Just a game: In search of snow, fun and the meaning of sport

St. Vigilio

Roger — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:39:36 +0000

So, as it turns out there are two St. Vigilio’s in Italy. One of them is where we are racing in a Europa Cup GS tomorrow, about an hour and a half from Innsbruck. So when we left Patsch at about four we looked at the map, found St. Vigilo and drove south over the Brenner to Italy. Of all the magical places I have been, northern Italy in December ranks top on the list; steeply walled valleys, pruned grape vines lining the lower slopes, rock buttresses rising out of the ground edged with steep cliffs dropping straight down onto town streets, settled into bottoms is the low haze of coal smoke, dulling the picture as if to dull the countryside in preparation for winter. Dusk seems to hang forever, old ladies finishing their shopping, kids coming home from school, and night finally comes down to reveal mutely lit towns spaced along the Autostrasse.

So anyway, I like northern Italy, good thing, because we drove south for a while, stopping once to ask a gas station attendant which exit for St.Vigilio. He circled it, and the town on our map, and wrote us out some directions. We asked again at the toll booth getting off the highway, and found ourselves cruising along a winding strip of black top, switchbacking up away from the highway. We were a little mystified when confronted with a sign directing us down a one lane road to S. Vigilio, but, we thought, maybe it’s the back road. A few darkened vineyards, an abandoned looking church, a deserted village, and we were out the other side confronted with further signs, none of them directing us to S. Vigilio, evidence that the lonely hamlet through which we had just passed was in fact S. Vigilio.

A trip to the tourist bureau in the next town up the main road revealed that we had traveled to St. Vigilio the summer resort, an hour or two south east of St. Vigilio the winter resort, where we were trying to get to.

So, several hours later we pulled into our hotel, just in time for dinner and to get ready to race the next day, probably the only people in the race with a highlighted line n our map between two towns named St. Vigilio.

Recap, Part 1

Roger — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 12:07:08 +0000

Hard to believe it has been a month of racing already. Eleven races, four countries, three continents, 15,000 air miles, with a little training, some football, and a turkey thrown in for good measure. Now we are working on our 5^th drive across Germany, seems like a good time to reflect and evaluate.

Race 1, Nov. 8, Europa Cup SL, Landgraff, NED, Indoor Ski hall

I was feeling great going in; I had been fast in training against guys from several different nations on the race hill over the last few days. Before the first run I heard over the loudspeaker that some of the Germans who I had been skiing fast compared to the day before were right in there. I went in with the mindset that I didn’t need to do anything crazy, just ski like I had been in training and I would get the good result I was looking for. Not so, I finished the first run tied for 71^st position; I didn’t really push as hard as I needed to out of the start, and on a flat 24 second course there is no time that you can afford to leave anywhere. Second run was a little better but it is always difficult to pull together a good second leg after an abysmal first one. I was ready to go out on day 2 and hammer out of the start.

Race 2, Nov. 9, Europa Cup SL, Landgraff, NED, Indoor Ski hall

Got a good start in on the first run unlike the day before, and came down in 12^th or 13^th place, moved back to 18^th after everyone was down, a fine place to start a second run with reverse 30, especially good because all that was needed to get into the special third run was a top 30 overall placing in the first two runs. Unfortunately second run, I again got complacent and didn’t go hard enough out of the start, moved out of the top 30 and did not qualify for the one run afternoon finals. I left Europe bummed because I had garnered no Europa cup points, but excited to know that I was skiing pretty well, and also finding race intensity, difficult to get to in training.

Race 3, Nov. 26, Noram GS, Keystone, CO

Went in intrigued to figure out where I would stand in my first GS race of the season with my new found prowess for the longer turns. I was happy with my 20^th place first run, I certainly didn’t blow the doors off, but I was right around where my best runs for last year would have put me, a good place to start. Second run I skied great in the top section and through the middle flat, made some big mistakes on the second pitch to finish about where I had finished first run. While I figured some of my trouble was coming from the fact that I had not trained much on long steep pitches, training more on flatter trails with short four or five gate pitches, I was enthused by the knowledge that there was good skiing in there.

Race 4, Nov. 27, Noram GS, Keystone, CO

On the start list, my previous day’s performance moved me out of the first 15 seed to the 30^th start position and came down with a lot of mistakes into 29^th place, giving me a great start position for second run. Second run was more of the same, with a good first half giving way to struggling through the bottom section. After some reflection I realized what changed from my good GS training to struggling in races on sustained pitches; I was coming too straight at the gates, “chopping off” the tops of my turns, taking away my ability to use all the great body movements early in the turns I had been working on in training. So all in all it was not a bad first GS series for me, I was leaving Keystone with enough GS Noram points to remain in the first group and a great tactical focus going forward.

