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:
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