Archive for March, 2010

I was hoping to have some pictures to post of the racing so far, but I forgot to bring the cable to connect my camera to my computer, so I guess not. Anyway, here’s a little update from Maine, pre-sprint.

Ten of us, plus Pepa, are crowded into a five-bedroom house. There’s a lot of room-sharing, and I am living on a futon mattress in the laundry room, which turns out to be unheated (leave the door to the rest of the house open, or else your water bottle will freeze overnight like mine did). We have no internet and no cell phone reception, so we’ve been doing a lot of reading and watching terrible TV. My favorite show that we’ve found so far is “Ninja Warrior” and its accompaniment, “Unbeatable Banzuke”, which are Japanese and basically entail making contestants complete obstacle courses by running on logs, jumping on things, climbing ladders, etc. Usually they fall into a pool of water or have spectacular crashes on unicycles or stilts. It’s kind of funny to watch and makes me think that Japan might be a really strange place…

Luckily all of the lodges at the ski venues have internet, and we spend a lot of time there. For instance: this morning we arrived at the venue at 7:30. The sprint starts at 10. I’m pretty sure our whole team was here before most teams’ coaches even arrived! With ten of us to wax skis for, though, Pepa stays really busy and we need to give her plenty of time and help out with testing. So far we’ve all had great skis, which is quite impressive for a one-woman coaching staff – that’s probably part of the reason that Pepa was just named NENSA coach of the year!

I didn’t race the marathon on Wednesday, opting instead to help Pepa test skis and do the feeds. It was fun to watch and cheer for everyone – marathons can be pretty crazy and a lot can change over 30 or 50 kilometers. I learned that there is a definite technique to handing out feeds, and by the end I think I was doing a pretty good job of holding the bottles by the top so there was the least amount of spilling. It was interesting to see people’s different strategies: a few of the CXC guys even ate bananas out there! We stuck to various mixes of gatorade, flat coke, and coffee – the skiers never knew exactly what they were getting.

I think it was good I sat out the marathon because yesterday I felt terrible in the 7.5k. As has happened so many times this season, I felt okay in the beginning of the race (I even managed to avoid getting tangled in at least 3 crashes that happened in front of me), and then it was remarkable how quickly things turned bad. By 2.5k I was somehow completely bonked and most of the field had streamed by me. I dropped out of a race for the first time in my life, ever. While I had known that I probably wouldn’t do great in these races, I wanted to do them for fun – and yesterday, I was NOT having fun. It was frustrating but I’m trying to stay positive that at least one of the next two races might be fun.

The silver lining here, though, was that I got to see my teammates finish! Ida’s second-place finish was absolutely incredible and so exciting to watch! Go Ida! And then to see Hannah in 13th with a great race of her own, and Lauren and Kaitlynn in 37th and 39th, wow. I might have had a pretty bad day but they all did great. It was very cool.

We’re all excited for more racing on the fast, icy course today. I should probably go test my skis again so Pepa doesn’t yell at me!

So I was figuring I’d wait and do a final blog post on my Estonia trip once I’d downloaded my pictures.  But unfortunately my camera was in my ski bag and I don’t think I’ll get it for at least a few more days, so I’ll give a quick update on the end of the trip sans photos.

High Points:

• The sprint race last Saturday: it was the one really sunny day of the trip, which always makes me happy.  And I had a good race!  I missed 3 out of 10, which isn’t great, but its pretty good for me, and I came in 38th.  I skied much more consistent splits too, and I finally felt like I was beginning to figure out this whole racing-in-Europe thing.  And did I say it was sunny out?
• Eurosport came to the weekend races. It was crazy! While we were hanging out at the hotel the morning before our race, we got to watch the boy’s races LIVE on Estonian TV! It was SO cool!
• I had fun doing the pursuit on Sunday, even though I missed 11 shots.
• On my last lap of the pursuit, most of the coaches from other countries had cleared off the course, since their skiers had finished.  But there were a few still out there, and this one guy yelled at me in some sort of Eastern European accent: “It is not so bad! I like, I like!”  It reminded me so much of Pepa, I just had to smile and go faster.
• I had fun getting to meet some skiers from other countries at the bar Sunday night.
• On my way home, I got to see the city of Stockholm, and got a free night at an airport hotel and a free gourmet dinner!
• I made it home eventually!

