Got Moxie? We do!

Here's Nick and Nat's report from last week's Moxie Festival:

This weekend was the annual Moxie Festival in Lisbon, ME. For those of you unfamiliar with Moxie, it's a soda kind of like Coke but notorious for having a weird taste. Mainers still love Moxie though, and it is made just 20 minutes from Brunswick in Lisbon. One of the events of the Moxie Festival is a 6 mile canoe/kayak race on the Androscoggin River. After finding out about it we decided to give it a shot. Neither of us have ever canoe raced before but we've both spent a lot of time paddling so we weren't sure what to expect. It was also Nat's 21st birthday celebration the night before and a good time was had by all, but perhaps too good a time by some of us. Our last and most legit excuse was the boat we borrowed was your standard plastic canoe and we borrowed some pretty basic aluminum paddles. A lot of other people showed up with streamlined fiberglass racing boats and carbon fiber bent shaft paddles.

The race started off with a strong head wind and very tough going. We had a pretty good start compared to the other non-racing boats but were quickly dropped by the fastest looking people. Once it got sorted out we were fighting it out with the "intense women team"; Bill Yeo (former Bowdoin Ski Coach) and his wife; 70 year old guy in a kayak; the old couple; and two canoe teams of middle aged out of shape guys. We thought that the two of us being young, fit athletes training 500+ hours a year should really not be hurting so much to keep up with this competition. The boat in this sort of flat water race makes a huge difference though and the 70 year old kayaker paddled away from up almost effortlessly. Eventually the wind shifted to a tail wind and the current in the river picked up to include some ripples and rocks to dodge. Nat's expert steering in the stern and some angry flailing out of me in the bow resulted in us getting away from the two canoe teams of middle aged canoeists. We tried our very best to get ahead of the other folks around us but it just wasn't happening. Finally we got in sight of the finish line but we were kind of in the back of this little group and it was a full out sprint for at least 3-4 minutes. The "intense women" looked like they would get us but an error on their part sent them pointed off towards the bank and out of the sprint. The old couple and the Yeos were still right there and although we might not be great canoeists we do know how to kick it in to a finish line. We ended up taking the sprint by no more than a boat length and getting second in our non-racing category category. Overall it was a hilarious adventure and a solid hour threshold/sub-threshold upper body workout.

-Nick and Nat

Nick and Nat post-race with their Moxie.

National Biathlon Team Camp

Here's Walt's report on the US Biathlon Team camp in Lake Placid:

Last month I spent two phenomenal weeks training in Lake Placid with old friends, and, although it’s been nearly a month since the camp ended, I promised Nathan I would recount a bit of it for the blog anyway. So here it goes…

On June 8^th I arrived at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid for a two-week camp with the US Biathlon Team. Following my results at our national championships in Minnesota and the Canadian national championships in Vancouver last spring I was named to a discretionary spot on the Senior National B team for the 2008-2009 season. I won’t be able to take full advantage of all the opportunities this spot provides this year because I’m still a full-time student, but I knew before I left that two weeks in Lake Placid with National Team and USOC staff would be an amazing learning opportunity.

The plan for the camp was to bring a large group of athletes together in order to create World Cup-like competitive environments, especially on the range. We also planned to train a lot. A lot. After a great dinner catching up with old friends that first night, I went to bed feeling both apprehension and excitement about the coming work.

The planned training for the camp called for nearly 50 hours in 13 days, more than I had ever attempted before in such a short amount of time, so I tried to prepare myself mentally for what lay ahead. The tone of the camp was established on the very first workout, though, leaving no doubt as to what the next two weeks would feel like. The morning of the 9^th we did a three-hour bike ride featuring 3 twenty-minute threshold intervals, each one a continuous hill climb with 1,200ft elevation gain. Couple that with 90 degree, 90 percent humidity type weather, and the first week became a big sweaty blur. Add the time we spent shooting on the range, and most days we were simply on the go from 8am to 5pm, with a brief interlude for eating and sleeping around lunch.

The second week seemed to be much more manageable, however, even though the training load was virtually the same. It was broken up by a great swim/run time trial (Forrest, if you are reading this, you’ll be happy to know I had to break out the doggy paddle half way through the swim), head-to-head shooting competitions, and a VO2 max test done roller skiing in the center’s physiology lab. I also got to have personal meetings with physiologists and sports psychologists from the USOC who are now working with the biathlon team. Needless to say, I learned a lot from them.

