King and Queen of the Mountain - Greylock Style

Sunday, October 20th was the Greylock Rollerski Race! This year the race was held on the North Adams side of the mountain. Very steep for the first couple of miles and a little shorter overall, but quite brutal and it was a great training day. The race came after a tough week of intensity training and a 5 hour run on Mountain Day, so there were some tired legs, but great performances surfaced throughout the team nonetheless. Here are the results:

CONGRATULATIONS TO JORDAN FIELDS AND SARAH ABRAMSON....the newly crowned King and Queen of Greylock!

The Start

Jordan near the finish. Notice Eli just behind in the background.

Eli hammering toward the finish 

Captain Isaac

Vanya finishing strong

Local, Bret Bedard chasing down the men's team

Captain Kalle

Josh

Ben

Hans and Luke training

Captain Sarah kicking and gliding her way to the win!

Women's chase pack Hannah B, Laura and Tsaina

The faithful timing crew

A HAPPY TEAM!

Yesterday we explored Deer Ridge with a point to point run from campus.

Still some nice foliage

Women's team with Men's team in the distance

En Route to Deer Ridge!!

The fall air is crisp and cool today and we are heading up the Schnell trail w/poles for some Threshold training. Keep an eye out for Schnell results after this coming Sunday's race!

Norway and such

Hello Eph nation!  I apologize for waiting so long to make my first blog post, I kept forgetting to make the post.  Today though, the first snow of the year came in Trondheim, so I had to post something!   I woke up to a few inches of fresh outside of my window and I decided to go in the trails and investigate.  Up high there ended up being a fair amount of snow, probably a good 6 inches or more.  I realized halfway through my run that if we were on the east coast we would have taken out the rock skis, but I resisted my inner Ben Corwin and decided not to destroy my skis to walk across slightly snow covered rocks for an hour.

The ski trails with Trondheim in the sun

First snow stoke

Unfortunately the forecast calls for a few days of higher temps and rain, so it won't stick, but I am optimistic about my chances to get on snow in October!  Some people went skiing a few K outside of the city and my and one of my friends might drive there tomorrow and check it out.

Tunnel life

To catch people up to speed, my fall has been a series of different trips just trying to enjoy the outdoors (and indoors) of Scandinavia as much as possible.  I kicked off the season with a trip to Torsby, Sweden to ski inside at the ski tunnel there with Henning Skiklubb, Hans' club from his gap year.  I had been to the ski tunnel in Voukatti, Finland, but the tunnel in Torsby was better because the music they played was less weird and just because it's not in Finland.  The training was great, despite my love/hate relationship with ski tunnels.  As much fun it is to ski in September, spending 4 hours a day on a 6m loop definitely gets tiring after a few days.  The worst part is when people start trying to one-up each other with how long they can ski in the tunnel, or tunnel syndrome.  Just as people were trying to one up each other in the tunnel, it seemed like the ski companies and nations were trying to do the same in the parking lot, by the end of our trip Salomon, Madshus, Oslo Sportslager, Canada, and Sweden all had crazy expandable trucks covered with funny slogans and intense pictures.

Wax truck city

The next week after Torsby I went back to Sweden, albeit to do something completely different.  I and a few of my friends went to Åre to go mountain biking at their world famous bike park, which was unreal.  From jumps and banked corners to steep twisty forest trails, the biking was unbelievable.  After a summer with a lot of high quality biking in Sun Valley it felt great to get back in the saddle again.  It was also odd because Åre is the only real ski town I have seen in Scandinavia, and it was like a weird European twin of a ski town in the US.  The funniest thing was all of the "rasta swedes" with long hair and laid back style, something you don't find in Norway that often.

Rippping

 I have also been on some kayak trips, which has been awesome!  Victor from the alpine team is here, and he is a pretty unbelievable paddler so being able to get some time in the water with him in some beautiful locations has been great.  The only thing that isn't so great is when you are kayaking in near-freezing water when it is under 0 degrees C out, without a drysuit.  Kayaking when there is snow just a few hundred meters up in the mountains is never warm, and usually a questionable idea.  Swimming when it is around 0º sucks, and it always leaves a bitter taste in your mouth...

Victor killin' it

Other than that though, I have just been trying to keep up with school and experience Trondheim, where there is always something to do.  I have been to ski film tours, seen concerts, had barbecues, seen the northern lights, hucked off the 10m platform dive, and a bunch of other stuff.  The training has been really good too, I have been partially training with the NTNU club team, which is basically a bunch of marathon master blasters, except they are my age, and some people from Henning who are living in Trondheim.  For strength I have been lifting with Victor, which is always humiliating but really motivational at the same time (except on the Canadian strength test), and occasionally throwing in some speed workouts with him as well.  I don't think I have ever been as sore as I am right now, after an explosive strength session and track intervals in the same day... But based on the blog I am probably not as sore as the team in Williamstown, looks like it was a hard week!