Low Points:

• I had been really psyched for the pursuit, and for being able to ski around other girls during it.  But then I missed 11 shots, which put me pretty out of the competition…
• On the way home, my layover in Stockholm was only an hour, and my bags couldn’t be checked through because the airlines I was using didn’t have a baggage agreement.  Then my flight got in a bit late, and by the time I’d claimed my bags and found the check-in line 20 minutes before my next flight, they told me I was too late.
• The next flight I could get was 24 hours later.  So I stayed in Stockholm for the day, which wasn’t too bad, I as noted above.
• My flight the next morning from Stockholm was canceled. So they routed me through Copenhagen first, and then to Newark.  In Newark, my bags didn’t come and I had missed my flight to Burlington.  So I waited in lines for 4hours, then another few hours to get a later flight.
• My bags still aren’t here.  The rifle got detained at customs in Newark, which I can’t call until Monday, and they won’t give me my ski bag until the rifle gets released.

Despite the traveling on either end though, it was a great trip!  And maybe when I finally get my bags I’ll put up some pictures.

Really, I can feel myself getting geekier by the post.  If I’m writing too many, please someone try to stop me, or check me in to blog rehab or something!  But I figure that I should write blogs now when I have a bit more to write about, and then I’ll cut back down on them when I get home.

But at any rate, yesterday we had a relay race so I thought I’d give a quick update on that.  I’ve given up on posting photos until I get back.

The relay was fun!  I skied the third of four legs, but I started off right with a group of girls  and was able to ski with them, and even passed one or two! Then I cleaned the first shooting, and it was sweet!  The feeling of coming into the range with a group and then leaving ahead of them is pretty exhilarating!  After that I got a bit more tired, and the standing shooting didn’t go as well.  I had to use all three of my extra bullets, and then still had to do one penalty.  I should explain here that in a biathlon relay, you get to shoot one regular clip, and then if you miss any you have 3 extra bullets that you hand-load to try to knock down all of the targets.  If you still have targets standing, you do penalty laps.  So you really want to not have to do any penalty laps.  The winning teams had no penalty laps and only used a few spare rounds. In the end, we ended up 9th out of 11, but we had been ranked 10th, so at least we moved up a spot!

Most of all though, it was just cool to feel like I was really competing with the girls from the other countries, even if it didn’t last that long.  It was fun!

Anyone who knows me knows two things.  One, I have blond or dirty blond hair.  Two, I’m not the hairiest kid you’ll find out there.  Really, at my age, the amount of hair I have can be a little shocking.  I have at most 6 hairs on my chest, none on my back, and very little on my face.  It’s always seemed especially strange given that my college roommate basically looked like a gorilla, but with a hairy chest too.  So it’s a bit of a sore subjucet for me.

This year I’ve been really trying to grow some more facial hair but it turns out that its really hard, not matter how hard you push, how much you water your upper lip, and how much Chia paste you rub on your cheeks.  It just doesn’t help.  And when people tell you the more you shave the thicker it gets, they’re lying.  That doesn’t even make sense.

So a couple weeks ago I decided it was time to rev the engines and really see where I was.  Now I think I could grow a pretty nasty neckbeard, and I might be able to pull of a soulpatch, but the only thing I really wanted was a mustache.  Unfortuantely for me, the hair on my lip is the lightest part.  That didn’t stop me though, and for the past few weeks I’ve been letting it grow.  And I think I speak for everyone when I say, I’m looking pretty good.

Before I really get into the details of what I’m lookin at here, I want to make it clear what I was going for.  There’s a lot of different types of mustaches.  I can think of 6:

1: The Fu-Manchu.  This is a bunch of wispy strands, growing on the upper lip that are so long they hang around the mouth down to the chin.  Popular asian style.

2: The American Fu-Manchu aka the Hulk Hogan.  This is a full dense mustache on the upper lip and down to the chin, but hair actually grows down to the chin, it isn’t hanging.

