and get it over with. So after thinking for two days, I decided: I wasn’t going to keep on.

(So to Anders, who said he was “mad at the people who fired me”: I guess you can be mad at me. I fired myself.)

In my season and a half with the GRP up to that point, I hadn’t had a single result that had jumped out and grabbed anyone’s attention, especially not my own. I was fitter, stronger, and a better technical skier than when I graduated from Dartmouth. I trained better: longer on distance days and faster on intensity days. I was more coordinated and I had developed fast-twitch muscles for the first time in my life. But when I got in races, for whatever reason, the promise shown in training didn’t pan out. It’s something that Pepa and I have never figured out – I just should have been racing much faster than I ever did.

If I hadn’t improved with the GRP in two years, I didn’t think a third year would do the trick. Plus, I felt guilty taking up the incredible resources that this team had to offer when someone else – someone who was developing and improving – potentially had to leave skiing because they couldn’t find support for their racing career.

I toyed with applying to a different program because I was confident that I hadn’t reached my potential as a racer. But in the end, I felt that my time was up. When I became part of the GRP, I felt like I held a winning lottery ticket in my hand. I didn’t want to become addicted to gambling, so to speak; I didn’t want to be one of those racers who hangs around forever, racing to mediocrity and always hoping for the mythical result that would justify their ever-lengthening commitment to skiing.

In some ways it was like a huge weight was lifted. I could race for the rest of the season just for racing’s sake, for the fun of it all, without worrying about how my results or my FIS points would set me up for next year. I could really enjoy skiing in a way that I hadn’t before, not since high school, before the days when I put pressure on myself.

But I cried, too. I love skiing, and I love racing. Even though I had made my decision and I knew it was time to move on, it was hard to give up something that I loved so much. That’s where the tears came from, a realization that simply loving racing wasn’t enough to let me stay.

I decided to make the next eight weeks the best weeks of my life as a skier. I planned out some races I was excited about. I wasn’t going to mess around, now that these were my last chances.

That very weekend – the weekend of the Craftsbury Marathon – I competed in a mini-tour in Orford, Quebec. While I certainly wasn’t winning or setting any records, they were the best races of my career with the GRP. I felt like I was skiing well. I was “in” each race, responding to what was happening around me, attacking, making things happen. I had a ton of fun. I immediately wondered if I had made the right decision. What if every race could be like this? Wouldn’t that make it worth staying?

But I think that part of the reason I skied well was that I wasn’t worrying about anything. I didn’t change my mind – instead the races reinforced my commitment to leaving the sport.

After races in Stowe, Vermont, and then in Gatineau, Canada – both of which were fun but unspectacular, results-wise – my season veered away from its planned course.

I headed to the Midwest, where the SuperTour races I was signed up for in Madison were canceled due to political protests. After an unexpected training weekend, I raced the American Birkebeiner, which was supposed to be something for fun – I’m not a strong marathon skier – but had suddenly become the focal point of the trip.

I also got the opportunity to travel to Oslo, Norway, to help FasterSkier cover World Championships, most-expenses-paid. With few races in New England in early March, it seemed like a no-brainer to go. And it turned out to be the best trip I’ve ever been on.

But I didn’t really train while I was there. I skied, but it was the opposite of training; practically all of my skiing was in that grey zone where you are going hard, but it’s not a quality workout.

Then I came back to the U.S. and got a cold. Too many late nights, too little eating, too much drinking, and that not-training all added up to poor health.

By the time the Spring Tour rolled around – the last races of my career – I was in a bad spot, athletically. In the last month, I had done one race, which was a marathon, one set of max intervals in late February, one aborted threshold workout in which I felt terrible, and a set of thirty-second intervals to wake up.

I was not in shape to go hard. And it showed in the first two races. Yikes.

I had had this idea that I would finish my career with a bang. I think, somehow, I had believed that all the karma from anything good I had ever done as a skier would come back to me, and I would go out in a blaze of glory; maybe I’d even win a race.

Obviously, this is not how things work. Especially when you haven’t been training.

The last race of the tour was the best, in a number of ways. I just went out and skied. I caught a few girls in the pursuit, I raced as hard as I could, and I basked in the sun. Then I continued to bask in the sun during the men’s race, and during the post-race barbecue, and during the second ski that I made myself go on through the fields on Sam’s Run, and as we sat around in the yard drinking beer, our last activity as a team before Matt and I left. By that night, I had a vicious sunburn.

