Playing Hard to Get

Sanville's thoughts on running:

This next bit is going to sound a little, or even maybe a lot like bragging. In some ways it is, but really I’m just trying to tell a story here. So, if you don’t want to hear about it, then don’t read any further. You have been forewarned.

Anyway, all that aside, this story starts at the beginning of this school year with the Lobster Run. Every year Bowdoin hosts, for its students and faculty, a little 2-mile fun run/race followed by a lobster bake. My freshman year I ran with my new found friends that I had met three days previously on our pre-orientation kayaking trip. This year however, I decided to run it with the ski team.

Now, I’m a pretty good runner. I ran both track and cross country in high school and posted some times that I’m more than a little proud of. I’m not as good as I used to be, mostly because I’ve just been training for skiing, but, though it has never been tested, I’m fairly certain that I still have a relatively high VO2 Max. Consequently, I decided to go out and compete in this Lobster Run, just to see how I would do. So, we all found our spots on the starting line, the ski team uniquely visible because of our heart rate monitors (I received more than a few “Go Nordic!” cheers during the race for what I’m pretty sure is precisely that reason), and when the gun went off, I booked it across Farley Fields and into the woods.

To make a short story shorter, I did pretty well. I ended up in second place, being beaten out in a sprint to the finish (surprise, surprise), and to my own smug satisfaction, housing all of the freshmen running recruits for the cross country team. I ran a good race. However, because the cross country team staffs the event, my race did not go unnoticed. As soon as I crossed the finish line, before I even had a chance to collapse to the ground and ponder why I do this kind of thing to myself (a time-honored running tradition), an upper classman friend of mine on the cross team materialized in my post-race tunnel vision and said that I should join cross country. I grunted as I went past him on my way to the ground.

However, my cross friend was not an isolated incident. For about the next three months, anytime I ran into or by a cross country runner I knew, they attempted to recruit me for the team. Sometimes the kids I didn’t know would tell me that I should join. Scott Longwell cajoled, pleaded, bargained, and once tried bribe me into joining. I think one runner in my Shakespeare class thought he could surprise me into joining. He would make small talk about whatever, then out of nowhere, BAM! “You should join cross!” Colman even talked to me twice, both times about how I should join the team.

Not going to lie, I kind of enjoyed the attention. It was nice to feel wanted and for a short while I vacillated on the issue. However, in the end I decided cross country and track just weren’t for me. You see, I’ve been there before, and at best it could called a love-hate relationship, or maybe more accurately a hate-love-hate-loath relationship. It wasn’t something that I really wanted to do in college again. Instead I could be perfectly happening just popping off a good race every once in a while, to show running that I might be still interested, but never to allow it to actually go anywhere. I just don’t want any long term commitment.

At this point (as usual it seems for those that have read more than one of my posts), you’re probably saying, “Great, you can occasionally run well and for once in your life felt wanted. Yep, that did sound an awful lot like bragging and before I lose interest in you singing your own accolades, what in God’s snowy world does this have to do with skiing?” Well, fast forward to now, or rather next fall. Next fall I’m going to be in Cairo, Egypt, studying Middle Eastern politics and failing to learn Arabic. Egypt, as some of you might have already guessed, is not the most conducive country in the world to Nordic ski training, a problem that has me pretty worried. However, as I recently found out, the University that I’m going to be studying at has a track and field/cross country team, and as of the last e-mail with the coach, the plan is for me to join it. In a strange twist of fate and concern over my fitness come January, I’ve decided to do in Egypt what I refused to do here, subject myself to a more than incidental relationship with running.

Needless to say, I’m worried. I don’t like this, not one bit. It’s something that I swore to myself I would never do again after four years of countless 800s, 1600s, 3200s, and 5ks of pain. Once again I’m amazed at the things that I do for skiing. I just want to be perfectly clear though, under no condition does this mean I’m going to start running when I return to Bowdoin. What happens in Egypt stays in Egypt, and once again I pledge my undying commitment to Nordic as the one and only sport in my life. Sorry cross country, but skiing is just sexier.

To back up that last statement, here's a high school photo of Sanville mid nose wipe:

Drama in Acadia

Here's Grace's account of a recent Acadia trip with Maren and Erin. Every word is true.

