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.

click to enlarge

Can your team mockapella? (The group Technopella opened for a collection of more...established acapella groups here at Middlebury. More than a few ski racers comprise this talented group that perform pantsless. The real action heats up around 1:01.)

More at www.greenmountainhillclimb.com. (Click Below)

Site Here..

So, I’ve been in Buenos Aires for almost 2 months now, which is a bit frightening to believe, and quite a lot has happened in the 6 weeks or so since my last (and first) email. I started classes at the university here about 4 weeks after arriving, and it’s quite a shocking difference from Middlebury. I am taking 4 classes at USAL (Universidad del Salvador, or University of the Savior in English…it was founded by Jesuits), 1 Spanish writing class with the Midd program, and doing an internship with an environmental NGO called La Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina (FVSA) (translated as The Wildlife Foundation) which kind of has an affiliation with the World Wildlife Fund. My classes only meet once a week, however, for a period of about 2 hours maximum and are only Monday through Wednesday, and I go to my internship on Thursday, which leaves me with a 3-day weekend. Unfortunately, BA is extremely hard to escape—getting out of the city to go anywhere worthwhile takes anywhere between 5-8 hours. Given that, I may try and starting going to FVSA during the afternoons Mon-Wed so that I can go places for long weekends.

Classes are interesting, it’s not particularly difficult to understand the professors, but it becomes difficult when I’m are trying to pay close attention and frantically take notes at the same time because they talk a mile-a-minute and the rooms echo and the other Argentine students are constantly jabbering back and forth with the professor and if I stop paying attention for 10 seconds, I end up completely lost-in-transition in the conversation. I’m taking History of Art and Culture of the Americas and Argentina, “Tourist” Geography of Argentina (there is an entire major focused on tourism, which makes sense because it’s a large career field in Arg., but it’s kind of bizarre to be taught a subject with an emphasis on tourism), History of Argentina, and Geopolitics. All are interesting because it’s obviously a whole new field of information for me. There isn’t a lot of work, just readings, but it’s much more relaxed than Middlebury, which is a nice change of pace! I find myself with quite a bit of free time, often not knowing what to do because I’ve already seen and done all the “touristy” things in BA.

Other than classes, I have gotten out of the city a few times for some adventures/break from the city. In early March I crossed the border (read, the river, Rio de la Plata, which is the widest river in the world) and spent a weekend in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay with a few kids from the Midd program in BA. Montevideo is a city also, but WAY more laid-back than BA. The main avenue is equivalent to an average side-street in BA, and they have beaches surrounding the city that were wonderful to swim in, even in the latte-colored water (it’s technically still the river, not the ocean at that point. Check out a map to understand how incomprehensibly wide Rio Plata is). I also took a train out of the city to a smaller town about 45 min north that is on a big river delta. We took a water-taxi out into the delta to one of the islands to walk around and chill out for a while. All the islands in the delta are populated, but the only mode of transportation is by boat, which automatically makes it a much more relaxed environment than a town or city.

Last weekend was Easter, and being a highly Catholic country, we also got last Thursday and Friday off. So, Tim and I decided to REALLY get out of the city, and we took a 13-hour overnight bus Wednesday night to the city of Mendoza, which is basically due west of BA at the foot of the Andes Mountains and the border of Chile, ~1000km away. The bus ride wasn’t too bad since we had semi-beds, so we could kind of sleep. But the bus station the night we left was complete and utter chaos, like I have never seen before in my life. I felt like literally half the population of BA (a mere 13 million) was in the bus station to leave the city. Buses were leaving for every possible place in the country, and several buses would be leaving for the same exact place every 5 minutes, so you had to make sure you got on the right one! Total Madness. And when we returned Sunday night/Monday morning, it was the same thing; we arrived near the bus station on time, but it took almost an hour before we got off due to the line of hundreds of buses.

Mendoza is the 5th largest wine-producing region in the world, and there are vineyards/wineries everywhere, some small family-run ones, some huge ones that stretch on for several kilometers. When we arrived in Mendoza, after settling into our hostel, we did a bike tour of a few vineyards/wineries outside the city and got to taste a lot of wine for very cheap! We stayed in the city only one night, then took a bus up into the Andes ~100km to a small town and stayed for two nights there. It was the first time I had truly been out of a city, and it was blissful after two months in the dirty, noisy city. It was heaven to be surrounded by mountains and rivers and nothing else. The first day we just chilled out at the stream that was just outside of town, relishing the clear, clean and cool water and the DRY heat. Saturday we took another bus a little farther up to the entrance of the Provincial Park Aconcagua, where yes, Mt. Aconcagua is. Aconcagua is the highest peak in the world outside of the Himalayas, reaching 6,959meters (22,616feet). Where we were hiking was just over 10,000 ft in elevation, so we stuck to hiking leisurely rather than running, as we’d basically jumped from sea level to 10,000 in a span of 2 days.