It was the best way I could have ended my career as a “serious” racer – even better than if I had won. On a perfect spring day, I was reminded of the best things about the ski world: camaraderie, community, and fun.

And when I left the assembled chairs, crates, and logs where my teammates were sitting in the sun, still drinking beers to celebrate a season well-done, I was sad to go pack up my few remaining belongings.

I had thought that since I had decided to leave two months ago, I would have had time to sort out these feelings. I didn’t think it would hit me all of a sudden as I left my now-empty room and carried the last box out to my car. But it did hit me, and I started crying for the second time in 2011.

Craftsbury has been my home for two years. Not since high school have I lived in a single house for as long as I lived at Elinor’s. Nor have I lived with the same people for so long, or felt as much part of a single place. For all the ups and downs, the adventures and bonfires, the frustrations and disagreements, the good races and the bad, this had been my place, where I belonged.

Saying goodbye to a place that has affected you so much is impossible, even if you’re excited about what comes next.

I kept crying as I gave my teammates hugs, wished them luck, and promised that I’d see them again. After briefly putting myself together, I cried as I drove by the Common for a last time, and then shed my final tears – perhaps for the year – as I turned off of South Craftsbury Road, onto Route 14, and towards the future.

No, just kidding, I’ll give you a little more than that. The racing has been really awesome and fun to watch. The highlight of course was watching Alex Harvey and Devon Kershaw win GOLD! I think we all knew that they could do it, but still, it took so long before it sunk in that they had actually done it. Watching the relays has been particularly fun.

I also tried to watch the jumping on Wednesday morning, but it didn’t work very well. This was my view from the good seats at the bottom of the landing hill:

I felt really bad for the guys jumping – I can’t imagine taking off, flying 120 meters through the air, and not even being able to see the landing! Yikes!! So that was kind of a bummer. The jump here in Oslo is pretty cool, so it would have been nice to have a better view.

The fog has generally been pretty bad most days. Along a similar vein, here’s a picture of the women’s relay which I took from the side of the trail literally right next to them:

And one of Jessie Diggins, who skied an awesome anchor leg for the U.S.:

Other highlights include skiing to work in the morning, the free waffles in the media center, asking Marit Bjoergen a question in a press conference, and basically everything about being in Oslo. The only bummer was that today I’m moving from one friend’s house to another friend’s house, so I had to get my 50-pound ski bag on a bus, two trains, and then up from the T stop in Holmenkollen to the media center, which is quite a hike. Luckily a friend helped me carry it part of the way.

The event has really taken over the city of Oslo, and Norwegians are INTO it. The trains are packed every day, standing room only, and there’s a veritable river of people walking up to the venue. The sides of the trails are packed and the cheering is the loudest I’ve ever heard by several factors of magnitude.

Here are some Norwegian ski jumping fans to close out this post.

I’m usually really bad at sleeping on planes, but this time it was no problem. I was exhausted! The few minutes I had to wait in between eating the dinner they served us and them collecting the trash seemed like eternity; I just really wanted to pass out.

But I was kidding about regretting the trip – I am definitely sure that I made a good decision! I am currently in Amsterdam waiting for a connecting flight and watching the men’s World Championships pursuit live on TV. Tonight, I’ll be in Oslo, and tomorrow, I will be right there in Holmenkollen stadium watching the races and helping FasterSkier with reporting. Since there aren’t many races in New England next weekend, I don’t have to feel guilty about missing them, and honestly, watching the biggest races in the World in the most packed, electric venue in the world is going to do as much for my love, understanding, and appreciation of the sport and get me more excited about skiing and racing as doing another ski race myself possibly could.

So anyway. I have a lot to look forward to in the next week.

But the last week was pretty good too – I had a lot of fun at the Birkie! I actually felt horrible for the first 10k, and was really slow, so that was a bummer, but after that I had fun, much more fun than last year. And I managed to avoid getting frostbite, which was something of an accomplishment after hearing stories of what happened to some other racers. Regardless of the fact that I seem to be a really poor marathoner – for some reason I’m much worse at marathons than any other race – I am planning on doing quite a few more Birkies.

