Spencer on Snow

Here's a post from Spencer describing the first of hopefully many weekends on snow in New Zealand:

As some of you may or may not know, the real reason I’m in New Zealand is because it’s winter here and that only means one thing: skiing. Unfortunately, NZ being a small Pacific island the ski culture here isn’t that big. In order to get to the one nordic ski area they have, called the Snow Farm, on Friday some friends and I rented a car and drove 4 hours inland into the mountains and camped on the side of a lake. Keep in mind it is winter here and was below freezing. In order to maximize ski time the next day I scraped my skis using the light of the van headlights on the beach we were camping on, easily the weirdest place I’ve ever waxed skis.


Since I was the only one of my friends going skiing, the next morning I woke up early and took an hour shuttle to the base of an alpine area near the Snow Farm, then hitchhiked up the 13km access road with my skis. I got picked up pretty quick by a shuttle bus coming from another town - if I haven’t it mentioned yet, everyone here is really nice. On the way up we picked up the Venezuelan national ski team, consisting only of a 23-year-old ex-rugby player named Cesar who came close to getting a slot in the 2010 Olympics as a developing country. He’s only been skiing for 3 years, so 2014 looks pretty promising. Also, McDonald's sponsors him - USSA should look into this, way more calories than that Nature Valley crap.

Anyway, once I got to the ski area I found that despite being on the other side of the world there were a fair number of familiar faces. The Koons brothers as well as couple ex-UMPI skier/coaches were there as ski instructors. The first awesome surprise of the day was that a recently graduated UMPI skier offered me a free place to stay and a ride to and from the trails. This sure as hell beat the original plan of hitchhiking back to town, camping out, and then hitching back to the Snow Farm. After getting a quick tour by the Snow Farm's resident NZ Olympian, I waxed up my classic skis and headed out. The conditions were unreal - a pretty good snow pack, and no ice anywhere. I skied on VR 45 and 50 all day with blue sky and would have worn a t-shirt if I had been doing anything but lots of easy skiing.

My second awesome surprise of the day came when I skied around a corner to find the US Nordic team cruising around a loop filming technique. I was wearing the JO bottom spandex and got some pretty good double takes from them. I pretty quickly realized that my technique showed pretty obviously that I had been skiing for a grand total of 5 minutes in the last 4 months and stopped flailing after them.

The training plan for the weekend called for as much volume as I could get in. To make things simple, I figured start out in the morning with 2 hours easy, then take a snack and go out again for as long as I could. Now I wasn’t expecting that much, not having skied in a while and having to deal with some hellacious roller ski conditions, but that first couple hours absolutely kicked my butt. After dragging myself up to the lodge and devouring some peanut butter, jelly, and cheese sandwiches. I admitted my difficulties to one of the ski instructors there. She replied, “You know we’re at about 6,000 feet elevation here?” 6,000 ft. might not be that much for some of you from out West, but for an Easterner who has spent most of the last 2 years living on the coast it made a difference. Feeling some justification for how clunky I was skiing, I went out after lunch and was able to reassemble my technique and start moving around pretty smoothly.

After skiing I helped de-fumigate some very stanky rental boots to earn a seat in the staff van headed into town. Back in town I went out to eat mountains of Indian food with some of the ski instructors. It turns out that the ski season down here corresponds pretty well with our summer vacation and that it’s manageable for a well-qualified skier earn enough to pay for a flight, rent, and food. Needless to say, I talked with the owners on Sunday and prospects look pretty good for a 2011 summer on snow.

The next day was pretty much the same: more awesome conditions, skiing with/getting passed by the USST. I managed to get in a little over 8 hours of skiing between the two days. Here are some pictures of the ski area. Sorry no pictures with/of the US team - I was too ashamed about my technique to ask them, but I’ll try next weekend.


The ski school instructors let me borrow an iron to travel wax skis. As I was waxing in the empty wax room, I looked over and noticed a bunch of nice skis leaning against the wall. Upon reading the names on the skis I came to realize that I was alone in a room with a least one pair of skis from most of the USST members. What’s more is that each pair of skis had a pair of ski ties with their first name then NZ written on it. Did I mention that I was completely alone with 4 perfectly good ski ties without my name on them in the next room over? After a long and ethically tumultuous debate in my head, I grudgingly decided against acquiring a nearly complete set of USST ski ties in one go. I saw kids fight over a single Southam ski tie at JOs. The main reason I left them was karma. I still needed to hitchhike 50 miles back to town that afternoon with a ski bag, and my legs were already fried from skiing all day which made walking any extended part of that very undesirable. I’d like to think that I made the right choice. Between the 3 times I hitchhiked this trip, I only got passed by 4 cars that didn’t pick me up, and never waited longer than 5 minutes for a ride - that’s also with a ski bag which won’t fit into a lot of the tiny cars they have here. I ended up getting back to where my friends were going to pick me up an hour early and took probably the most scenic nap on the side of the road imaginable.


