Ski to Hallowell

The forecast this morning said "100% chance of rain."
The forecast was right.
A perfect day for our annual ski to Nat's house in Hallowell - 26 miles.
Fortunately, there was a vast spread waiting for us, courtesy of Naomi Schalit (Nat's mom) - a massive pot of chili, rice, salad, and a high class lentil dish for the vegetarians. Nice warmup for post-race tailgating this winter.
What a great way to end a week of training - thanks Naomi!

Skiing in the Rain

We're not building arks here in Brunswick, but we're getting close. A little rain never hurt anyone, though, so today we did a long pace workout on the Woodside/Bunganuc loop (by "we" I mean "the team and Ollie" - someone had to take pictures). No frowns, no whining - everyone jumped right in.

Here's Shem, burning it up - at least, I think this is Shem.

At least one of the coaches still has some street cred.

Nick and Wilson - easy cooldown rolling.

A half-drowned team wrapping it up at Maquoit Bay.

Elissa's Fall Break

Elissa just came back from her fall break abroad:

I spent most of my time in Switzerland in the mountains, and I am happy to say that I have now been on snow twice! I mean, running through snow is not as exciting as skiing on it but at least snow is involved. I went running on back roads and into small villages and even got stuck in a few cow herds! I went running in the evenings, so generally I would find myself on the same roads as the dairy cows being brought in to the barn at night. Pretty cool, especially because Swiss cows have really, really, big cowbells on them and you can hear a group approaching at a distance. I also got to go hiking near a glacier, but sadly I could not see the glacier because it was super foggy and rainy that day.

As far as training goes back here in Italy, I'm up to about 6.5 to 7 miles a day running and I exergenie most nights and do core when I can. Although I am taking five courses, I don't have a ton of homework (excluding studio time, there is always lots of studio work to do) so I am free in the evenings to do core work (even if my roommate laughs at me from time to time). Niko visited me two weeks ago, and we got to go running all the days he was here. It was really nice to see a familiar face and to have a training partner. He seems to be doing really well and is weight lifting a lot back in Copenhagen. I'm sure he is going to be fast this year. Anyway, I took him on my usual morning route, running through the city and up to Piazza Michelangelo and around the Arno (about 5 miles) and suddenly, because I was showing it to Niko, I remembered how beautiful it all really is...running across the bridges over the Arno as the sun is rising and then standing in Piazza Michelangelo under the copy of the David certainly doesn't suck.

I can't wait to hear about Thanksgiving Camp, and I hope that everything goes well!

First Month

We've been training as a team for just over a month now - it's been a good month. I'm thrilled with how the team looks - they've done a great job of executing the training and everything else. If things continue the way they're going, it's going to be a great season.

We wrapped up this week with a long classic rollerski that included some specific strength work. Today was a perfect day for working on little technique adjustments, and Ollie and I kept up a steady nagging for most of the workout. The changes are coming along - we'll be a much sharper team by the time we're on snow. People showed remarkably little fatigue from yesterday's bounding intervals at Pineland - we tested out a new workout, a hybrid session with several minutes of moosehoofing at threshold before finishing with a kick up to VO2max pace. It was a surprisingly hard workout, and the wet weather we've had made it tougher, but everyone handled it really well.

Speaking of Pineland, here are some photos from last week's XC race, courtesy of Nick:

Colman ran through the background and ruined this perfectly good shot of me.

Scott's had a great season - he's had some breakthrough races and is running fast enough to make the top 7, which extends his season by another 2 weeks. This is both good and bad.

The last hundred meters of Maren's season - good to have her back with us.

Focus Change

Lots of things changing in the last few days. We turned the clocks back last weekend - daylight is scarce in the afternoons now. Fortunately, we're moving into a new period of focus in our training - we're transitioning from threshold work to VO2max work, accompanied by a lower total training volume. Tuesday was our first VO2max session - skate intervals on Highland Road, the biggest hill we can find that's close to campus. We'll expand our boundaries in the weeks to come, but Highland will remain a great bread-and-butter location for our VO2max intervals. This is a fun time of year - everyone's excited to start going hard after we've been holding back for so long. We'll still keep in touch with threshold training, though, with some hybrid sessions and an occasional pace workout.

We're also into a new strength training phase - like last year, we're now finishing our max strength workouts with rollerski sprints. The new hockey arena is almost finished, so we have a beautiful new parking lot to ski in - perfect for sprints. Small groups of athletes skiing in circles also provides a good opportunity to work on technique. We're getting into some very productive training right now - it's an exciting time of year.

No pictures lately, but here's a Lobster Roll video that Ollie put together:

Duelathon 08

The 8th Annual Jenex/Patagonia Duelathon is in the books. We had a good turnout - 45 racers, mostly from Bates, Colby, and Maine Coastal Nordic. Nat once again led the race on the pace bike - he wisely chose a mountain bike this year. Colby racers Wyatt Fereday and Matt Briggs quickly broke away from the back, joined by Sylvan Ellefson of Bates. Fereday came into the transition with a slight lead, but his slow rollerskis quickly took him out of contention, and the race turned into a duel between Briggs and Ellefson. After a few kilometers, they settled into an easy cruising pace and waited for the sprint (this was fortunate for Nat, whose bike was apparently was stuck in the granny gear or something - he struggled heroically to stay ahead of the leaders). Ellefson pulled away in the final uphill sprint to take the win, with Briggs close behind and Bates's Sam Evans-Brown moving on the rollerski leg to take 3rd.

The women's race was less contentious - Colby's Lucy Garrec entered the changeover just a few seconds ahead of teammate Kathleen Maynard and Kirsten Gill of Bates, but a quick transition and a blistering rollerski leg gave her the win by a wide margin, with Maynard cruising to a second place finish. Bates's Megan McClelland won a three-way sprint with teammates Natalie Ruppertsberger (skiing as a team with Ingrid Knowles) and Caitlin Curran to claim third.

Our team did a nice job of pulling the event together, and things went pretty smoothly. We were also lucky to have help from Bowdoin alumni Danielle and Ryan Triffitt '97 and ski team parents Sue Crawford and Betsey Shepard. Thanks to all of today's racers, and to NENSA for providing bibs. Thanks in particular to sponsors Patagonia and V2/Jenex, who donated great prizes for today's event. Without their support, this race wouldn't continue to exist.

Full results here.

XC NESCACs

The XC team competed at the NESCAC Championships at Pineland today. We brought a group down to watch the races and do a long run. It was a beautiful day for a race or a workout, and we had a great time cheering on the runners. The women finished 6th (Courtney 36th, Maren 114th), while the men were 7th (Colman 16th, Scott 57th). Pretty solid showings in such a tough conference - the D3 national rankings for XC are loaded with NESCAC teams.
Women's Results
Men's Results