Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Thanksgiving Camp 2015


      Dana’s recap of a memorable week:

Well, since no one has posted in awhile, I felt I should try to update our SLU ski fans and fams. We’ve been quite busy!  Hopefully you are following us on Facebook, and Instagram! Also, I apologize if anything appears out of the ordinary as I am new to posting an actual blog on here.

The trip began the morning of Saturday, November 21 at 9am, all packed up in the van, trailer and our new “bus”, the transit.
The preparation -PC: Dana ‘18
The drive was uneventful, unless you consider all the weird, strange, and often disgusted looks, but perhaps we’ll just say they were jealous looks.., and conversations we received every time we stepped out of the vans in our red onesies for a bathroom stop. 
Overheard:
“Mommy, why are they dressed like that?
“They are dressed like Santa”

Here we are at the first stop in Canada.  Yes, they are very comfy and perfect to put on right after you ski.  PLUS, they have a butt-flap, full front zipper, and a hoodie. PC: Lizzy L ‘18

Unfortunately, when we arrived, we did not see the expected white winter wonderland as we did last year.

We unloaded in a timely fashion and if anyone looked out the windows of their houses, they were sure to see an interesting sight…an assembly of workers all dressed in red suits.

We stayed in the same house as last year, with the same spacious room and a large garage for storing skis and waxing; the girls stayed downstairs and the boys upstairs.  The coaches stayed in the neighboring house.

We went for a run as it started to get dark, scavenging for a trail that the captains had been on in previous years; to my surprise, we found it.  The guys got their traditional haircuts, and we finished the night waxing and preparing for the first day of skiing!

We put in a lot of training and luckily none of it was rollerskiing, although we did bring all of our rollerski gear just in case.  We ended up skiing everyday, except for the day we arrived and the day we left.  A little TRX and strength training were mixed in after skiing occasionally.
Lizzy ‘18 and Celeste ’19 working it. PC: Asst. Coach Liz P


A little rain never hurt anybody- smiles all around!

On Wednesday night, we went to Quebec City to go Top Karting.  No punishment was made to the slowest drivers this year, phew…If you read the blog last year, I’m sure you remember what previous SLU skier, Isaac and I had to wear.   After, we had an hour to explore and get our traditional Mcflurry’s  With new Assistant Coach Liz being unfamiliar with Quebec City, it was destiny she would get lost driving.  Sure enough, on the way out of the city, we were headed to Mount Sainte Anne’s, the completely wrong direction… Nonetheless, it will always be a fond memory of ours, with lots of swears and giggles in the back seat.  Just ask any of the girls on the team for the full recap…


Top Karting!

Thanksgiving, we skied in the morning and cooked all afternoon.  We sure missed Barb Frielinghaus’s cooking this year and the extra time she used, so we could relax.  It makes us very grateful to our parents and how much work Thanksgiving and dinners in general take!  However,  I’d say that we all did an awesome job working together to prepare healthy meals and have food on the dinner table.


The large dining room gave us room to gather for a wonderful Thanksgiving meal! PC: Liz P

On Saturday, we had the skate ski time trial with the other college teams.  The weather turned out to be really nice.  We woke up around 5am and left at 6:15 for an 8am race.  Foret closed the loop to the public until 9:30, which was very nice of them to do for us and made the time trial much more enjoyable!  I think everyone on our team endured the course very well, given that we were all pretty tired from a long week.  It was a good way to get a fast workout in and also dust the cobwebs out for the real races to come.  I heard a lot of enthusiasm and “that was so much of fun!”  We all cheered for each other, and the atmosphere felt very similar to a carnival race.  In the afternoon, we skied for about an hour and half more.  That evening we headed back into Quebec City and watched the Crashed Ice Competition hosted by RedBull: http://www.redbullcrashedice.com/event/quebec-city-0  The event was awesome to watch up-close.  The crowd was enormous and it was quite an experience to be a part of.  However, many of us did not anticipate how cold it was.  It was much colder than the first night in the city!!  Luckily, we warmed up with a quick stop to McDonalds where most of us bought chocolat chauds!  Thank goodness for Micky D’s ….






Left: The crashed course preview- two nights before the competition  Right: Crashed Ice course up close!


Here is a fun summary of the week and maybe it will leave you with suspense of some stories to be told:

20 hour training week
19 servings of burnt oatmeal (Thanks Liz)
18 times Henry asked where his phone was
17 teammates in onesies
16 place Erin P got in the 5k race
15 bags of milk used
14 loafs of bread eaten
13 seconds ranch dressing was poured into Rubens mouth
12 place Phil got in the 7.5 race
11 teams on course (mwsc, usa biat., uvm, umpi, slu, bat, col, bow, lav, mid, smc)
10 minutes of top karting time for each group
9 days total
8 boxes of energy bars attacked
7 pies consumed
6 vans of different teams klistered
5 haircuts given (Blaine, Calvin, Dustin, Ruben, India)
4 people in a cooking group
3 captains
2.5k manmade ski loop
2 coaches, 2 vans, 2 turkeys, 2 houses, 2 nights in Quebec City
1 week in Stoneham Canada =
Priceless


Thanks to Etown, Liz and the captains for putting the camp together and for driving us around all week! Good job team! Practices are now back to rollerskiing and running…do your snow dances!  We're finishing up our last week of classes and then a week of finals before winter break! We hope to see you at Craftsbury for the first Eastern Cup!