Perhaps my favorite part of the whole weekend was listening to Matt parrot various French words and phrases in an awesome accent. “Bienvenue!” “Bonjour!” “D’accord!” When I heard actual French-speakers talk, I could no longer take them seriously. Matt has a real talent for accents (example: his Midwestern one) but I didn’t realize that it extended into foreign languages.

Anyway, it was just Ollie, Tim, Matt, Alex and I, and then Ollie got sick and couldn’t join us on Saturday and Sunday, which was a bummer. We were flying solo without Pepa or any sort of wax support, but it worked out totally fine and we all had good skis – even though the boys and I put completely different things on our skis for both of the classic races! It was actually nice to realize that I am grown-up enough to go to a race and do all of the testing and prep work on my own without getting too stressed out or running out of time to warm up (more on that later).

Friday and Saturday went okay for me – I was tenth both days, and felt like I skied pretty well on Saturday in particular. But I feel like I’ve kind of been in a rut lately; it took me a long time to get back into racing shape after being sick for a while in December, and while I have been very consistent all season, it’s been consistently mediocre! That isn’t really our goal around here so I’ve been hoping to have a good race that broke the cycle.

On Sunday, I think I might have had that race. For the women, it was a 15k pursuit, consisting of three loops on a fast but difficult 5k course. There was a kind of flat rolling section between 0.5k and 1.5k, and then a loooooong multi-pitch climb for about a kilometer, followed by some shorter hills and more rolling terrain back through the lap.

I started six seconds behind Sheila Kealey from XC Ottawa, and ten and fifteen seconds ahead of two other skiers. Part of the beauty of racing in Canada is that you really know nothing about most of the people you are competing against, so you have to kind of just ski your race and see how it all shakes out. Anyway, I started off thinking I could catch Sheila; part of the reason I thought this was that she’s only five years younger than my mother. So I took off pretty hard, trying to bridge the gap so I could have someone to ski with.

This turned out to be completely misguided. I never caught her and after a few kilometers of maintaining the gap, she simply skied away from me. It turns out that Sheila is a fast lady- she had the 5th-fastest time on the day! Wow.

At this point, I panicked for a second. I was sure that I was being dropped because I’d gone out too fast, not because she was speeding up. But then I realized that the pack behind me, which had grown to three or four women, was always ten or fifteen seconds behind me and not gaining ground. So I couldn’t be slowing down that much.

Anyway, you are doubtless getting bored hearing about my race, but basically it went really well. I felt like I skied well and this was the perfect skate course for me, with manageable climbs that I could really attack. It was really fun to feel like I was going for it after a couple weeks of races where I was definitely not on the offensive as much as you should be. I think this was the best I’ve ever skated in my life. So that’s nice.

And at the end of the day, I decided that I want to be as fast as Sheila Kealy when I “grow up.” So it’s a good thing that I felt like I was fairly competent at waxing my own skis and all that good stuff. Green Racing Project: preparing post-college skiers for masters glory!

Here’s a picture I took of Tim on the podium on Friday. He’s laughing because Matt said something funny.

The morning started off like any other race morning: we arrived, tested skis, warmed up, and everything seemed to be on track. I got to the start with my race skis and my bib seven or eight minutes before I was supposed to start, put my skis down, jogged around a little bit: all normal things. As my start time drew near, I went to the start itself, where a nice man in a red jacket (Chisholm Ski Club’s trademark) was checking off people’s names as they lined up.

He looked at my bib and said someone else’s name expectantly.

“No, no, I’m Chelsea. Chelsea Little,” I replied, confused.

“Chelsea Little? No, that’s not right. Let’s see, you should be…. let me find you…. bib 240.”

The bib I was wearing was 242. Crap.

At this point, I was mostly confused. What was going on? I had looked at the start list in the lodge, where I was listed as bib 242. That’s the bib the ladies in race headquarters had given Pepa. I had no reason to think I shouldn’t be bib 242. And yet… I was staring at the start list in the official’s hand, and it clearly said that I should be bib 240.

It appeared that the officials had changed the start list after handing out some of the bibs, and neglected to tell anyone that they had the wrong bibs. That…. isn’t supposed to happen.

