Outta here.

For the next week I'm leaving behind the rain and Ithacan shades of grey for greener (whiter) skiing pastures at Mont Ste Anne in Quebec. For mine and others' sanity there'd better be snow falling here in the meantime...

As I leave, I'm reminded of perhaps the greatest moment in extreme nordic which happened at Mont Ste Anne, courtesy of great timing and Jordan's infallible style.

Back In Ithaca and a new year

Another case of clouds having silver linings...or however that saying goes.

Warm temps apparently ruined all the snow in Ithaca, so going home to LI wasn't as tragic as I might have expected. I didn't realize how long it had been since I'd gone for any sort of training ride or used the rollers...but my legs told me it had indeed been some time after a two hour mtb ride. My legs hadn't felt that heavy for a little while now. All in all, I managed to get out on my mountain bike five times (1.5-2hrs each) and the cross bike twice- riding in nothing but sand. I'm hoping this will pay some dividends when I hit the dirt next fall (and not permanently ruin my drivetrain). In any case, there's some really great singletrack on the island and it sure beats fighting SUV driving "Lawn guy land"ers for space on the shoulder.

I got back to Ithaca yesterday to see a few inches of skiable snow that had just arrived. Looks like I'm going to be classic skiing for the next few days, or at least until the thaw comes and melts it all. Weather.com predicts a high of 55 for Tuesday. Ugh.

For the upcoming road season I guess I'm going to be riding with NorEast Cycling on some kind of "elite" team. Originally I was expecting to be riding on a startup team with a friend from Ithaca College and some other cat 2's, but it seems the effort has been merged with some other cat 2's from NorEast. We allegedly get free kits, a free Orbea Opal frameset (MSRP $2100), and some serious discounts otherwise. I've heard prices to the tune of $650 for a full SRAM Force group. I'm pretty pumped about that...in what other sport can you get so many handouts for doing relatively nothing??? The team is also sponsored by two New Hampshire breweries, so I'm sure there will be associated perks of the drinkable kind. And I almost forgot about the Timberland sponsorship...I can't wait to get pair of workboots and a puffy coat. I'm thinking I'll look pretty sharp in these...

It's been a while...

...but there's nothing interesting to write about!

Let's see...skiing is good- hopefully the ample snow will continue through the winter...

Uhhhh...I've been classic skiing more, since I've been terrible at classic racing the past couple seasons (Ithaca never has snow deep enough to set decent track)

I'm going home tomorrow where I'll probably mtn bike a bunch, so that should be fun.

And yeah, possibly doing a little trip to the ADKs following New Year's for some backcountry adventure skiing with some others. I'm actually looking forward to that. Hopefully the logistics won't dissuade me in the meantime.

You'd think when I'm not racing bikes or skis that I cease to exist. Maybe that's all too true...

Blast from the past.

From such inauspicious beginnings...oh my.

First trail ski and assorted disasters.

A small (too small...) contingent of us went up to Salmon Hills to ski yesterday. I hate leaving, or even waking up early, but it had to be done...by 8:30am we were on the road en route to the juxtaposition of desirable and disgusting that is the Tug Hill plateau.

The way up was pretty uneventful, save the last 100m of the Salmon Hills driveway. Due to a long off-season, the death trap driveway was eager to claim another Cornell/Clarkson vehicle. And it did...

On the final left hand turn, my wheels lost traction and my car began its inevitable, mostly uncontrollable skid off the road, over the side, and almost into a small creek. Awesome. I tried to steer out of it prior, but the car was having none of this "driver input". Never having lost control before, I didn't think it was possible in my Subaru. We ended up 3 feet from a tree, with the car precariously poised at an extreme angle of repose. Think of the stunt cars that can drive on the two left wheels while the right ones are in the air. I feel that if the car were any higher (e.g. SUV, van) it would have flipped over and gone entirely in the creek.

With the car safely off the side of the road in its temporary parking spot, I was waiting for hordes of rally racing fans to come and push my car back on the road. That never happened. Instead, I climbed out of my window (couldn't open the door since it was trapped shut by the snow), we grabbed our skis, and headed up the lodge.

Someone had already alerted the lodge to my "distress", so a maintenance guy was ready to go with his chains and pickup truck when we got up there. Unfortunately, the truck couldn't get enough traction to make any headway on pulling me out. We had to call in the heavy machinery...

The call was placed, and I went for a short ski while waiting for "the guy" to get to Salmon Hills. I imagined "The Wolf" from Pulp Fiction was on his way to evaluate the situation:


During that time, I managed to put a chip in my Star poles as I threw them aside to practice some no-pole. Great day!

After about half an hour, some guy decidedly less awesome than Winston Wolfe but equally entertaining shows up with a backhoe. We drive down to the accident site and it makes quick work of my car. Hooked up the chains, swung the boom, and we're back on the road without a scratch or any damage on the car. $100 later, I was back skiing. Expensive little mistake. I wish I had photo documentation of it all, since it must have looked amazing.

Oh yeah, I also skated for 90 minutes and classical'd for an hour. So that was good. And it was also good that I didn't kill anyone in the car. But it made a pretty good story.

No sandbagging left.

...One less roadie cat 2 riding in a C Men's field for 'cross. Just as I was getting comfortable...

Hopefully I'll be able to make noise in the B's next year. Grass crits all the way!

First ski

For the third year in a row, my first tracks were on the astroturf in the football stadium on Sunday. Nothing like skiing in circles for 2 hours...although by the end we had a good skate lane and "mid-season conditions." The turf is innocuous to the ski if you break through, you only need 0.5" to get a decent surface, and it's perfectly flat to help with the early season lack of balance.




Yesterday was too icy to ski, but a few more inches fell overnight, so we might be good to go again. Salmon Hills is also 100% open, which most likely means a weekend trip.