So I have been trying to find out details about what to wear. I get the distinct impression that weddings happen so infrequently, nobody really knows anymore. Answers have varied from "goretex jacket" to "suit and tie" to "shirt & tie".
The wedding has yet to start and it is already entertaining.
Today my friend Jörgen is getting hitched. This is extremely unusual in Sweden, so all the old folks are all excited. Jörgen and Eva are getting married outside and happily it looks like a rather nice day. Overcast, but warm and not too windy. This presents a bit of a dress issue, however. We will be outside for quite a while, in a park beside the Baltic. It will probably be quite muddy. So although a suit is in order, what to do for footwear? I am kind of leaning towards my hiking boots. Jörgen will appreciate that, I think. He is about the outdoorsiest guy I know. Kind of like a Swedish Paul Bunyan.
I will get some photos to post later on. I don't know how long this will go - the reception could go on for quite a while.
One interesting thing about this wedding is that instead of gifts, Jörgen and Eva have asked their guests to contribute to the cost of the reception. This seems quite intelligent. They are both adults, and have their household established (they have lived together for a few years) so they don't need 5 more toasters. However, having a nice party for their wedding could be quite expensive so a contribution from the guests in lieu of a gift makes sense.
OK, I have to go for a run before I get dressed. Later
When someone in North America says "Geez, you're lucky" the implicit meaning seems to be that you have been the benefactor of a fortunate but random circumstance. As we spend our time sitting on this little blue marble on the western spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, sometimes things fall into place and you happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Not so in Sweden. When someone says your are lucky, they seem to mean that luck is a skill or a personal quality, like having nice teeth or a good combover. In other words, the implied meaning is that luck is a personal trait. Some people have it, some people don't.
Now, don't get me wrong here. I have not interviewed a bunch of Swedes about their views on this. It just occurred to me today when someone told me I was lucky. It is just that the way they said it left me feeling like somehow they thought I had something to do with it. As if I had skilfully managed my luckiness.
I seem to recall that the Vikings thought that luck was even more important a quality in a leader than intelligence. Given the Viking job description (sail uncharted waters and attack heavily defended forts while wearing a loincloth) I could see how you would want to delude yourself that maybe the Gods were smiling on the the dude who was calling the shots.
Now, I will admit that I have had a streak of unusual good fortune the past few years. I seem to end up in the right place at the right time for good things to happen. But is it a skill? Hmmm. Perhaps that isn't so outlandish as it sounds. Being lucky is probably heavily related to having decent people skills. When people like you, good things happen. And nobody would deny that people skills are - well, a skill. Even stuff that seems random can be traced back to knowing someone who got you in touch with someone...
My car is a great example. When I arrived here, one of my friends (and a regular reader), Nevin told me he thought he had heard that some folks he knew from out west were in Umeå. That is how I met the Ellises. The Ellises were on sabbatical here in Umeå and they left in October. When they left, they wanted to keep their car because they were coming back this summer. So they offered me a sweetheart deal to "rent" it over the winter. Lucky? Maybe. If I didn't get along so well with Nev, and then get along so well with the Ellises in turn though, it never would have happened.
I will concede, however, that it is a bit weird that I win roulette every time I walk into a casino. I have no interest in gambling (see previous post) but whenever I get dragged into a casino, I play roulette exactly one time. I bet on red. it is about as close to 50/50 as you can get in a casino, and I haven't lost since my streak began in Monaco in 2002. I don't know how many times I have won, but I have never, ever walked out of a casino with less money than I started with. And that thing with meeting Terese Pirak in the restaurant in Jokkmokk... yeah, that is a bit hard to explain too.
OK, maybe I am lucky. Oh well, it is better than being unlucky.
No snarky comments about my classic waxing, thank you very much.
That was a nice way to end the ski season. I finally got to do a ski-o race and against all odds, apparently I won.
This is nice because it is a bit of confirmation that - classic ski loppets notwithstanding - I am not a total sack. Ski-o is anything-goes, so skating is allowed. The trick is choosing routes that allow you to use skating technique. If you choose to ski uphill on a narrow trail, skating will not do you much good. So as you look at your map you have to decide whether or not you will save more time by taking a longer route and skating, or by taking a short cut and having to double pole through brush. Of course, skiing downhill on narrow trails is about as fast as on skating trails, so you also have to watch the contour lines.