Race 5, Nov. 28, Noram SL, Winter Park, CO

For our first day of outdoor slalom for the year, we got moved from a fairly steep hill at Keystone to a more moderate hill at Winter Park with a lot of side hill (side hill: section of the hill where the direction of the course is different than the fall line, ie. A ball dropped on the course rolls right or left away from it, not towards the finish). On the whole a mildly disappointing day for me, good sections of skiing, but one big mistake both runs moving me around a second a run back from where I really wanted to be. Because our slalom preparation was not as good as it was in GS, I was happy to have some good sections, but at the same time needing some more training to really find my slalom zen.

Race 6, Nov. 29, Noram SL, Winter Park, CO

My first non finish of the season. Frustrating because as much as I hate it when it happens, I think I was affected by this being the last day of a series as well as a travel day to Europe; let down my focus a little and leaned in ten gates in.

Race 7, Dec. 2, Europa Cup SL, Are, SWE

Because of a baggage mix up we arrived on the evening of the first race in Are just in time for them to cancel the second run because of wind and snow, fortuitous. So we weren’t going to miss a race after all, time to take advantage. Not quite. Warner went out after eight gates and I was slow getting into the course with a slow top section, and then a better bottom, but still outside the top 30. Second leg was a little better, but still not really there. So I left the slaloms with some good sections, and decent feeling but for sure needing some training to get my slalom going and consistent.

Races 8-11 coming soon.

Roger

A little quiz

Roger — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 08:30:37 +0000

Here is a quick probability problem. Warner and Roger have between them eight bags checked from Denver to Trondheim via Frankfurt, and Oslo. The bags are four duffel bags and four ski bags. In the four ski bags Roger has slalom skis in two of the bags, and Warner has skis in the other two. The bags are tagged randomly between the two. On arrival in Trondheim, Roger receives two duffel bags tagged under his name. They are racing the next morning and are told that three of the bags tagged under Warner’s name will be there late that night and the other three will be there the next day at noon. They figure out that one of Warner’s duffel bags is tagged under Roger’s name. What are the odds that either or both of them will receive a pair of slalom skis to race on the next morning?

Answer: Zero. After getting a hotel room and returning to the airport to pick stuff up at 11 pm, they arrived to find no ski bags, apologies and promises that everything would arrive the next day at noon.

What to do? At some point after you have tried everything possible to get your bags and get to the race the next day you have to throw up your hands and go back to the hotel and join the Christmas party in progress in the bar.

As it turned out it didn’t matter. We got out bags the next day and drove the two hours to Åre, Sweden. Arriving there in a driving snowstorm we found out that the second run of the race was postponed until 7 pm because of the weather. “Isn’t it dark at 7?” you ask. Thats true, but in Sweden in December it is also dark at 6 pm and 5 pm and 4 pm, so the hill is well lit The 6 o’clock decision time came and the second run was canceled because of the wind and a two run race was scheduled for the next day. So we dodged a bullet. Good times in Scandinavia.

Race #1

Roger — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:24:15 +0000

The last time I tried to write about my winter two years ago I stopped because I was trying to write about all my races, and, basically I got sick of writing about bad performances. This time I am not going to do that. One strategy is to have good races and write about them. Today I will implement my second strategy. Hence I will sum up my performance with this anecdote. I was having a beer with one of the Austrian racers at noon, prior to the final run of the day, for which neither of us were qualified. We had tied on the first run (more on the format in a moment), I think he was as perturbed to have gone from start position number 1 to tied for 70^th as I was to have gone from 39^th to 70^th. So we put a beer on the second run, which I got by nipping him on the second leg. So all was not lost; it was fun to hang out with him.

It was one of the most exciting race formats I have seen. The race was in the indoor ski hall in Landgraff, Netherlands, was flat, 25 seconds long, and incredibly icy. It led off with a two run qualifying race, where the second run was ranked by reversing the first thirty finishers from the first run followed by the rest of the field in order of finish. The race then occurred on the third run, for which the first thirty finishers from the first two runs combined qualified. The start list for the race was the reverse of the first fifteen finishers from the qualifying race followed by the fifteen subsequent finishers. The flat, icy conditions led to a close first run, so the second run was a shootout t qualify for the race. With the slate wiped clean, the third run was again exciting with everyone in the top 30 realistically having a shot at the win, evidenced by Paul McDonald’s going from 28^th position to second. Tonight we figure out what to do better, reload, and do it again tomorrow. Next time: Made For Vegas: skiing, inside.