This is the story of how we increased our capillary densities and Maren found a new way to naturally blood dope. It started off as a beautiful sunny day in Trenton, ME, and it ended as a beautiful sunny evening in Trenton, ME.

The in-between was filled with the peaks and ocean views of Acadia National Park, and that was mostly all (along with one depressing moment, when Maren, who was aiming for 16 training hours this week, posited extending our hike, thinking aloud, “Well if we just keep walking, we will be hiking for like 8 hours. Then I would only have to do… one more hour in the next two days.”) until the end of our adventure…

As we made our final descent from the most treacherous trail known to Acadia, we were faced with the final challenge of fording a most raging, stormy, angry river (babbling brook). There were only three stones at our feet’s disposal to save us from being swept away into the river and over the Niagara Falls of Acadia (serene pond). As we approached the crossing, Maren looked across the void and, pointing to some distant cyclists, shouted, “Follow the bikers!” As she bounded towards the river’s edge, she exclaimed, “This will be fun!” Famous last words.

She launched herself onto the first rock smoothly, without incident. Brief success. She launched again, following her frog-like instincts, but this time did, success was fleeting. In a blur of flailing limbs, she slipped on rock number two. Luckily, at the same moment, a pot-gut (please see Wilson’s earlier post), the only one left in Acadia after the ice storm of ’98, saw the drama unfolding, and leapt to Maren’s rescue. Maren’s left shin, sadly, landed in the pot-gut’s mouth, on his single remaining canine, puncturing the aforementioned shin. The result was a deep wound that bled profusely on contact. But the wound was a minor sacrifice, considering the pot-gut had successfully saved Maren from being swept away over the deathly falls. Miraculously, she had managed to hook her right hand around rock number 3, and, with a push from the pot-gut, in his final hours of life, and a bid of farewell, (his exact words were, in Native pot-gut, which Grace picked up during her Kenyan travels, “it’s not your time, your ski team needs you.”) Maren pulled herself to shore.

Erin and Grace quickly and safely bounded across the flat, anchored stepping stones, and prepared to use their WFR and CPR skills to arrest the bleeding and dress the wound. A ruined white sock, a Nalgene of water, and a single Band-Aid later, the leg was saved. Maren began to recover. Erin, however, was not fazed in the least, as the thought of our post-hike ice cream lingered in her frontal lobe. Onward, she urged. As soon as our feet hit the gravel of the carriage trail, we were off and running, with only the game of Contact, and Maren’s will of steel (and a few attempts at “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by Grace and Erin) to fuel us towards our awaiting chariot. Just minutes later, we had cones and banana-chocolate shakes in hand. All was well.

THUNDER!!! (or The Point of Saturation)

Here's Sanville's first epic post of the summer. Please note that I don't condone the approach to training that Chris outlines here, non-alcoholic beverages notwithstanding; however, I do appreciate his ever-improving storytelling skills.

For those of you who are avid followers of the Bowdoin Nordic Ski Blog, you may remember a short piece I wrote last summer entitled The Boomerang Effect. For those of you who aren’t, The Boomerang Effect, in short, chronicles an interesting phenomenon that I’ve observed every time I hop on a bike during summer training. The sky looks calm, placid, and inviting as I leave my house, but right as I arrive at the furthest possible point away from my home on the route, out of nowhere a huge anvil head swoops in and I’m suddenly caught in a Class 5 thunderstorm with enough rain to make people wonder whether or not to start building the ark. Interestingly, though, as soon as my tire crosses the threshold to my garage again, after being soaked for a good hour or so, the storm leaves again with rapidity equal to that with which it came. This is the upgraded, summer of 2010, sophomore-becoming-a-junior version of that essay.

Before I begin this story, which I promise is actually about training at some point, I need to preface with a recounting of my night (and really morning) last night. This past weekend is reunion weekend at Bowdoin. For alums, Reunion Weekend is when a whole bunch of you come back to Bowdoin, live in college housing, and party in ways that would have had you suspended while in school and would now cause you to lose your job, family, and any shred of dignity you still possessed had you done it anywhere but on Bowdoin campus. For the students still remaining on Bowdoin campus, those either working there for the summer, or staffing Reunion Weekend itself, Reunion Weekend means a plethora of free, tasty, and obviously non-alcoholic beverages available on campus. So, despite knowing that I had to do a four hour OD the next day in order to make hours this week, I decided to stay up with the random people I had met the day before and drink all kinds of free, tasty, obviously non-alcoholic beverages with them.

