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.