Ski-o is a lot easier technically than "real" orienteering because 90% of it is on trails. Therefore, it is a lot easier to memorize your route. The tricks are to figure out the best route and to ski hard while not missing any critical trail junctions. I find it to be a lot of fun and less frustrating than real orienteering can be. I appreciate being able to put my head down occasionally and just ski really hard without worrying that you will get hopelessly lost.
The race was in my backyard, in Gammlia park. This was not as big of an advantage as you might think because I have spent very little time skiing in Gammlia this year. It is really hilly and therefore inappropriate for training for the Vasaloppet.
I took advantage of the awesome spring skiing conditions to go out to the Bothnia this morning. Crust skiing was perfect, you could just scoot along the surface with almost no friction at all. I skied along the shore for the first hour, then headed straight out towards Finland. Eventually, I got to a point where all I could see was ice and sky. It was probably the closest I will get to skiing in the Arctic. It was quite amazing. I can see how you can easily lose your bearings and get lost. There are simply no visual cues. Happily, when you leave ski tracks behind you, it is pretty hard to get lost.
Last night I went to a stag party organized for Jörgen. Jörgen is the guy I wrote about in the fall for taking me up to his experimental site on the mires. Jörgen is getting married the 31st, he defended his Ph.D. last month, and his first baby arrived a few weeks ago.
It will have been a big year for him.
Anyhow, the stag party in Sweden does not involve the kind of stupidity that one typically thinks is normal during a Canadian stag party. The majority of the time was spent in an amazing rustic sauna with a sod roof and a wood burning stove. No electricity, of course, so it is lit with candles. Very, very cool. I wanted to take pictures, but 1) they never would have turned out because the light was so dim. 2) taking my camera into an environment of 75 degrees C and 100 % humidity is not a smart thing to do, and 3) any pics that did turn out would have been of a bunch of naked, sweaty dudes holding beer cans. Inte bra.
Towards the end of the evening (after a fair amount of beer had been consumed) a conversation began in the sauna about the tomte (little people) who are never seen but can either cause mischief or help you out depending on various factors - like, if you are nice to them, or if you accidentally build your house over one of their paths. I don't think tomte can be translated, but it would be close to elves or leprechauns, I think. It was a serious conversation, about how they are slowly disappearing because they have nowhere to go nowadays. This fits with an article I read a while back (I can't find it now of course) which claims that a significant percentage of the adult population in Sweden and Norway believes in these little people. Moreso in the rural areas. It could be argued that Umeå is as close to a rural area as an urban area can be, though.
One more thing for a North American to digest. But again, something I find quite charming.
I keep track of readership traffic on this site. It is interesting to see where people are logging in from. I am pretty good at figuring out which folks are regulars and who are surfers. I get a surprising number of hits from China and Indonesia for some reason. I am also pretty good at figuring out who the regulars are based on where they log in from.
There is one, however, that baffles me. Mountain View, California. Someone from Mountain View logs on regularly, and I have no clue who it is. So, please, Mr. or Ms. Mountain View, please drop a line in the Comments to let me know who you are. The suspense is killing me.
This is a big news item in Europe - Knut the baby Polar bear in Berlin. His mother rejected him and he is being raised by hand. I defy anyone to watch this clip and not go awwww..... Believe it or not, "animal rights" activists want to put him down rather than be raised by humans. Weird.
These photos were hanging in Håkon's Hall which is where the Birkebeiner should have finished. I took digital photos of the photos, so there are some reflections from the glass, but you get the idea. There were a whole bunch of these, I thought they looked really cool.
Hi everyone. I will be in Iceland from 27 June to 8 July. I would be happy to have a travel partner (s). If anyone is interested, drop me an e-mail, or leave a comment here. I am giving you over 3 months heads up! No excuses, people.
This even applies to anyone who I have never met and just happens to read this blog.