Lauren and Tara were having similar experiences. We were all dumbfounded, nobody more so than the race officials. And at this point, bib 241 was at the start. I had missed my start. Except that I had been there, on time, with the bib that the race officials had given me. I was still trying to wrap my head around this fact.

Tara realized that she was supposed to be bib 242, so I ripped off my bib and handed it to her, and she literally skied right into the start and out the other side, barely making it on time herself. Lauren had bib 245 but was supposed to be 243, so she skied up to the start and told the starter “I am actually 243″ with an impressive amount of authority.

Which left me standing there.

“I need to start!” I kept saying.

“This girl needs to start!” The officials kept saying. But nothing was happening.

I saw Judy over at the announcer’s booth, trying to peer in the window and see how Ida and Hannah had done on the live results screen. So I took off my skis walked over, and told her that they had changed the start list and I hadn’t been able to start, and proceeded to start crying. That’s kind of embarrassing, but it happened. Judy gave me a hug and ran off to find a jury member, who after acting very confused, helpfully walked me over to race headquarters to get a new bib so I could eventually start.

“Ah, yes, you should be bib 240, and here it is,” the ladies said. “We’ve been expecting this all morning.”

Really? Well that’s great.

So I put on the bib and headed back to the start, where the jury member explained that I needed to be started. There were still girls lined up to start, so I couldn’t exactly just jump in line – they were now on bib 270. So they had me start in a separate lane, not with the wand, and promised to write down the time when I started.

“Yeah, whatever,” I thought as a skied off the line.

I had a lot of adrenaline, and then I didn’t, and my race was pretty mediocre. I had used up a lot of energy and emotion as I cried to various people, found a new bib, etc. The details of my race aren’t that important.

On the plus side, I’m sure the next few races can’t go as poorly as this one did.

Until then, we’re chilling out in our cute little cabin and waxing our skis in the Silver Lake Lounge. Life isn’t so bad.

Me and Jess getting psyched on the start line. Not sure why everyone is wearing pink...

I’m psyched to be back in Vermont and skiing on snow (although that might not last long), but I had a really wonderful Thanksgiving with my family, and I miss them, too. I traveled to Irvington, Virginia to see my aunt, uncle, cousins, and grandparents. I hadn’t seen my dad’s family in a couple of years and my grandmother isn’t getting any younger, so it was good that I went. Also, I love my cousins, they are completely awesome.

But anyway. The day before Thanksgiving we were taking the dog for a walk and ran into one of the neighbors. “Are you doing the Turkey Trot?” she asked.

“What Turkey Trot?” we replied.

“Oh, the whole town does the Turkey Trot every year. There’s 400 people, which is practically everyone who lives here!”

Without missing a beat, my parents and uncle asked, “How do you sign up? I’m sure Jess and Chelsea want to do it!”

Wait a minute. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to do another race. After all, I had just completed five races in ten days over in Finland and I wasn’t feeling my most spritely. Also, Jess was taking a nap, so we certainly didn’t have her approval. Nonetheless, my family hurried off to the town office to sign up me, my cousin, and my dad.

Jess has always hated running, but this year she discovered that if you run with a friend, it’s actually kind of fun. It was her first race ever, and she was super nervous. Luckily, it was only two miles, and I promised her she’d be okay. We’d run together the day before and on a training run, she pretty much tired me out.

Well, the next morning, off we went. The course was a one-mile out and back, pretty much completely flat. The field was not particularly competitive, I’d say, and I won the women’s race. Jess won her age division and so did my dad, which was kind of hilarious. My aunt was so so so excited and proud of us. They have just moved to Irvington and don’t know many people, so she kept saying, “People are going to be wondering who those Littles are! Now they’ll know us!”

Anyway, it was pretty fun, and much less serious than my racing experiences in Finland. A good confidence-booster – I was completely surprised to be able to run at all! Now, back to the stuff that matters…. skiing!

Bringing home the hardware. I repped the GRP but of course nobody knew what it was or really cared.

Me, Jess, and Emily. Bestest cousins ever!

Today we had some classic races in Muonio. For the women, it was just 5 short kilometers, and Petra Majdic won by almost twenty seconds. Ida had an amazing race though, finishing 25th, and Hannah was 56th, sandwiched between Liz Stephen and Morgan Arritola. Lauren and I were pretty close to the bottom of the results sheet, but…. oh well.