We also visited a national historical natural monument, a really cool geologic phenomenon called Puente del Inca (Bridge of the Inca) which is an amazing formation of calcium and iron sediments that met with natural thermal water and created this huge deposition on this old bridge in the middle of the Andes. There were tons of tourists around, but it was worth braving the crowds to see it. We spent another low-key night in the little town and witnessed a spectacular moonrise over the mountains, with a full moon, which was one of the most beautiful and pure sights I think I have ever seen. To be in the middle of a huge mountain range, practically alone (the town was tiny, and had no light pollution at night) in the dark, and have everything suddenly illuminated by a full moon, it was indescribable. Sunday was a looong day, first bussing 2 hours back down to Mendoza, hanging out for a few hours in the city (we met up with a group of kids from Middlebury studying in Chile who were in Mendoza for the weekend) before the 13 hour bus ride back to BA.

So, if you’ve made it to here, congratulations. I apologize for this being so long, and I hope to get more frequent and shorter updates out from here on out. I have photos posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/aklaurenfritz and just about everything I’ve mentioned in this email can be found in photos, plus some. If you aren’t too busy, I’d love to hear from people about what they’re up to these days too. Take care!

The following is an account by one Nate Larsen, a good friend of my brother-in-law, Sam Damon. It is about falling through a floor ceiling. Like everything else, apply it to skiing.

well i think that life is trying to teach me a lesson or that's how it appears, but let me try that again...

i fell through the ceiling, but that makes it sounds like i was traveling upwards, so no i fell through the floor, but the floor was the ceiling. and don't get all like "whoa the floor IS the ceiling, man," because that is not the lesson i think life is trying to teach me. and to step further back into the story, these squirrels live in my eaves and that in and of itself is fitting because i determined a while back that squirrels were my spirt animal and have even been known to have said "i don't think i could live somewhere that squirrels don't," but i didn't mean it literally. but squirrels literally do live where i live and so i wanted to see what kind of a door squirrels use to come into my house and i was wondering if maybe they had a doormat that says "welcome squiends" or something clever like that because those seem to be in fashion and almost always with a goose who is wearing a bonnet and carrying a basket. i don't know why. but i never made it to the squirrel door because i knew what was happening a split second before it did happen and this is not the only known instance of my clairvoyance, sometimes i know what i will say even before i say it, but my right leg burst through years of old wood and plaster and many hues of paint and my left leg hesitated like wile e. coyote in the air for a second before following suit (and pardon me for just realizing that expression has to do with card games!)

if you were in the kitchen, and i wish you were, because i like having company, you would have heard some tentative footsteps followed by nothing, because there is a noiseless vacuum that precedes any calamity. then the levy of ceiling, holding back the mass of me would have burst forth, peppering you with plaster, showering you with splinters, pelting you with years and years of accumulated paint and not unlike the fabled yellowstone eruption that blanketed the modern day bible belt with ash and pumice, there was grit and plaster and dust on every shelf, plate and appliance, and definitely unlike the fabled yellowstone eruption, two hairy and bloodied legs protruded from the smoldering caldera.

i don't know how many of you have tried to extricate yourselves upward from a jagged hole of splinters and rusty nails and fiberglass insulation. and never mind the squirrel audience. i know that i didn't want to drag the rest of me down it, the hole i mean, because the ten feet of air beneath me scared me more than the scrapes, and it wasn't the added pressure from having that added air above me that concerned me because i generally tolerate being in the kitchen very well. in fact it is one of my favorite places to spend my time. and so i decided to go down there the conventional way, since i like being there so much and i didn't have a whole lot better to do at that very moment, but i had to climb out of the hole first. and what is really funny and what you don't usually think about when you're walking around in any upstairs anywhere is i had no idea what i was above, no idea which ceiling exactly i had fallen through, so one of my first thoughts after i had a chance to inspect my handy work was "huh, i thought i was closer to that wall."

now i have fallen more than my fair share and that is why i am supposed to learn a lesson, but i want to take a moment to tally for you the times i have fallen, but good. i fell in a manhole, the cover dropped out from under me. i fell off a chairlift, because the bar went up and i was little and i just got off. i fell off a balcony that i was trying to climb down because the railing came off. now i have fallen through the ceiling, because squirrels. the culprit each time is complacency, they all happened because i took something for granted, that what i was walking on was solid, that the railing wasn't rotten, that when your dad puts the bar up, it is ok to dismount. and, oh, i could extend my realization to so many other literal events in my life, but the real temptation for me is to think that all of my metaphorical falls are a result of my complacency, and at first glance that might seem to be true, but it isn't and it can't be, because there is just no way that every negative event that affects me is my own fault. that is too buddhist.

so the first thing i did when i got into the kitchen was pick up two broken slats and a piece of plaster and a shard of wood and i nailed the wood to the wall in my studio and i nailed the plaster to wall in there too. and the shard of wood. and i painted a skull on the plaster and crossbones on the slats and wrote "fear complacency" on the shard. and that is my lesson, and the word fear might count as hyperbole, but i couldn't fit "beware complacency", though now i see i should have tried. you should always try.

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 came to Middlebury from Colorado Rocky Mountain School (CRMS) in Carbondale, Colo where he was Nordic Program Director. Since coming to New England, he acted as the wax tech for the 2008 Junior National Team, a coach at regional development camps and serves on the U23 NENSA board. Gardner is the coordinator for sustainability in athletics, serving on the college's environmental council. In the summer he enjoys road racing for the MetLife cycling team.

agardner@middlebury.edu

o: 802.443.5963

Assistant Nordic Coach

Patty Ross

Now entering her 23rd 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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