A warning: this will be a low cost, high activity outdoors-oriented trip. Details are still sketchy, but it will involve sleeping either outside or in hostels, lots of hiking, lots of mountain biking, and plenty of dips in hotsprings. I may spring for a hotel on the final day just so I can clean up a bit for the trip home. But that is it.
This would be why Norwegians kick everyone's collective asses in nordic sports. I filmed this besides Håkon's Hall, the big sports arena where the Birkebeiner should have finished. Notice that some of the kids are wearing racing bibs - just because they think racing bibs are cool. Although the video doesn't show it well, these kids are going fast, the jump is big and they are travelling about 5 m through the air. I went to the top of this jump with the idea of giving it a try, but I decided I value my equipment too much.
The Norwegian Birkebeiner was first run in 1932 and has run every year since then. In 75 years, the Birkebeiner has never been cancelled.
Until 2007, when Jeff Lewis decided to enter.
For some reason, this makes me think of Mr Warden at Camp Algonkian Island scowling and somberly pronouncing "The Norwegian Birkebeiner was founded in 1932. Since that time, it has never been cancelled. Shape up, or you don't eat."
I doubt anybody will get that reference. Well, maybe one. Any guesses are welcome in the Comments to this entry.
What is even weirder is why it was cancelled. Wind. Apparently there were gale force winds blowing over the fjell (mountain highlands) that allegedly reached 130 km/hr. Not because of anything understandable like a lack of snow or a freak snowstorm or frigid temperatures. Wind. Sheesh.
On top of that is that the race was only cancelled after we had all started. All 13 000 of us. As I skied into the second aid station, there was a huge gaggle of people standing around.
"Great!" I thought. " I am going to pass a whole bunch of people."
Or maybe not. I get to the other end of the aid station to see a big rope across the trail and an even bigger Norweigan dude who was clearly having a very bad day yelling at skiers to NOT CROSS THIS ROPE!!! (He actually said that in Norwegian, but I am incredibly perceptive about these things.) So I go up to another dude who looked kind of in charge and asked what was going on.
"The race is cancelled." He helpfully explained. "Huh? You mean, like temporarily?" "No. It is over. " "Uhhh.... why?" "Because it is windy." "No, seriously."
I almost said something snarky about how I thought Norwegians were supposed to be tough, but looking at this dude's face I quickly changed my mind. The organizers were not in a joking mood.
So 13 000 people turned around and skied back to the start line.
Think about the logistics of that for a second. 13 000 people don't turn around on a dime.
All I could think about as I skied back down that mountain was how happy I was that I wasn't on the organizing committee. 13 000 bags that were in transit from the start to the finish in dozens of trucks had to be stopped and turned around. 13 000 people had to be transported from the start to the finish in Lillehammer. There was no food, no hot showers, nothing at the start. I kept thinking "Is there the least chance that they have a contingency plan for something like this?" It seems pretty unlikely, but hey, you never know. I think everyone involved was pretty lucky that the temperature was so mild. This would have turned out quite differently had it been -20.
This was such an enormous gong show, it redefines anything I have previously witnessed. Whoever was responsible for making the call to cancel is one ballsy dude. He is going to have an entire nation to answer to tomorrow morning. Of course, it was probably the correct decision, but it still took guts to make it. All things considered though, it all went quite well. I was in Lillehammer within 3 hours of being stopped on the trail, and was reunited with my bag after about 9 hours. In the meantime I went up to the ski stadium and did tourist stuff.
So many other things went wrong that it almost seems inappropriate to mention that it was - surprise, surprise - exactly 0 degrees at the start and that I had to stop to rewax (re-klister) twice in the first 10 km. Double poling was not an option this time, since we were basically skiing up a mountain.
I am still in Oslo, but I will upload some pics when I get home tomorrow.
One of the unforeseen advantages that I have discovered in writing this blog is that I find myself immediately thinking "This will make a great blog entry" every time something disastrous happens. It puts things in perspective. Rather than get upset I end up looking at the disaster as a source of merriment and entertainment. Although I suspect the organizing committee would not agree with me on that count at all.
