Vasaloppet 2008
There really is something about the Vasaloppet that is hard to describe. When you compete in it, you are really taking part in a historical event. It has been around since 1922, and even the ski-fanatics that live next door (the Norwegians) have to admit that the Vasaloppet is the Big Race. It is incomparable to any other ski race in length, in the number of participants, and in prestige. You can feel all of this when you are at the start line in Sälen. The newspapers are full of stories like the one fellow who completed his 55th race this year at 77 years old, or the guy who has raced the Vasaloppet 32 times - on the same pair of skis (quote: "I think they are still good for another few races"). Or how about the women who used to race disguised as men before they were formally allowed to participate in 1977.
For a country that feels a bit self-conscious about how they have lagged behind their Norwegian neighbours in terms of cross country skiing dominance since the early 1990's, the Vasaloppet is a chance to say "Yeah, maybe you guys have had Bjorn Daehlie and Thomas Alsgaard, Vegard Ulvang and Petter Northug, but we still have the greatest ski race in the world."
The conditions this year were almost a carbon copy of last year: 0 degrees and fresh snow. A waxing nightmare. you either have no grip, or you have a foot of show stuck to the bottom of your skis. I had decent skis, which is all one could ask for. Swix silver klister with a top layer of Rode Multigrade violet. I had some problems with icing, but not as bad as the dozens of guys we passed on the side of the trail, scraping snow off the bottom of their skis with their skipoles. That had to suck.
Last year the elite men were incredibly slow because they essentially had to "break trail" through a layer of soft fresh snow that lay in the tracks. This year the organizers avoided this by having a skidoo precede the racers, towing 3 guys on skis who cleared the tracks for the racers. However, those of us just behind the elite men still had the same problem as last year: passing was virtually impossible. Sure, there were 4 or 5 tracks the entire length of the race, but everyone crowded into 1 or 2 tracks because the more people passed over a track, the faster it got. To pass, you would have to jump out of the fast track and double your energy output in order to barely pass by a couple skiers. Then, you had to hope someone would let you back into the fast track before you died. More than once, I tried passing only to end up losing a couple positions because nobody would let me back in the fast track. Very frustrating.
The thing which I think is so attractive about long distance racing is how - for those few hours - you have a single purpose of mind. Everyday thoughts and concerns completely disappear. Your only thoughts are "Is this a good pace? Am I going to hard or too slow? Do I need to eat?
Should I try passing this guy?" It is a very simple and uncluttered existance.
Jörgen Auckland won the race this year, after having placed in the top 10 for the six times he had previously raced it. He is a Norwegian, which kind of rubbed the Swedes the wrong way (My girlfriend's grandma was "pissed") but they are a good natured bunch in general and one must say that Jörgen deserved it. He broke away with 30 km to go and raced to the finish by himself for the last hour and a half. He ended up 3 and half minutes ahead of the second place finisher - his brother, Anders. This is quite extraordinary for a race that has seen the last seven races decided by sprints.
At the start as I was contemplating the awful snow conditions, I was reminded of a trick that Bill Koch - the only American to win an Olympic medal in xc skiing (in Innsbruck, 1976) - used. When the snow was 0 degrees, he would just rough up the kick zone with sandpaper and use no kickwax at all. The roughed up zone would provide the kick. He used this method with some success on the World Cup. Of course, I didn't have the resources to do this 1 hour before the start, but I was gratified to hear that this is exactly what Jörgen did to his skis. Interestingly, Jerry Ahrlin decided to race with
skate skis, and no grip wax at all. Ballsy. I look forward to seeing the race video, because double poling up that first 2 km long hill must have been pretty difficult.
My strategy this year was to carry absolutely all of my food with me, and not stop at all. I succeeded, but I may try something else next year. Carrying a couple of kilos of fluid in your Camelbak and pockets definitely has an impact on your efficiency. I make a habit of imitating the pros in whatever field I am interested in, and the top skiers in the Vasaloppet carry absolutely nothing.
Speaking of pros, I want to congratulate Dan Roycroft for his 24th place finish. To my knowledge, that is the best Canadian finish in the Vasaloppet ever. I happened to run into his wife Tasha Betcherman before the start, which is a minor miracle considering there are about 20 000 people milling about. I would have loved to talk to them after the race, but that just didn't happen. I saw Tasha didn't finish the race, I am hoping that she didn't get injured or something.
This year I finished in 904th place, an improvement of 13% over last year. Next year I want to be in the 1st seed, which would mean I would have to be in the top 500. To do this I will have to knock off about 15 minutes from my finish time. This year I improved by 10 minutes, so I think that is a reasonable goal.