All you have to do is make it to the post season.

-Scott Willie

Malmedy

Roger — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:40:02 +0000

Yesterday, on our second drive from Patsch, Austria to Landgraff, Netherlands, we deviated a little from our previous course (from which we also deviated a little at the time) to drive up the German side of the border with the French province Alsace-Lorraine, skirt Luxembourg, traverse Belgium, briefly return to Germany, and finally arrive in the south of the Netherlands.

My grandfather fought as an infantryman in Europe during World War Two. Part of the motivation for a train trip I took four years ago from Munich to Bremen, Germany, was that at some point along those tracks I crossed his line of march from west to east. Going through Belgium had similar motivation for me; he fought there in the winter of 1944-1945 in the Battle of the Bulge.

We got off the highway in Malmedy, a town in the middle of the Ardennes forest, where in December of 1944 the German army attacked, trying to drive all the way to the coast, recapture the port of Antwerp and break up the Anglo-American alliance. Malmedy is infamously the site of the killing of 84 American prisoners of war by German forces.

We stopped just outside the church to walk around a little (hour number 7 of the drive), we had been looking for a memorial to the Americans killed there, and saw one next to the church. When we got close we saw that it was a memorial to civilians killed in the area during the fighting.

A few things stood out. First, although the German army was at least indirectly responsible for the devastation, the eight cities listed on the memorial were from both sides of the Belgian-German border; the memorial listed named and ages, the German side was written in German. Also, the ages on the memorial ranged from 7 months to 75 years. The youngest was born 63 years ago; this happened well within living memory.

A cave behind the church had next to it a plaque which stated that 300 villagers took refuge from the battle there for several weeks in terrible conditions in the winter of 1944. The elderly man who walked by when we were standing there may have been in there during that time.

The same goes for much of Europe; a significant part of the populace lived through a war in their towns, and their homes. Over the last 70 years the world has been saved by the fact that the populations of several major western democracies lived through those horrible events.

Glacier Skiing, european style

Roger — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 18:19:25 +0000

Any of you who have spent time ski training on a European glacier will read the title and feel a slight sense of nausea. For those who haven’t, let me walk you through a day of training at the Piztal glacier in Austria. Getting to the first lift is an exercise in European lift lines. First you wait in a huge, crushing crowd outside the doors of the station, then the doors open and you walk in and wait in the huge crushing crown for the turnstiles to turn on and let you into the station. Then you wait in the huge crushing crowd at the door that slides open to allow you access to the to the train you ride to get up to the glacier. The you board the train along with the rest of the huge crushing crowd. The train you ride is a cog railway which goes through the mountain at high speed with the walls of the tunnel a foot or so from the outside of the train. The train is similar to one which caught fire in Kaprun, Austria, killing 150 people. This tragedy is on my mind every time I board the train. Upon arrival to the glacier you click into your skis outside the top station and slide over to the bottom of the stupid gondola/ tram thing. This lift features top, middle and bottom loading / unloading stations, and at four points on the cable loop are four closely spaced gondola cars. So you wait in the huge crowd at the bottom, the cars pull up, the lift stops, you stuff yourself in with all the other people, and then it starts up and brings you to the middle, where the doors open, let more people on, and then take you to the top. The system ensures that you will be smashed into a huge crowd basically the whole time you are not actually skiing down the hill, even then it is pretty crowded. So that’s Piztal.

The other glaciers are all shades of the same thing. The rest have gondolas you ride to the hill, some then have t-bars you ride while up on the glacier, all feature long lines, crowded slopes and Euro teen racer people that walk all over the backs of your skis.

That said, I love it. One, the slopes are crowded with European ski racing fans. While in the US you have to put up ropes and fences to keep brainless recreational skiers from skiing into your course while you are running it and saying things in a Jersey accent like “f-you! I paid 60 bucks for this ticket, I’m gonna ski where i f-ing want to!” , over here, no ropes are needed there is public all over the hill, yet somehow when you are running the course people, even snowboarders (!) are aware of it and stop to wait for, and to watch you go by. Two, in the smashing gondola system I have become friends tons of racers from other countries; gondola ride after gondola ride, all in full body spandex inevitably ends up in some sort of conversation. Three, the huge t-bar lines (t-bars are lifts where you and another person are pulled up riding with your skis on the snow) make waiting in them unappealing. Therefore, I wait for someone to be going up by themselves and get on the lift with them. Doing that in the last week I have ridden up with Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, Germans, French, Slovenians, Slovaks, Latvians, Lithuanians, an American guy who has been living in Munich for the last 20 years, a Czech who worked washing dishes in Ithaca, NY for 2 years on a visitors visa so that his could be born there, an American citizen, Maria de Trentino en Italia, who was 7, and a 9 year old Austrian boy who had a cat named Billy. That is all not counting the Hungarian father and son who we invited to run our slalom course yesterday. (The father pointed out the son’s name written on his skis, Bode Martzy. He was 11, either they are huge, perceptive fans of American ski racing, or, most likely, that Bode is only his nickname. Still…)