It was a pretty awesome trip to say the least, and I should be able to go back most weekends through mid-September.

Part II: The Best Weekend EVER!!!

Here's Part 2 of Sanville's post from last week:

I know that a lot of you are doing some pretty cool things this summer. Maren is in Australia, Spencer is in New Zealand, Wilson is doing all sorts of kayaking, climbing, and high altitude snow skiing, and Grace is in Philadelphia (Ed. note: Which one of these things is not like the others?). In the meantime, Scott and I are still at Bowdoin, and though fun, it is really remarkable only in that it’s not home, thank God (sorry Mom and Dad, but I know for a fact that you’re thankful too). My existence here at Bowdoin is justified and paid for by my forty hours of pretty much sitting and nothing else in a windowless office on the second floor of Coles tower. Though I am ridiculously overpaid for what I do, the job’s sole requirement really is just to sit in that office. Consequently, I don’t really have a chance to do too many awesome things. Well, last weekend that all changed. Last weekend was The Best Weekend EVER!!!

Those of you who regularly follow the blog already know how Scott and I did a sick workout on Saturday, but that’s not actually the beginning. This story starts in Portland, at the Portland Pie Company. Scott, myself, and a few of our friends decided to hoof it down to Portland for some pizza, the Cabin and the Brunswick House of Pizza being notably lacking in menu items that actually taste good. Sitting there as our gum-snapping, bad hair dye job waitress laid two delicious pizza pies in front of us, I had sudden revelation, and premonition, or perhaps epiphany, that this was going to be the best weekend ever.

Taking one bite of that delicious pizza (seriously, if you’re ever in Portland, GO!), my prophecies were fulfilled - it was so good. About halfway through the meal, we started talking and decided to go see Inception, which had just come out. Inception turned out to be just as good as the pizza, though in a slightly different manner. My mind totally warped from sheer deliciousness and dream-heist-movie awesomeness, I went to sleep.

The next morning I woke up early, packed the car, woke Slongwell, and we headed out to what I already talked about in Part I (I didn’t realize that you lived in the Sugarloaf area, Emma, I will totally call you next time I’m out there). What I didn’t tell you, was that afterward we went back to the river and found a series of small waterfalls that, when you sat beneath them, gave nature-based back massages. The cool water calmed my aching muscles and the rocks still retained their heat from earlier that day, acting like warm, though not in the least fuzzy, towels. On the way home we stopped at McDonald’s for milkshakes and I indulged in a medium fries - best recovery food ever.

Early that week I had been invited to go to Canobie Lake Park with some friends I’ve met recently here over the summer. It’s an amusement park, and I had fun, but I think if I died without ever going to another one, I would die contented. On the way back they dropped me off in Cape Elizabeth, where I was going to spend a night at the Hatton’s and hang out with Erin during her precious time away from the candy concentration camp where she is working this summer.

You see, this summer Erin is working at a summer camp for the children of the rich and famous. She only has a little time off, and the weekend previously she stopped by Bowdoin on her way home on one of her short little stints away from the camp (she can tell you all about the horrors of camp some other time - this is a happy blog post). We had talked earlier in the school year about me visiting her in Cape, but it never worked out until this weekend. So, after laying plans a week ago, she picked up Scott on her way home again and I was dropped. I was fried from Canobie and Erin from camp, so we talked just a little while, had some delicious food, and went to bed.

We woke up late the next day (Monday by this point, Scott and I both took the day off), and cranked out an absolutely amazing two-hour run. Cape Elizabeth, just outside of Portland, is actually one of the most beautiful parts of Maine I’ve ever seen. We ran down by the ocean, along a beach for a while, and then up to the most-photographed lighthouse in the world.

Portland Head Lighthouse

Then we came back. I crashed again, this time on the couch, for three or four hours, until we had a delicious dinner of chili and caperese salads cooked by Mr. Hatton (thank you so much for having us, Mr. and Mrs. Hatton - we really appreciated your hospitality and food, and had a ton of fun).