In the last two races I’ve learned that it’s much more important to ski well than ski hard. Hopefully I can do that tomorrow and end up a little higher up the results sheet. BKL skiers, take note!

I spent most of the men’s race outside taking photos, so thought I’d share some of the best. I overexposed a few of them, which looks cool, but don’t get any ideas – it is gray, gray, gray in Muonio! Click any of the photos to enter the gallery, and then click it again to see full-size.

It took me a while to figure out that the blank was supposed to be an "N".

When we were leaving for Finland, we were pretty afraid that we were going to be terribly bored over there in the great white northland. After all, we were going to be essentially doing a four-week training camp – longer than any of us had ever done before. How could we keep from getting bored in the long hours of complete darkness we were imagining?

We loaded our luggage with books. The boys brought movies on external hard drives; the girls brought yarn to make hats, mittens, and socks. And we girls brought one more secret weapon, too. We brought our scrabble letters.

This was clearly a losing effort - the extra letters are scattered around the outside.

You don’t need a board to play scrabble. There are a bunch of different other games you can play. We checked on wikipedia, and some of them are way too complicated or intellectual for us. We stick to “speed scrabble”, which occupies us pretty well. Like many speed games, it’s completely addicting, and we all want to keep playing until we have that perfect board. Unfortunately, I think it gets us a little too excited before bedtime….

Now, this one must be Lauren's. She always makes long, "good" words rather than short, easily re-arrangeable ones.

Here’s how you play. Each player starts with seven letters. All the other letters are face-down in the middle of the table. When you say “go”, everyone turns over their seven letters and starts trying to make words in their own little scrabble-crossword world. As soon as you use up your letters, you say, “Pull!” and everyone takes one more letter, regardless of whether they still have any left or not. And so on. Sometimes you can get really behind with five or ten extra letters you are scrambling to work in. Or sometimes you just get on a roll, building more and more words off of each other and re-arranging two- and three-letter words as you draw new letters. The first person to finish when there are no more letters in the middle of the table wins.

A nicely organized board, this one.

Sometimes you draw a “Q” two turns before the end, and then you’re pretty screwed. And because you aren’t sharing the board with others, if you don’t have vowels, well, you can’t do much about it. Lauren once drew 5 “E” tiles in a row. But… games go so quickly that you’ll always get another chance soon. It’s really addicting. Hannah’s almost as addicted to it as she is to knitting and melatonin. Just kidding about the melatonin. Not about the knitting though.

We’re psyched to be exercising our brains at least a little bit.

Ida leading her quarterfinal heat up the second hill. In the next shot, she turns around to check on the size of her lead...

Did you hear? We had our first race on Sunday, a classic sprint here in Muonio! It was a pretty interesting experience. We’re used to having bizarre sprints to start the season off after last year’s 6-minute, point-to-point extravaganza in West Yellowstone, but Muonio took things in the opposite direction. The races were only 780 meters long for women and 1110 meters for men, and indeed started and ended in different places. They also included some sharp corners (in the men’s race, I think they skied around a branch in the snow at the far point on the course) and a sharp downhill turn leading into the finishing stretch.

Personally, I think I forgot how to race, because I really didn’t go fast in the sprint! I also put my pole between my skis going around one of the sharp corners and struggled not to fall down… always a good feeling when the course is lined with European coaches watching you. I didn’t make a good name for America, I’m afraid.

Ollie cheering for Ida.

Luckily, not everyone was as silly or clumsy as me. Ida killed it in the qualifier, finishing second, and Hannah and Pat would have been in the heats too if they had run a full schedule. But because of the cold and the narrowness of the course, the organizers opted to do 4 heats of 4 instead of 5 heats of 6, so Hannah and Pat got to sit the afternoon out after all.

Which meant we all got to cheer for Ida as she cruised through the heats. Yay Ida!

Ida outsprinting a Kazakh girl in her semifinal heat.

It was fun to watch all the heats – there were some really good skiers, and the women’s final came down to a toe-slide. But it was cold. Really cold. I decided to take portraits of my teammates defending themselves against the cold. Here’s the series.

Lauren

Hannah

Ollie

Moni!

Big Dilly