I learned that my generation of kids from the Baltic states feel so much resentment towards Russia that they are refusing to learn the language, as their parent’s generation did. The little kids are the most fun to ride up with because we end up speaking some pidgin form of their language, as opposed to their elders who, if they speak some English, use that. I really enjoy working on my German, finding out that Italian is sort of like Spanish, but not quite enough to communicate well, especially if your Spanish is limited, and realizing that if you share no common language, not even a little bit, communicating is really hard. But a 5 minute lift ride which yields only that you are from Slovakia, I am from America, my name is Roger, and your name is something I didn’t really understand, still leaves you both smiling and waving goodbye at the top.

Retirement (not what you think)

Roger — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:48:35 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot about retirement over the last few days. No, not because I am feeling the pressure to quit because of my peers having jobs, my body getting tired, my bank account being empty, etc… but because I have stuck with the sport long enough that when I do retire I will retire happy.

Retirement is a funny thing. When else in life are you able to finish your career in something and have it defined as retirement? At some point quitting your job becomes defined as retiring; I suppose when you have the intention of remaining out of a job for good. What else can you retire from? Before “retirement age” when you finish an activity you graduate from it, move up, step up, move on the bigger and better things. Since retirement has connotations of stepping down, stepping away, aging, ending a phase of your life, it is viewed in some ways as a negative.

In sports too, retirement is tough. It seems that, to really retire, based on the lexicon of sport, you have to walk away from it on your own terms, if you stop because you aren’t committed to competing at the next highest level, you are more quitting than retiring. For example does a high school athlete retire if he or she doesn’t compete in college? Sort of, but they really just stop competing, move on from their sport, move up to other bigger things. It is really post college where you truly retire from sport. Again it is in many ways a negative. Your sport has become such a huge part of your life, that by ending your competitive association with it you are stepping down, ending that phase of your life. One of the hardest days I will face in my life will be the day when the focus of my life is not longer on making faster turns. For a large part of my life I have made most of my decisions based on the question of whether it makes me a better ski racer or not. Someday, sooner rather then later, that will change, and at that point I will have made the best run of my life. Weird to think about.

Bringing us back to why I have been thinking so much about it recently, is the positive part of retirement. I finally felt what it is like really ski giant slalom. GS is the event where the turns are 25 to 32 meters apart, and you use skis hat are almost 2 meters long. Up until this point I have always been a mediocre GS skier at best, as such, I have never been able to understand how the best skiers in the world do it. I mean I could see it, but I couldn’t imagine feeling it. In the last week some things came together and now I think I feel it; I watch video of tough races and I understand what their feelings.

What does this have to do with retirement you ask? At this point I had pretty much given up on GS, now I almost feel as if I have reached “total consciousness”. Seriously, I have a greater understanding of my sport than ever before. And I think that is the true measure of retirement; you get to a point where you understand your sport, and you understand yourself through your sport when it becomes ok to step away from it. I’m hoping anyway.

Gunga lagunga

Shipping out

Roger — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 06:20:20 +0000

I have a new addition to my favorite places to watch. Warner had a 7 am flight out to head home, and since we didn’t leave Queenstown until 5 pm, we didn’t get to Christchurch until 11 and we figured it would be dumb to get hotel room for the five hours we were going to sleep until he had to head to the airport, so we headed out to find something to bide our time until the early morning. We decided to go to the port.

Christchurch is kind of a funny city. It sits on the eastern edge of the plains of Cantebury, with ocean to the north and south, but bordered to the east by a mountainous peninsula. The city sits on a beautiful natural bay, but it is too shallow to bring in big ships, so the port of Christchurch in five miles away, on the other side of a thousand foot high ridge. Until the turn of the century all goods had to come by horse across a bridle path, a railroad tunnel was put in around the turn of the century, and then car tunnel in 1968.

