Skiing Celebrities; on snow in October

I was going to put up some nice fall foliage photos, but this is much more important. It's been a goal for me since my Junior year in High School to try and ski on my birthday. This year October 13th rolled around and, even though I was home in the mountains for Mid-semester break, things were just cold and rainy. Until the last few nights, that is, when a nasty Nor'easter blew in a dumped a foot of snow on top of Mt. Mansfield. Every fall I watch the webcams anxiously, and for the last 5 years I've dragged a crew of skiers up various mountains in search of October skiing. This morning Eric, Hollis, my friend Danika and I strapped the skinny skis on our backs and high-tailed it up Stowe's Toll Road to the white summit. This promised to be one of the best early snow trips ever.


The hike up was dry for the first part, but as the snow grew deeper we turned the corner and ran into a van from The Weather Channel. Not your local newscast team, the actual legit Weather Channel. We were called over by a guy named Jim Cantore, who Danika excitedly informed us was some type of TV celebrity in the weather world. News to me. He introduced himself and asked us to ski back a forth a little bit between two lift towers as the were "Desperate for some B-roll footage".


Needless to say it was incredibly nerve-wracking to be putting on real skis and taking our very first strides of the season on national television, but we figured the general public wouldn't have much idea what we were doing anyway. Jim thanked us afterward, and immediately we tried to get in touch with anyone who was near a TV, as we were told we would be on TV within the hour. My roommate Ryan was watching and confirmed that he did see us. After the excitement of our 4 seconds of fame, we were even more pumped to ski. We reached a nice flat spot and packed out a 200 meter loop that included some turns, a small climb and descent.

It was about as perfect as you could ask for in October; the snow packed into a solid track for skating, and we made a set of separate classic tracks to switch on and off.


We were far from the only people up there, but we were the only Nordic skiers we saw; the first skating and classic strides in the East? Maybe. Definitely the only ones on television in October. Apparently our skiing wasn't scenic enough to make it onto the re-released web-version of the clip, where they used some 'piner bro instead. Still, you can watch Jim's segment on Stowe HERE, the front-page story on weather.com

Testing week, complete

We finished up our dryland testing week on Sunday with an excellent classic roll through the North Country. While overall our team averages appear to have declined some there were several notable records broken, mostly by Leah Hart who looks exceptionally strong right now. Leah broke every record we have except the St. Regis time trial which she ran in 37:52 (record is held by Kalie Dunn'08 37:07) still an excellent time given the very wet muddy condition of the trail. Leah broke her own Double Pole record by nearly a minute at 9:30, the only woman on the team to ever go under 10 minutes and shaved 5 seconds off the no pole skate record now at 9:13. In the 3000meter on the track she is the first woman on the team who is not on the XC running team to go under 11minutes posting a time of 10:53. Other notable results were Kelsey with a time of 38:50 up St. Regis and a 3K of 11:55 both solid improvements over last year.

For the men Adam broke the double pole record by 5 sec, now at 7:42 and also took the win in the no pole skate test. Kyle won the 3K in 9:56 which is his first sub 10min result on this test and only 13 sec off the record held by Angus McCusker'01. Steve took the win up St. Regis in a very respectable time of 31:03, less than 2min off the record of 29:21 held by Tom Lepesquer'07.

Europe is fun

SLU-SKI greetings from Spain...

I just thought that everyone should know that I just bought a plane ticket to the land of fjords, Petter Northug, woolen sweaters, and the birthplace of nordic skiing. That's right, if you haven't yet figured it out, I am going to NORWAY! Tickets were unbelievably cheap--something roughly equivalent to $40 american--so we jumped on the opportunity. Though there probably won't be much snow, if any, as we're going in November, the trip will be a once in a lifetime opportunity. And hey, maybe I'll even pass by Northug, or Bjørgen, or the Sausage somewhere in the streets Oslo.

Hopefully training and fall is treating everyone well. Ski fast.