On learning a language
Learning a new language as an adult an interesting experience. I have not really taken any formal lessons (outside of 6 weeks of 1 lesson per week when I first got here - which were useless). You don't really notice any progress from one day to the next, but here and there you pick up new words in passing, some connecting are made, you understand a conjugation. Suddenly you find yourself capable of asking where the bathroom is and passing for a hopeless foreigner who is butchering the language. Hey, that is a big step up from being incomprehensible. It is only when I think back to my ability a year ago that I can think "yeah, I am getting somewhere". Because to be blunt, when I try to listen in on a bunch of Swedes chatting, I still get next to nothing. I can formulate sentences by carefully planning them out in my head, using circuitous phraseology to get around a word I don't know. I can pronounce them with enough ability to be understood. But if the answer includes 3 or more key words I don't know, then I am stuck with "Jag förstor inte..." - I don't understand. That happens a lot. To improve you have to be ruthlessly unembarrassable. Say things that you know are stupid, because chances are good someone will correct your mistake and you will learn something. Don't be bothered by stopping someone in the middle of a sentence to ask what a word meant. Most of all, just keep talking regardless of how bad you are.
Anyone in need of an attitude adjustment only needs to move to a foreign nation. Egos get deflated quickly when you go to the pharmacy, ask for some cream for your muscles and the girl gives you Preparation H with a quizzical look.
Viking women had sexy style
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Radiotjänst
The Television Taxing Authority. Arguably the most dreaded organization in Sweden. These are the folks who collect money to support SV1 and SV2, the Swedish public broadcasters. They are ruthless. If you own a TV in Sweden, they own you. "But", you ask, "How do they know if you own a TV?".
Well, first of all you must register with them if you buy a TV in Sweden.
"Aha!" you say. "But what if I buy my TV abroad? Then I can watch all the TV I want in Sweden without having to pay the piper."
Not true. Radiotjänst folks take a dim view of any apartment or house in Sweden that does not declare TV ownership. They have been known to peek into peoples windows to see if they have an illicit TV.
I am not making this up.
Back in business
Hi everyone.
Well, after a lengthy pause in our regularly scheduled broadcasts, we are back in business after a bit of gentle prodding and an unexpected endorsement from
Okansas.
Last weekend was the Swedish ski- o championships (SM) in Lycksele. Lycksele is the home of the ski gymnasiet that produced local wonder boy Per Elofsson. It is a nice Norrlands town of about 10 000 people, roughly 100 km from Umeå.
Ski-o is fun. I find it technically a lot easier than regular orienteering since you pretty much stay on trails 99% of the time. So really losing contact is almost impossible. The subtlety lies in choosing the best route among dozens of possibilities. In a good ski area like Lycksele, the trail map looks like a spiderweb, so skiing from one side of the map to the other you can choose to go around the outside (and maybe miss some big climbs) or go directly and get stuck double poling uphill on a narrow skidoo trail. You have to make those decisions on the fly. However, once the decision is made, you can really push hard, which for me is different from "regular" orienteering. If I try to run hard in "regular" orienteering (what I would otherwise consider "race pace", HR of at least 160 bpm), I lose contact with the map. Not so in ski-o. You can push to the point of getting tunnel vision and still be able to remember to take the next left turn. So it suits me far better, I guess.
Ski-0 has a lot in common with the annual orienteering race through the streets of Venice.
I really wanted to race the long race (20 km) on Friday, but my car broke down 20 km outside of Umeå. I managed to get to Lycksele Friday evening, but I could only register for the Open 3 category for the Saturday race. So, no SM for me. I did place 2nd in the Open 3 category, which makes me really wonder how I would have done in the real race. Still, it was a lot of fun and I am thinking about making ski-o my focus next winter rather than Vasaloppet. 90 km of double poling is kind of cool once or twice, but I can't say I enjoy it as much as ski-o.
I just found a guy who wants to sell his Vasaloppet bib, so it is confirmed that I will be racing. This year will be more a matter of survival, I think. No matter how you slice it, 90 km is a long way to ski.
A closeup
One of my better legs. dotted line is my route, 11.4 is my time in min/km. Winner averaged just over 7 min/km. In terrain like this, compass bearings are your friend, and mine are getting better on a daily basis. Holding a bearing on such crazy rocky terrain is not the same as doing it in a flat area.
Orienteering
Hi everyone. This has been extremely frustrating. I still don't know what I did differently this time so that the program allowed me to actually write stuff here. It took me 45 min of mucking around to get this far, and as far as I can tell, it was just a random happening that this time I can type. So I apologize, I will try to figure out what the problem is. In the meantime, stay posted.