3: The Adolf.  Not popular.

4: The Pushbroom.  Full dense ’stache on the upper lip only.  Commonly trimmed at the bottom.  Popular in the 80s and perfected by Tom Selleck in “Three Men and a Baby.”

5: The English Colonial.  Thick sideburns down to the jaw and into a mustache.  Basically all facial hair except the beard is shaved off.

6: The Pedro.  From Napoleon Dynamite.  This is a thin, wispy, failed attempt at a mustache.  Popularized by overgrown 8th graders everywhere.

So with this in mind, I was aiming for English Colonial.  But I knew it wasn’t in the cards for me.  One day I’ll nail it, but for now, I had to work with the ingredients I have.  And I don’t have sideburns.  So I settled for the pushbroom.  It’s pretty classic and I thought I might be able to pull it off.  With our big trip to the midwest coming up, I started not shaving for a week (which is normal) and then the night before we left, I shaved everything but the stache.  I was pleasantly surpised.  I could see it, in the right light, standing 2 feet from the mirror.  So that’s like 4 feet in real life, in the right light.  I’m still pushing hard and trying to keep it going, but here’s what I’ve found.  A good stache seems to have two main components: density and length.  I’ve got length, I think.  I don’t have the density though, and that part is hard to change.  I think I’ll keep trying though.  Eventually I’ll get the few hairs I have long enough to fold them over and make it look like more hairs.  Then I’ll be really all set.  Or maybe I’ll just set myself up with rogaine or something.  I heard that stuff can do wonders.

I’ll try to get a picture up soon, if my camera can capture it, in the right light.  or maybe if you see me you’ll be able to see it yourself.  If you’re within 6 feet.  In the right light.

Well, the ice is broken on my first international biathlon racing experience! And it was definitely an interesting one. To begin with, it was a new type of race for me, what is called an individual race in biathlon. That means that you shoot 4 times—prone, standing, prone, standing—but instead of doing penalty laps, you get one minute added to your time for each missed target. For this reason it’s known as the shooters race, since it’s highly beneficial to hit lots of targets. For the women, it was a 15k race made up of five 3k loops.
I was pretty excited and a bit nervous before my start, primarily because I was worried that I would somehow forget to do something important, or otherwise make some dumb mistake. But I zeroed my rifle and warmed up without getting too distracted by all the colorful uniforms and foreign languages around me. I was starting last in the field of 55 women, and decided that my goal was to place higher than my bib number. Secretly though, I was hoping to shoot reasonable well and actually be somewhere in the middle of the pack.
But alas, it was not to be. To begin with, the range here seems to be in a wind tunnel. Even when its not windy anywhere else, the range is windy. And I’m just not very comfortable shooting in wind. On top of that, the flurries that we’ve had pretty consistently since getting here decided to pick up into a full-fledged blizzard just in time for our race. The big fat flakes made the skiing slow too.
I skied a pretty hard first lap, trying to keep up with the girls lapping in front of me, and then missed two in my first prone shooting. Which could have been worse, I thought. I knew that everyone would be missing a lot on a day like this. But then in my second standing I did what’s called “dirtying”—I missed all 5. It was sort of embarrassing, but I also had to sort of just laugh. As I skied by the penalty loop, I was at least happy that it wasn’t a penalty lap race! After that I’ll admit it was hard to really stay super psyched, especially as I was getting passed every few minutes, and struggling along in the slow snow. 15k felt like a really long way to ski with a rifle on my back!
In the end, I finished with 11 penalties—tied for the second worst shooting in the race. I was also almost 16 minutes off the leader—meaning that I also skied and shot a lot slower than the leaders.
But with a whopping 53rd place, I beat my bib!
It certainly wasn’t the most exciting way to make my international debut, but it was definitely a learning experience! I’m definitely realizing how fast the girls are here—it’s a whole different league! And its impressive and inspiring. Its also made me realize how important it is for U.S. athletes to race over here—the level of competition is just so totally different, and its hard to comprehend that difference until you see it.
And now I have three more races to try to have some fun and hopefully improve upon this one! Really its not a bad starting place, since I can only go up from here!