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Much love and respect to the family of Willie Neal. We will miss him on the ski team at Middlebury, but the world will miss him more.

Fasterskier: Willie Neal

click to enlarge The scene in "Sun" Valley.

Rain, Rain, Go Away.

Despite the fact that I have grown to love the Middlebury campus and the college life it has to offer, I was looking forward to being home for several reasons. One of them was simply leaving the college campus that has been associated with academic stress for the past 9 months, but probably my most anticipated change that I was looking forward to was the weather. No offense to the native Easterners who are reading this post, but I could do without the constant, incessant overcast skies and drizzling rain.

In the weeks preceding my Middlebury departure, I would eagerly check the weather report for Sun Valley, Idaho just to verify that I would be getting my fill of vitamin D when I came home. Every time I’d look, it was essentially the same; sunny and about 60-70 degrees. However, once I came home, I was only able to enjoy about 3 days of glorious sunshine before the rain started, and to be quite frank, it has yet to stop. Don’t get me wrong, most of the time rain is much appreciated in this region, especially when the fire danger is as high as it has been the past few years, but when there is so much of it that it causes power-outages and severe mud-slides, it gets irritating.

Also, as some of you may know, I run a window washing operation during the summer, which is necessary to fund my various ski-related endeavors. With severe rainfall, or any rainfall for that matter; most of my clients have opted to wait until its sunny again to get their windows washed. With the weather acting the way it has, I’ve essentially been postponing most of my jobs to July and August, leaving the month of June wide open. So to make a long story short, I have no work.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I woke up this Monday morning to see sun shining in a cloudless sky. Since it was such a beautiful morning, and with no work in my schedule, I decided to go for a scenic hike and take some awesome pictures of Idaho wilderness for my blog post. These pictures would, in my mind, invoke jealousy from the east-coasters who are in a perpetually rainy environment. “What a great way to make these people jealous of my hometown,� I thought!

However, by the time I reached the trailhead, clouds were already starting to roll in, and when I finally reached the end of my hike the view was completely obstructed by a thick haze of clouds. What would have been a picturesque view of the Pioneer mountains and Pioneer Cabin was instead a rather dull view of the cabin with nothing but clouds in the background.

What it should have looked like...according to Taylor.

click to enlarge It's a deep burn.

Once you start driving out of the Middlebury College campus, the bubble that protects our happy little world for eight months of the year (more for some) pops quickly. Living only a quick forty minute drive north on Rt. 7 in Shelburne feels like an alternate reality. Right now, I’m enjoying a quiet morning at home, something that’s all but eluded me for the last three weeks. My mom is in the next room listening to a meditation tape, I have a pot of coffee spiked with maple syrup, a pyrex measuring cup (one of the big ones) full of cereal, and I’m looking out on a view of the Adirondacks over Lake Champlain. The view is still new for me, as my mom and her newlywed husband Steve only moved into this house a year ago, and I haven’t actually lived here until now. Pretty ideal.

Oh, and it’s an off day. Unfortunately, my off days from training and my off days from work don’t coincide, and I’m still trying to decide whether making 300+ bagels and 20+ loaves of bread counts as strength at least. I may have told some of you earlier that I was one of the dinner cooks at On the Rise Bakery, in Richmond, but as it turns out they had other plans for me. Recently the owners decided to try and keep their heads above water by wholesaling—mostly bagels and bread, and some dessert things. The bagels are a big one, because they’re the best bagels you can get for a long ways away. So I’m the new bagel boy. Every day I get to work, I start by taking buckets of dough (that I made the night before) out of the walk-in cooler, cutting them into an intestine shaped mass, and rolling out bagels. Once I’ve done however many are needed for wholesaling and for the bakery the next morning, I start boiling them. They boil for three minutes then get seeds or onions or whatever, then go into the oven. I run back and forth between the boiling stove and the ovens (on opposite sides of the kitchen) and try not to burn or overboil any bagels. Fun stuff. Oh yea, and I work at night.

So that’s what I do for money, and food. I also try and keep in shape when I can. The training around Shelburne is some of the best. Most of those wonderful tax dollars that people pay for their larger-than-average lake view homes go into repaving the roads, a lot. The rollerskiing is unbelievable, as is the biking. There are plenty of trails to run on, and a lake to kayak right down the road. Recently I’ve been having fun exploring some sections of the Long Trail I hadn’t found until now, including the Duck Brook trail, which goes from Jonesville to Bolton. I’ve also been navigating around Lake Champlain in my mom’s kayak, and may soon take the Ades Challenge, and try racing the Charlotte Ferry to the other side of the lake.

Attached you should be able to view some pictures that I’ve included of my rigorous training regime, as dictated by Andrew Gardner.

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About a year ago, the Frost Mountain Ski Club came together to act as an umbrella group overseeing the efforts and providing a resource for the Bill Koch league, various masters groups and any other skiing entity in Addison County. It has had some great success with team nights, a great clinic schedule and strong growth. Now there's another boost, Middlebury Ski Team alum Sabra Davison will act as the director and coach. Welcome to Sabe and congratulations!

click to enlarge Midd skiers have had impressive results internationally of late. They certainly aren't the only college represented.