Unfortunately, these beverages were so tasty and so readily available, that I drank a lot of them. The people I was hanging out with were really cool, and somehow we ended up in what I think was an apartment on what I think was Federal St., a good hike from campus. Despite how sleepy free tasty non-alcoholic beverages make you, especially when your belly is full of them (you know how when you eat a lot and kind of get a food coma? It’s basically the same thing), we were having so much fun quietly chilling and being upstanding citizens of Brunswick that I didn’t end up going to sleep until somewhere in the vicinity of 5:30am literally as the sun was rising.

I woke up four hours and twenty some minutes later, psyched to get my OD started. Knowing I had an OD the next day, I fortunately had had the foresight to hydrate the previous night and had downed three Nalgenes of water before I went to sleep. I went to the bathroom to empty my bladder and approximately ten minutes later I was ready to leave the house. Unfortunately, a sock and several buttons from my shirt had mysteriously vanished during the night. Equally disfortunate, it was pouring rain outside and I had a long walk back to my dorm. I found an umbrella, left a note about borrowing, walked out the front door to what, despite utterly failing to hook up with anyone the night before (not from lack of trying, I assure you), would be the most epic walk of shame of my life, a walk of shame of such insane proportions that I defy the rest of you Bowdoin College skiers to top it.

It was not merely the distance, the disheveled shirt and pants, missing buttons, missing sock, or the hair sculpted during the night by my pillow and dried sweat into a shape only taken seriously in Japanese anime that made this walk of shame so epic. It was not the pouring rain and the girly lime green umbrella with uniquely ugly floral patterns. Nor was it the dozens of hung over alums I would pass on my way through campus, some just a few years older than me, others older than my grandparents, all packing their cars to leave. These were all just ingredients for a pretty good walk of shame. No, what made this walk of shame truly astronomically epic was that as I walked up Federal St. and crossed the drive way to the President’s House, Barry Mills was pulling out in his car, dressed to spades. He stopped to let me by. I smiled and waved at him, and he in return nodded, the faintest hint of a grin playing at the corners of his mouth. I returned to my room in Appleton, made a quick bowl of oatmeal, strapped on my rollerskis, and set out for my four hour OD.

The workout itself was pretty uneventful. By the time I started the rain had reduced itself to a sprinkle and a few minutes in stopped altogether. Things went well. To my amazement, I felt pretty good despite the activities of the night before - until I was about three hours in that is. I decided to do a big loop with a few detours, going all the way out to Mere Point, coming back, and taking Maquoit Bay Rd. to Bunganac and then whatever it turns into until it merges with Pleasant Hill Rd. I was pumped to nail those hills on Pleasant Hill Rd on my way back and make this workout worthwhile, but as I came to where it merged, it started raining, hard. A few minutes later it started pouring. Then it started deluging. A little while later I started hearing thunder and just as I was coming out of the shelter of the woods to the high, farmed, open area along Pleasant Hill, I started seeing flashes of lighting.

Being the sensible person I am, I decided to pull off to the side of road and wait out the storm. I was kind of asking for it, being soaked and all with semi-metal poles attached to my wrists and an all-metal aluminum water bottle attached to my back. However as I drank some water and ate a vanilla bean flavored GU (you know, why not?), I swiftly began to realize that waiting out the storm was not an option. It was still raining ridiculously hard and I was soaked to the point where water just rolls of you, the terminal velocity of being wet, if you will (saturation?). Within minutes I was freezing, and finally deciding that I was more likely to die of hypothermia than lightning, I hit the road again.