I was pretty excited once the camp was over, not only for having completed so much hard training in such a short amount of time, but also because of all the great conversations I was able to have with the other athletes, coaches, and staff about how some of the best skiers in the world are training today. At the same time, however, coming back to Brunswick was bittersweet – two weeks with nothing to do in the world but train is a pretty great lifestyle. It’s going to be tough once school starts again!

Overdistance

Here's an update from one of our incoming skiers, Wilson Dippo from Salt Lake City, UT - always good to hear from the Westerners:

Every summer seems to have its own theme. Three years ago it was just learning to train for an entire summer. Two years ago it was V2 Alternate (the majority of the park that I usually ski at is flat with slight down (which makes you feel like superman!). Last year it was running - by the end of the summer I was consistently running 50-60 mile weeks... with very little rollerskiing. This year I was trying to strike up a better balance, especially considering that on the training plan most of the different workouts have the side note - should be done on rollerskis. The summer was turning out to be just that balance, I was hitting almost all of the training goals and I was spending a good portion of that time on my rollerskis.

Two weeks ago, I went to visit family in Wisconsin, where I thought my training would really suffer; on the contrary, I ended up with even more hours than the plan called for and I found some great rollerskiing trails. Almost immediately after I returned, however, I headed off to the Manti-LaSal National forest for a four-night backpacking trip with four of my friends. On that trip we would hike for 3-6 hours each day, and on one day we did a rough 6.5 hour out and back to our high point of over 11,000 feet on a peak called Block Mountain. Two days after getting back my ski team met to ski one of the local mountains called Big Cottonwood Canyon to a teammate's cabin for brunch. About and hour and forty-five into the ski my ankle was hurting terribly so I stopped, took off my boot and sock and found out that I had the biggest blister of my life. At the cabin a friend asked if it was nickel or quarter sized. I answered... silver dollar.

I was out of Salt Lake City almost before I had settled back in, heading to Grand Teton National Park with my brother and the headmaster of my former elementary school (who also happens to be a mountain guide) the day of my ski up Big Cottonwood. We woke up the next morning at 2:45 AM to try to do the Grand in one day. I put a four layer "shield" around my blister, turned on my headlamp and headed out. By 7:30 however, we had hit the lower saddle and found it to still be totally snowed in; without crampons and heavy boots (we did have ice axes) there was no way to summit. So we headed back down and went to a more technical climb called Baxter's Pinnacle, a 5.9+. I have done almost no real rock climbing in my life, so it was a great experience for me. We got back to the car at about 4:30, which was six Clif bars, one and a half PB&J sandwiches (a squirrel got the last half), four liters of water, 6000ish feet of elevation gain, 19 miles, and twelve hours after we had started up the Grand Teton. My brother and I will get another shot at the Grand next year, but for now I think that my summer has slowed down quite a bit.

When I showed up to ski training today and recounted my three weeks to teammates, most of whom I hadn't seen in that whole time, and the rest that I had only seen on the day I skied Big Cottonwood, I realized that like all of my summers this one has a theme as well, only this time the theme is clearly overdistance. I am ready and excited to surrender to this theme for this summer. With my team we have already planned two really awful 4+ hour ODs that both include rollerskiing and running up mountains.

Let me tell you, getting up at 2:45 is way worse then any jet lag that I have ever experienced so I apologize if any of this is incoherent or if my writing sounds like I should be a high school freshman rather an incoming Bowdoin first year. I can't really make any excuses for my comma usage... I am terrible with those. Either way I am off to bed to try to catch up on the sleep that the Tetons cost me.

I hope everything is going well back East!

Rainbow Rollerskiing

Update from Nick:

After a month sea kayak camping around Casco Bay (the stretch of coast between Brunswick and Portland), I'm excited to be back on the Maine-land (hahahaha). While it was a lot of fun and reasonably active, there were limited opportunities for ski specific training. I'm based out of the University of Southern Maine in Gorham for a few weeks here and have had a good time exploring the running trails and rollerskiing roads in the area. The good news is I have a long stretch until late August without any major training obstacles.

I had a hard time getting going on my rollerski today after a long day in the computer lab and a light rain outside. I found some black powder (for those of you who don't know what this means, it's a road with really good fresh pavement) but still wasn't feeling so great and I considered cutting my hour and a half workout off short to go grab some dinner. Then as I was turning around to head in the skies opened up and there was a full rainbow and parts of a double rainbow. It stuck around for the entire ski back so I added a bit onto the end of the loop to get the full time.

Since I don't think I've ever seen a rainbow on skis before I take this to be a good sign for the rest of the summer and season. That's it for now because I still have to go grab dinner, but more updates to come!