I just spent a few hours on the web tracking down cheap flights to go visit my aunt and grandparents in Switzerland. This process gets very complicated very quickly when you need to deal with up to four different airlines, two of which (easyjet and Ryanair) are budget airlines. Living in Umeå, you have no choice but to start your journey with either SAS or FlyNordic because they are the only two airlines with routes up here. From Stockholm, RyanAir operates flights to about 10 different cities. However, they fly out of a small airport 1 hour south of Stockholm which is at least a 1h30 voyage from Arlanda airport where the SAS and RyanAir flights arrive. Of course, none of the cities RyanAir flys to from Stockholm are anywhere near Switzerland. In fact, RyanAir does not fly to Switzerland at all from any destination. EasyJet does, though. Unfortunately, the only airport that both EasyJet and RyanAir fly into together is Stanstead in London. The early RyanAir flight from Stockholm arrives in time for the EasyJet flight to Basle, but the return trip doesn't work. So I would need to get a hotel in London overnight and catch the RyanAir...
You get the idea. Although the RyanAir and Easyjet tickets were ridiculously cheap as usual, when you factor in the cost of at least two overnight layovers Stockholm and London), plus ground transport between airports, the total cost was more than just taking a full fare SAS flight which would get me from Umeå to Zurich in about 5 hours with little to no aggravation created by having to shlepp my way between airports in cities I have never been to before.
Rule of thumb: if a trip requires more than 1 low cost airline and involves more than 4 legs (return), it is probably cheaper to just go with the regular carrier.
Well, Norway is pretty much as advertised. Beautiful, snowy, ski-crazy and the land of ridiculously expensive beer.
I went to see the Canadians ski the Holmenkollen World Cup biathlon this past weekend with my boss Jan Sjöström. As it was last November in Östersund, it was a treat to be accepted into the inner circle of these phenomenal athletes. It was also my priviledge to pick up the tab when we went out Friday night in downtown Oslo. Cost of 10 beers? 750 Norwegian crowns. That would be roughly $140 Canadian dollars. Rather than feeling stiffed, I feel a sense of power. I paid for Norwegian beer and survived! I can handle anything now! I am a man!
Oslo is pretty much my dream city despite the cost of beer. It is small, pretty, and it has public transport up to world class cross country ski trails. Holmenkollen is a stop on the city's light rail, line number 1. If my darn camera hadn't crapped out, I would have taken a photo of the train full of people dressed in spandex and carrying skis and poles. It was very cool.
I got to help Tom Zidek, the wax tech with a bit of ski prep. Tom is the celebrity Canadian dude in Sweden right now because of his relationship with Anna Carin Olaffson, the world champion biathlete. It was interesting to hang out with the two of them. Anna Carin is very nice, and a bit shy I think. I can't imagine what life must be like for her in the media spotlight all the time.
Tom will be spending some time in Sweden this spring, and I have been trying to convince him to some to the Tiomila orienteering race at the end of April. He is a serious adventure racer, so it should be right down his alley. Swedish biathlon championships are in Sollefteå in a few weeks, which is 150 km north of Umeå, so I may head up there in a few weeks to watch.
It was really cool to ski the famous Holmenkollen trails. They are tough! The 16.7 km loop that is used for the famous Holmenkollen 50 km is just constantly rolling up and down. There is very little time to rest. It was cool to ski there and think of the history of that trail.
The problem with writing about an intense weekend is that no matter how much you write, you will always leave something out. As a summary: The Canadian biathlon team is a great bunch of people. Holmenkollen is amazing. Oslo is even better.
I do have a few photos that were taken before my camera crapped out, and as soon as I have new batteries I will put them up. Stay tuned.
I leave tomorrow morning for Oslo, ostentatiously to present my work to the Norwegian armed forces research institute (FFI), but in reality to go see the biathlon World Cup in Holmenkollen and hang out with my old biathlon friends.
Holmenkollen, along with Lahti Finland and Falun Sweden is one of the Holy Grails of skiing. The Holmenkollen 50 km ski race course is legendary, and the ski jump is one of the landmarks of Oslo. I am really looking forward to this pilgrimmage. The Holmenkollen Ski Festival started in 1892 and the 50 km (called the 5-mile in Scandinavia) is still the premiere event, which is nice in this day and age of short attention spans. It has been won by my heros Vegard Ulvang (3 times!), Juha Mieto, and Thomas Wassberg.