Other than work, I have been spending most of my time for the past month orienteering. Up to today, I have been on a map training every day for over a month. However, tomorrow I am going to take a break. This weekend was the Swedish junior team trial races in Örskoldsvik, about 110 km south of Umeå. The races were held here because it is the closes to alpine terrain within easy access of most Swedes (getting to sites inland would have been logistically challenging for so many competitors). Before I go any further, let me just say that I have been incredibly humbled since I have started running here. I realize I am not - nor will I ever be - an elite orienteer, but the difference between my performances and the best guys here is just astronomical. I am happy if my run time is double the winning time. There is no other endurance sports that that is true. Even in sports I am pretty sucky at (road running) I can count on a time 1.5 times longer than the winner. In sports I am better at (skiing and biking) I can usually come within 1.1 times winning time of the elite guys. So being happy with 2x the winning time is humbling.
The reasons are multiple, but most of all, the terrain here is absolutely crazy. I am attaching a copy of today's map, I don't know how well it will come out. The terrain detail makes your head spin. The whole region is rocky, so the cliff and boulder symbols are very misleading. Back in Canada, a big boulder on the map is a pretty good reference point. Here there are dozens of boulders and the one that is mapped is the most "distinctive" boulder. Which Swedish orienteers can easily identify, because (as a good friend recently pointed out) their first experience orienteering is in-utero. This is not a joke. One of the women in our club is pregnant, probably just in her second trimester, and she came out to the race this weekend. She didn't run, but she was there. That counts, from an exposing-your-unborn-infant-to-
orienteering standpoint.
I am not ashamed to say that this race killed me. I was out for just under 3 hours, and running in this stuff is really hard (winning time was 1:28 by the way). Because everything is rocky, you have really poor footing, so you always have to concentrate on where you are putting your feet or else you fall. Onto another rock, which leads to unpleasant consequences. Happily, I usually absorb the impact with my skull, so damage is minimal. However, if all you do is focus on where you are putting your feet to avoid falling, you quickly lose contact with the map and then you are screwed again because you are lost. So orienteering properly here requires a really rapid ability to look where you are putting your feet, glance at the map, process what you are seeing, identify the next significant feature (also really hard) and repeat. Add to that the fact you are totally exhausted because you are running up a frickin mountain, and you might get an idea of how hard this is. The only good thing is that if I can get by on this terrain (which I am told is pretty much the hardest in the world) then when I get back to the easy "continental" terrain, which is what we mostly have in Canada, it should be a piece of cake. Uh, knock on wood...
Well, as I said, I will attempt to figure out whatever the problem is with this Blogger thingy. We now return you to your regularly scheduled web browsing...
Verka Seduchka II
I may just have to go buy an accordion now.
I am inspired.
I (Heart) Verka Seduchka
So much to say here. Wow. First let me tell you a little about the
Eurovision song contest. This is an annual competition between the best up-and-coming bands from every European nation. It is kind of like Canadian (or American) idol, except it is actually cool.
Unlike Idol, the music varies from stadium rock to metal bands to lounge music to solo singers, to I-have-no-idea-what-the-hell-that-was (see photo above). The format is more stadium rock than the club type format of Idol, so it is way higher energy.
Last night was the Eurovision final in Helsinki, and as far as I can tell, the entire continent came to a standstill last night to watch and vote. I don't really understand the voting process, people could call in to vote, but there was also some kind of mechanism where bands that were about to be eliminated could contribute their votes to the band of their choice. Regardless, the winner was from Serbia - Marija Serifovic. She was a solid performer and
her song was definitely good. It had a certain sweeping quality. It would be great in a Hollywood movie soundtrack at the climactic point in the film where the action goes to slo-mo and the protagonist, having finally overcome his personal demons and in the face of overwhelming odds, runs through a sheet of flame to rescue his spunky but exhausted girlfriend from imminent catastrophy. You know what I am talking about.
I also have to put in a plug for The Ark, who were the entry from Sweden. Their tune
The Worrying Kind was extremely catchy. It rightly gets a lot of airplay over here, and despite their dismal result (18th) they will do well domestically at the very least. They have a simple pop-rock kind of sound. Imagine combining prototypical '50's rock like Bill Haley and the Comets with Abba, and you might be close.
However! My vote (and heart) , went to Verka Seduchka - the contenders from the Ukraine, who are unquestionably the most bizarre band I have ever seen in my life (again, see photo above). I defy you to watch
this clip of their performance last night and not pee your pants laughing. I have watched it a dozen times and I still crack up. Not to mention, the tune has a really good hook. They ended up in second place. For sheer entertainment value, they absolutely should have won. They are spectacular. If they ever, ever come on tour anywhere near where I happen to be, I will definitely go see them. They are so over the top, it defies description. The photo above is of their lead singer. Who, I might add, is a guy. Imagine combining the Daleks from Dr. Who with the Village people, and dressing the result in leiderhosen. Watch the clip. Please, go watch the clip.