As this point I invented a new workout that I like to call Lightning Sprints. What you do is you find a group of tall trees alongside road and wait there until you see lightning. As the thunder booms over head you sprint as fast as humanely possible through an exposed area to the next stand of trees, praying to God the whole time that you’re not about to get smoked. The Lightning part is actually a double entendre. Though you do them in time with the lightning, you also move lightning fast, or hopefully faster, because your body is so juiced up on adrenaline from not wanting to die. The real key is to do them with only a half hour left in a four hour workout - that way as soon as the adrenaline cools down you feel their maximum effect. The rain water in my boots also added some extra five pounds to each ski, making the rest of the workout a specific strength one as well (i.e., I specifically felt a stronger pain than normal in my legs). In that hour it was proven to me once and for all that the gods of Greek and Norse myth are solely mythical. If they were indeed existent and had any sense of pride to speak of, Zeus or Thor would have nailed me so fast on account of my sheer impudence. With my poles, water bottle, and geographic location, I was just asking to get hit (though Zeus could have been busy carousing, much like I saw many of the elder alums doing last night).

After surviving Lightning Sprints, I came to a lower area that was much less exposed. Again demonstrating the boomerang effect, almost immediately the storm stopped and the sun made a half-hearted attempt to come out. A strong wind picked up and strangely, by the time I was back at campus, I was only as wet as I would have been from just sweating. I peeled off my gear and demolished the remaining dozen or so cookies in the package my Grandma had sent me.

So, in conclusion, um, I guess, Mom, if you’re reading this, which I’m sure you are because you’re bored at work right now, save your comments, please. I understand that just about everything I’ve chronicled here reveals what you already know about me, that I make really dumb decisions. Yes, I know, staying up until 5:30am and then skiing in a thunderstorm is stupid. I’m in no way advocating for anyone on the ski team to combine those two like I did. However, I’ve behaved well for so long (doing well on finals, not going out every night of reading period, waking up early to train before work) that my propensity to do dumb things was bound to boil over in a string of bad decisions eventually. It’s just the way things work.

Happy Summer.

A Good Sign?

Grace and Maren encountered a curious sight on a rollerski last week. "It's a good sign for the season," says Grace. I'm not so sure - after all, it has the word "SLOW" on it.

Don't Go Rollerskiing?

Here's post from Wilson, enjoying the privileges of mountain living:

DON'T GO ROLLERSKIING!

Well, maybe that was a bit uncalled for. Today marked my first official training day of the 2010-11 ski season. As some, many, or most of you know right after the ski season ended I got mono and was sidelined for the next month. Since then I have been concerned about going too hard and risking getting chronic fatigue syndrome which has, in some studies, been linked to mono. Well, a couple of days ago I went for a 5 or 6 mile run and it just crushed my knees and ankles. It seems the workouts that I did this spring kept my main muscles in shape while entirely neglecting the supporting muscles. I was pretty frustrated to say the least. With few other options (except rollerskiing which seems to have gone out of style - see Nathan's previous post) I was forced into the mountains. I drove up to Alta early this morning with my mom. We got out of the car and the "summer road," the normal xc route, looked horrible - dirty and filled with chunks of ice. After just a short way up we ditched the road and headed out onto the alpine hill. After a bit of really steep skiing we were in the "Albion Basin." There was nowhere that was unskiable, and the only obstacles were tree wells and the occasional pot-gut. Beyond the occasional animal track, the only places that the snow had been disturbed were the tracks that I had left earlier. Strangely for CRUST skiing, the crusty places were actually the worst skiing; last night Alta got a dusting of new snow so most of what we were skiing was silky smooth. I figure this was probably a bit of the opposite of the hamster wheel. Toward the end of my ski I took a pretty good fall on a fast gradual downhill, and I got some nice roadrash - mostly I was thankful that I wasn't on pavement. After 2 hours the altitude (oh, and the general lack of fitness) got to me. We were a bit nervous about skiing back down, but the east facing slopes were just starting to soften up and the ski down was incredibly smooth. Basically, everyone should drop what they are doing fly, drive, or walk out here and we'll do a bit of a camp - on snow - in June. Pictures coming soon. About half way down I bumped into some people who were skinning up the mountain for some corn-skiing. They asked "you having any fun skiing on those things?"

GUESS!

Graduation 2010

Last Saturday was Graduation Day - a fine sunny day to close out the school year. We sent four seniors out into the world: Jeff, Niko, Elissa, and Matt. No photos, unfortunately - please send them along if you have any. Congratulations, all of you! This group has been the heart of the team for a long time, and they've seen the program through a coaching change and continued upward progress over the last four years. They'll be missed.