In 2004 when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, much was made of the reversal of the curse of the Bambino. A short documentary, the appropriate revival of the losses that Red Sox fans suffered through and a thorough history of Babe Ruth’s 86-year effect on the ball club were a hot topic. The individual players on the club were unfazed, mercenaries hired by the best minds in baseball to win regardless of history, and win they did. To quote the Boston sports columnist Bill Peterson, “If there’s anything to curses, they’re mental. They become expectations that are reified when Bucky Dent beats you with a home run or a ground ball scoots through Bill Buckner’s legs.”
As cross country skiers, we’re living a similar curse- it’s a curse of culture, history and circumstance. Where does the mental block come from? An examination:
Cross country skiing is particularly participatory in this country. Given the small geographical locale for skiing spread out across a big country and the myriad other sports that compete with skiing, most programs take all comers and don’t separate based on talent or physical gifts, the participants. Programs are successful first if they have numbers, second if those numbers perform. This is a strength of skiing- it builds the closeness of the community. It’s also a weakness, since there are few places skiers are culled out made elite, pushed in a way similar to basketball or baseball players. Our “all-star teams” are smaller and more vulnerable. If we lose one good athlete, that represents a higher percentage of loss in our sport than it would in baseball or basketball.
Because of our niche position, we attract a certain type of athlete. There are very few folks that ski well, coach well or are involved deep in the ski community that don’t have a natural feeling of opposition. That feeling could be described as “I don’t care if the world doesn’t follow skiing, I love and believe in it.” The sport is tough physically demanding isolated self-confidence and drive. It may be tougher culturally demanding an even more stubborn, focused and driven folks. Think Zach Caldwell.
Finally, we’re haunted by what we are not. You need only to read the impassioned reports from the world cup and Team Today to know that as a ski country, we have a lot to prove. If medals were handed out based on pure wanting it, we’d crush all comers. They aren’t however.
These bits and pieces add up to the curse, the mental hiccup that gets in our way time and time again. There’s no one at fault. No bambino. No hidden race number from Bill Koch buried under the stadium at Soldier Hollow. There are just a series of events that have put us down. Here’s where we cannot start to doubt ourselves or question and or cast blame.
The USST released a statement urging athletes to push ahead with a year or two of deferred acceptance to college and to focus on skiing. Andy Newell, in a Faster Skier interview explained it this way, “I think the other big area we could improve on is in College skiing. Right now in the US you can’t go to college full time and still train at a competitive level. People who say you can are full of it. It’s just embedded too much in the American culture that you have to go to college right after high school. If you’re a fast junior skier you should definitely weigh your options.” By themselves, these aren’t untrue or unreasonable statements but there are a few points that are important to understand.
Firstly, there is no such thing as “college skiing”- to label it such implies that college programs are unified, driven and focused into an institution. They aren’t. There is no common goal for all college programs. Some programs are driven to build skiers beyond graduation, some aren’t. Some are driven at NCAA success. Some aren’t. There is so much discrepancy in what the programs believe and support and so much difference in tradition and financial offering that to toss college skiing in one big pot is just as ineffective as saying that “junior skiing” or “post-23 skiing” is not getting it done. “College skiing” isn’t getting it done…but that’s because “college skiing” doesn’t exist. Like junior skiing, there are collegiate programs that are working towards success post college and programs that are not. Some college skiers are training at a competitive level, however. Over the last two years several collegiate skiers collected top ten and twenty finishes at the U23 and World Junior Championships. These skiers owed that success, in part, to their college programs. It is the next step that is important, the next jump up the results page. The next step will take a Red Sox approach, an unfazed approach with the support of the entire skiing community.
It is here where the questions start mounting. Should a skier take a year off from college if they’ve started? What type of support will there be for athletes that take a year off? What is the rate of success for kids who ski for a year only? Which college programs are committed to post collegiate success? There is no single answer which is why each athlete has to be conscious and confident about making their own development happen. Pete Vordenberg at the coaches congress said, “I only know what hasn’t worked.” College coaches, club coaches and USST coaches will need to work harder to make certain that the inevitable transitions between programs that will occur don’t leave cracks in training and support for an athlete to slip through. Club coaches need to reach out to successful skiers both from college. There needs to be racing longer into the season: a joint USST / NCAA trip would be a good step. Bring those athletes to a round of late Europa cups following the collegiate season.
It would be a bad decision to cut out any possible avenue for skiing success. Across all disciplines there are hard working, gifted coaches pushing success. There is an ember of belief burning in the ski community that hasn’t previously. To those that naysay, that point to mistakes (“The Ski Team is wrong. College is wrong. It will never happen.”), get on board. It is too easy to point out the difficulty. Offer solutions. To do less would be to strengthen the curse.

Links and Resources

Head Nordic Coach

Andrew Gardner

Gardner enters his fourth season at the helm of the men's and women's nordic ski teams. He cames to Middlebury from Colorado Rocky Mountain School (CRMS) in Carbondale, Colo. Since coming to New England, he acted as the wax tech for the 2008 Junior National Team in Anchorage. Gardner is the coordinator for sustainability in athletics, serving on the college's environmental council. In the summer he rides for the MetLife cycling team.

agardner@middlebury.edu

o: 802.443.5963

Assistant Nordic Coach

Patty Ross

Now entering her 24st year as a full-time coach of Middlebury nordic skiing, Patty came to the College after four years of world-class competition. She was one of five American women nordic skiers to compete in the Sarajevo Olympics in 1984; she also competed internationally with the U.S. national team from 1983 to 1986. Patty graduated from the University of New Hampshire, where she was an All-East collegiate skier and captain of the Wildcat team. While at UNH, Patty competed in the World University Games in Sofia, Bulgaria. As a coach for the International Special Olympic Games, Patty received a Distinguished Service Award in 1984. She acted as a coach for the U23/ World Junior Championships in Italy in 2008.

o: 802.443.5006

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