To have a great race weekend, the night before, you have to
be burned by a careless mother and on the last day, your ski coach has to
accidentally ski off with your perfectly prepared race skis. Yes, Friday night
while helping my mom apply base green klister to her skis for the Craftsbury 25k,
she touched a heat gun to the bare skin on my arm. It hurt but it was a must.
Saturday morning, we showed up at eight something in the
morning at the waxing area, a 200 sq ft patch of frozen ground walled off on
one side by college vans and on the other by ice that no one could see. Fun. I
personally got lost trying to get in and out of the area several times. But,
after making an emergency trip to the ACE to get some triple taps, everything
went smoothly. Our skiers did very well. Lewis got 4th! Max passed Tim
Reynalds! How cool is that! Tons of other people did well, but I would die of
old age before I finished listing them. Outside of the lakes of frozen ice, the
conditions were great, quite fast to say the least.
That night at the team dinner, we had a blast. Max got
ambitious with the nail polish and showed off his feminine side. Jacob got a
haircut from Julia. What else is needed, other than Lewis giving us his daily
routine down to the minute. The food was great, mostly due to the fact that it
was an all you can eat buffet of simple comfort food. Everyone who spoke, by
the way, did a great job.
If you thought that the first day went really well. Umm… the
second one didn’t… at all. For some people, they might have personally done
well, but I saw some solid chaos. However, I think that the chaos is what builds
character and makes us so resilient and in the end is why we have such a good
time, even while hell is freezing over. So we arrived at the same place on day
two. Some of the ski waxers were doing pushups but that wasn’t a huge problem.
I noticed that something was wrong when everyone was talking and no one could
even hear anything I had to say over the commotion. I am used to that, though,
being a quiet person from a somewhat loud (major understatement) family. It
started to get a little bit tense when some of the skis weren’t ready quite as
early as people wanted. However, all the J2’s made their start.
It was tough later also. There was a group of us who were
watching from inside of one of the turns, and one of the things that we noticed
that the skiers were using a more unconventional way of descending around the
first turn. We saw a lot of snow plows. In my head, I was thinking “Oh we don’t
need that snow. Yeah, just push it under that fence where we can’t use it.
Thanks.” Luckily, no one from CSU did a snow plow (or that I saw). The snow
plows told us about the conditions better than any words could. When we got out
there to warm up, we were on the trickiest course by far. Everyone had plowed
it clean and everyone had somehow hidden the ice, so you would be stepping
along the berm entering the turn, and then almost eat it as it turned to ice.
Not fun.
For me, the race was trickiest twelve minutes before my
start. My black Fischers, which of course, no one else has, went missing. Ten
minutes to go, Doro, Gunther and Julia came to the rescue and offered up a pair
of skis that they had prepped for the race but hadn’t used. I didn’t want to
use someone else’s skis, in fear that I would damage them on the perilous
course, but my only other option was my enormous practice skis, so I took the
offer. I tested the skis and I didn’t need to add wax. How perfect was that. I
made it to the start with plenty of time. The only shock to me was how fast
they were. After about five double-poles, I almost landed on my back as the
skis slid out from under me. In the end, the race went well. The kick was good.
More of the course was in the sun than I thought, so it wasn’t perfect, but for
receiving them within ten minutes of the start, they were great. Afterwards,
the skis were found. Guess who had them. ROB. King Rob had grabbed the skis to
use to ski out on the course, and he never notices that my name was written
on them. He never saw my name on the work order stickers. No. It wasn’t until
he was looking at the tv screen that I was able to see the name on them. When I
pointed it out to him, he looked like I had just slapped him. His expression
was a mix of confusion and pure terror. Needless to say, he will be doing
pushups for life.
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