And that’s really about it. That epic? I don’t know. No, actually, I do, and here’s why: We did do some pretty cool things this weekend, had some sick work outs, communed with nature, etc., but the truly epic part was just spending time with fellow ski team friends. College presents a number of really unique opportunities while you’re there, but skiing is a doubtlessly individual experience within that range of once in a life time possibilities provided in college. Traveling all over the Northeast (to New Hampshire and back) with a group of people who before you even realize it you’ve become incredibly close and attached to, eating cooking, napping, skiing, training with them, is so incredibly, epically fun. I believe it to be a trait absolutely individual to the Nordic Ski Team because of its size, closeness, and own strange flavors of personality. It’s what I once described to a girl I was hitting on (failure, again) as living the Nordic-Ski-Rock-Star-Life-Style. Though I’m jealous beyond what words appropriate for a public blog post can possibly describe of Spencer’s last e-mail from New Zealand, for me, skiing is really about the people. A weeny cop-out with an emotional appeal shove into it in the face of Spencer’s overwhelming snow covered New Zealand awesomeness? Perhaps, but I don’t care. So, who’s up for the Presidentials?

The People

Rock on with your Nordic-Ski-Rock-Star-Life-Style Bad Selves.

Spencer in New Zealand

From New Zealand, Spencer responds with this video and a team email entitled: What did you do this morning?

Part I: The Gauntlet Thrown (or A Whole Lot of Testosterone)

Here's the first of a two-part Sanville story - apparently the sheer awesomeness of this tale can't be contained by a single post.

The first part of this post is a direct response to Spencer’s challenge to find an interval workout cooler than the one depicted on the Isle of Skye. Normally I’m not a one-upper, or a Mario as they’re known (think about it, you’ll get it eventually, maybe), but I just can’t let that kind of challenge go unanswered, especially since I was at the Isle of Skye last summer and did intervals up this:

As proven by this picture of me with a muddy shoe after I put my foot in one of the numerous mud holes Scotland seems to be covered in:

Well all right, as some of you have already deduced from the cargo shorts in the picture, I didn’t actually run up, but I did hike it as proven by this picture of me at the top:

Which is actually a picture of my little brother, but he looks enough like me that you get the idea.

Anyway, last Saturday Scott and I set out to actually top Spencer’s interval workout. We woke up early in the morning, loaded our skis, poles, and running shoes into Scott’s small and now very stinky car and set out from campus. Eventually we arrived at our destination and ran from here:

To there:

Yep, we ran all the way up Sugarloaf. It took us about forty minutes and was certainly an interval workout, alternating from the highest ends of threshold to just below cardiac arrest. We ended up walking a lot of the steepest parts, keeping our heart rates right around 180 (for the Polaskys on the team, that’s right about the very end of threshold for those of us who fit into airplane bathrooms), but whenever the slope was greater than a 43° angle we would start running again, spiking our heart rates to just below heart attack. Not going to lie though, it’s pretty satisfying to run past people walking up Sugarloaf with their Trek Poles.

Afterward we had lunch and napped here:

And then went on a two-hour rollerski. The ski was pretty baller. It’s nice, in a painful sore calf kind of way, to be able to ski altitude bigger than a those few bumps out on Pleasant Hill Rd. It’s a whole different kind of training on actual vertical.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Wow, that is pretty sweet. I wish I did awesome things during my summer like sit in an office with no windows for forty hours a week and then run up ski hills on the weekends, but does it really top Spencer’s interval workout?” To which I respond, “No.” It is indeed pretty sweet, mysterious reader voice, but you are correct in wondering whether Spencer’s workout is indeed one-upped. Nay, it is merely on par. In order to truly show Spencer who loves suicidally painful training more, Scott and I plan on running the entire Presidential Traverse next Saturday, rain, shine, lightning, or 30-mile-an-hour wind. So yeah, um, take that Spencer.

Anyway, I’ve also decided to get a head start on the beards off a little early this year. I hope to win by Bowers-esque margins this season. I actually consider it part of training, and unless Riley and Alec have some as-of-yet undiscovered facial hair growing talent, I think I might actually have this one in the bag.

(Beard at one week two days)

Oh, and Erin says “hi!” to everyone:

TO BE CONTINUED…!

Cute Little Duckies

It's been a slow news month for Bowdoin Nordic, so I thought I'd post a photo of Emma's recently-acquired ducklings. No word on whether they're going to be pets or food, but in either case they're pretty cute.

Isle of Skye

Here's a photo from the Isle of Skye in Scotland, which Spencer visited with his family recently - he did a threshold pace workout up the road and along the cliff to the top. He writes, "I challenge anyone to find a cooler interval or summer workout." Team, are you guys going to let that stand?