The guard at the gate was a little surprised when we pulled up at midnight, just to “check it out”. Needless to say we were not allowed in, but w had a nice talk with him, it is the only port in New Zealand that constantly runs three shifts (24 hours), the coal freighters scrape on the bottom on the way in and out, and when they are tied up to the wharf at low tide are resting on the bottom. He also said that if we drove up n the side of the hill we could have a great view down into it.

What a view we had. Containers stacked on ten floodlit acres, with weird tall yellow containers lifts driving around. They were probably 30 feet tall, ten feet wide and 40 feet long, with a leg at each corner. There were at least ten of them driving around the rows of containers shuffling them to and from the gantry crane by the ship which was doing the actual loading and unloading. I could have watched all night.

Incidentally the one driving error I made in my time in New Zealand came at 1 am when I went to pull out of a gas station and I needed to turn left, there was a curb in the median so I figured I would turn right and then pull a U turn at the next stop light. I didn’t realize my error until I made the U turn and there was a car coming towards me. No really occifer, I’m just American.

Snowparkin’ it

Roger — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 05:59:37 +0000

Most days we trained at Treble Cone, just north west of Wanaka, along the lake, but on a couple days I drove south on the Crown Range road and about twenty kilometers up the valley, turned off and climbed up the east wall of the valley to aiming for a small ski area perched high up in the Southern Alps.

Snowpark is a little different though. Geared towards the freeride scene, there is one short chairlift, flanked on one side by a halfpipe that run from top to bottom of the lift, and some big jumps, on the other by a slalom training lane. By the time we were out of there at 11 we four guys in our lycra didn’t fit in real well, but at 7:30 when we got there we had the place mostly to ourselves for a some mellower slalom training that we had been getting on the steep injected hill at TC.

That day Warner was in Queenstown racing GS but I stuck around to train slalom with three guys from the Norwegian Ski Team. I left Paul’s house in the pitch black, and by the time I had turned off onto the access road the sky at the eastern end of the valley was showing signs of morning.

The access roads in New Zealand must be seen to be believed. Because the snow doesn’t stretch all the way down to the valley, the ski areas’ base is always situated at the end of an eight or ten kilometer long, twisty, dirt road with nothing on the side to catch your car if you drive off other than the sheep in in the farmers field a few hundred feet down where your car would finally stop tumbling.

I was halfway up to the ski area and a little worried because I still hadn’t seen any other cars, the snow on the mountain across the way was stating to glow, but a thousand feet below the valley floor was still in inky predawn darkness. Racing up main road towards the entrance were five sets of headlights from the Nowegians’ cars. It was a pretty incredible sight, looking down on five closely bunched cars snaking up a dark road far below snow covered mountains.

Being with the national team certainly has pluses, knowing what time training starts and not being a half hour early for one, but there is beauty in my sport which cannot be seen but with an outside perspective.

Waaaayyyyy baaaaaccckkkkkk… gone!

Roger — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 04:54:09 +0000

Today was the 2007 All Star Home Run Derby, an impressive spectacle of guys doing what is to some the most exciting part of baseball over and over again. And boy is it impressive sometimes. Earlier today they replayed the 1999 edition which was at Fenway Park, a truly awesome spectacle. Wow. All I watched was Mark McGwire. In ten “outs” he hit 14 balls out of the park. Most of them into Boston Harbor by the looks of it.

What a heady time that was in baseball, after years of declining popularity McGwire and Sammy Sosa brought baseball back into position as the darling of American sports by electrifying the country with their summer long chase to break Roger Maris’ record 61* home runs in a season. They were co Sports Illustrated sportsmen of the year. Sosa was invited to the 1999 State of the Union address. Baseball rode that wave right into the 1999 all start game, held at the oldest, most storied park in the majors. Ted Williams was there, asking Big Mac if he smelled burnt wood when he fouled balls off too. Pedro Martinez struck out the first five National League hitters in a row. Things were good for baseball.

But you know what they say, “after Pedro strikes out the first five batters in the all star game he will tweak his arm and never be quite the same again.” Five and a half years later Sosa was back on Capitol Hill with McGwire among others, testifying to a House sub-committee on the rampant use of steroids in baseball. McGwire a deflated shadow of his former self, when asked about his alleged former steroid use pathetically stating that he “wasn’t here to talk about the past.” Now, two years after that, one of our era’s most amazing athletes is on the verge of breaking one of baseball’s most impressive records, and the current record holder has said that he is going to be playing golf when it happens. Bummer baseball. There must be some proverb: “If you catch a snake by the tail, make sure you step on the back of its neck before you show in to anyone, don’t hoist it right up in the air in front of you or it will bite you in the face.”