I can't wait to meet up with you guys in Quebec after christmas, I have been missing Williams and the team, especially the storied Mtn. Day exploits.  See you in a few months!

Training Update from the Purple Valley

We've had an outstanding week of training this week in the Purple Valley. Spenst and Track intervals on Monday, Threshold Classic Intervals on Greylock on Tuesday and L4 Skate Intervals on Petersburg Pass yesterday. We also delivered race skis to Caldwell Sport this week. Winter is in the air and today is Mountain Day!! Keep an eye out for race results in the coming week as the Greylock Rollerski Race is Sunday and the Schnellsteigen is a week after that. As always, you can keep up with our training schedule through the links in the right hand column. 

Sorting skis at Caldwell Sport

Some skis getting ready for stone grinding

More skis. More than 50 pairs of team skis went to Caldwell Sport this week

Cooling down after Greylock Threshold Intervals

BAREFOOT COOLDOWN:)

Laura, Olivia and Hannah looking tough!

Freshman Tsaina Mahlen leading the charge for the women

Men's team attacking track intervals on Monday

Coach Lemieux's favorite new piece of training equipment

This chalk and our new video camera make for some fun video making. We've taken to uploading our video footage to youtube in an effort to make the footage more accessible to our athletes. The links are private, but if your curious to see how someone you know on the team is doing, just send them a note and I'm sure they'll be happy to share the link. Happy Weekend to all our fellow Purple Cow fans!

September Recap

Somehow, it's already reading period (not quite sure how that happened), which means that we have already started practicing with coaches. September definitely flew by. We (the girls team) started out the month with our traditional first run up Taconic Crest on a beautiful Wednesday afternoon after the first day of classes. Some of the river crossings were a little high after the end of summer rains, but overall it was a great beginning to the fall.

Welcome (back) to the Purple Valley

You too, Olivia

We were lucky to have a lot of good weather over the next month for our workouts. Apart from a few days of torrential downpour (read: running from class in science quad to the gym, ~3 minutes, meant you were totally drenched) and some randomly hot days, the Berkshires delivered warm and beautiful afternoons. We've visited most of the normal rollerski loops without getting lost on the way there or back, though there were a few close calls. Special thanks to our captains for shuttling us around in their cars all month!

Classic specific strength on Whitman Rd

Not a cloud in sight

 It's been nice to be back with the team, catching up on summer events and getting to know the freshmen. Our longer runs and rollerskis especially have led to a lot of interesting discussions and learning random tidbits about one another (Trivia: Who had a Japanese princess stay with them this summer? Which member of the team has lived in Germany? Who would you talk to if you wanted to learn about pop culture in the Middle East?). We certainly miss our teammates who are abroad or taking semesters off right now and can't wait to hear all of their stories this winter.

Cloudy Sunday morning on top of Berlin Mountain

The last Sunday practice before coaches was the same day as the Real Food Bike Farm Tour, which a few  team members helped to organize, so some of us pushed our long workout to the afternoon and headed out on mountain bikes to visit local farms in the morning. Though it was supposed to rain, thankfully it held off, so we had a great trip with fall foliage, baby animals, and locally produced cheese and skyr. It was definitely a good way to wrap up our month of captains practice.

More alpacas! (and Eli)

Laura and a 5 day old calf

All and all September was an awesome start to the fall; now we're settling into normal practices with the benefit of vans, quality time with Bud and Jay, and, of course, free laundry.

Testing Day

A little rain didn't hurt the team on Monday for the fall testing day. And by "a little" rain we're talking buckets and sheets of rain that soaked the team during the warm up!! The Canadian Strength Test Results and the King and Queen of the Cobble uphill run results can be found through our "Testing 13-14" link in the right hand column or by clicking the link here:

Testing 13-14

Here are a few phone pics from the first official day of practice:

Isaac and Tsaina sharing a dip station in the crowded gym

Vanya cheering on Kalle

Sarah and Ben on Situps

Rain soaked heads in the situp, box jump and push up stations

Olivia on dips 

Jordan getting encouragement from Isaac

 The team then ran over to Pine Cobble for the hill climb. Here are a few pics. It was raining hard, so we opted out of our threshold interval to the top of Pine Cobble and chose instead for an interval running back to campus. A special shout out to freshman Jordan Fields for setting the new course record in 8 minutes flat!! Freshman Tsaina Mahlen led the charge for the women's team in 9:38, but Hannah Smith's time of 9:33 from fall 2012 still stands as the course record.

The whole crew on the first climb

Jordan and Eli leading the charge less than 1:30 into the race

Tsaina leading the women's pack

And a video from a portion of yesterday's workout. The opposite of the testing day weather. Opposite percent grade too!!

Whitman Road from Williams Nordic Ski Team on Vimeo.

Getting ready to enjoy the fall colors with a little sp. strength