Of course, this is also the first time I will set foot in Norway, the home of Bjorn Daehlie, Vegard Ulvang, Thomas Alsgaard, Ole Einar Bjornedalen, and so many other great skiers. That alone makes me very excited.
I get back Sunday night, then leave next Wednesday to race in the Norwegian Birkebeiner, the biggest ski loppet in Norway, which ends in Lillehammer.
Lillehammer will obviously be another pilgimmage of sorts for me. The Birkebeiner finishes in the Olympic stadium, on the very same finish line where Silvio Fauner robbed Bjorn Daehlie and Norway of the 4x10 km relay in the 1994 Olympics. Silvio drafted Bjorn around the entire last lap and then out sprinted him for the win in a finish that broke my heart. I had been in the hospital for a few weeks at the time for a lump in my neck and I forced the nurse to let me get out of bed to watch that race. That Norwegian team was perhaps the greatest team ever assembled, Sture Siverten, Vegard Ulvang, Thomas Alsgaard and Bjorn. I watched that race in my ridiculous assless hospital smock as those accursed Italian steroid monkeys drafted my Norwegians lap after lap after lap. When Fauner outsprinted Bjorn, I actually cried. Then the stupid nurse came in and told me that if she had known I was going to get so upset she wouldn't have let me watch. Bitch.
I may have to bring a small Italian flag and burn it on that finish line.
Well I certainly didn't know this post was going to go in this direction when I started. How interesting.
According to the Dave Orr Law of Notoriety, in the short term that platoon commander can expect some disciplinary action, but in the long term his career advancement will go into warp drive because absolutely everybody will know him. Having senior officers know your name is the first necessary step to getting a promotion.
Dave Orr was a classmate of mine at the Royal Military College and a military engineer officer. During the Manitoba floods the year after our graduation, Lt. Dave ordered a dump truck to dump its load of gravel in the middle of a highway because he was pissed off that the soldiers manning a checkpoint wouldn't let him through. Dave was one of the first guys in my class to be promoted to Major.
There were only 10177 finishers. The last guy in was Göran Lundgren in 11:53:23.
He deserves a special medal, I think.
I also apologize for the poor editing in the long post below. I didn't re-read it before posting and there are some grammatical errors. I could correct them now I guess, but I am feeling lazy and sack-like.
I think I first became aware of the Vasaloppet by reading an article in Cross Country Skier magazine when I was about 12 which was written by 17 year old Pete Vordenberg (who is now the U.S. ski team head coach). Pete was a top U.S. junior who decided to spend a year in Sweden on exchange and - naturally - participated in the Vasaloppet. Against all odds, he ended up skiing part of the race in the lead group while the television announcers in the helicopter frantically tried to figure out who this guy was, then finally deciding that someone else must be skiing in his bib because it was impossible that a teenager from the U.S. would be doing so well.
I thought that was an awesome story. I still do.
So I would hazard a guess that I have known about and been interested in the Vasaloppet for about 20 years or so. There are other races that are more challenging http://www.keskinada.com/, races which are longer http://www.boreal100kloppet.ca/ and even races with more participants http://www.engadin-skimarathon.ch/ but in terms of prestige and respect in the xc-ski world, nothing comes close to the Vasaloppet. I can't think of another race - in any sport, actually - that has world class athletes who have decided to specialized their training for this one single event. These guys don't care about the Olympics, World Cups, World Championships or even making the national Swedish team. The truth is, they are so highly specialized for the Vasaloppet that they could not compete in anything else. But in the Vasaloppet, they are untouchable. Gunde Svan, Thomas Wassberg and Bjorn Daehlie - all of them were the best skiers in the world at one time. Each had multiple wins in the Olympics and World Championships. All of them tried the Vasaloppet. And they all got their butts kicked. By guys who weren't even on the Swedish national cross country ski team.
All that to say that I think there is a certain romance about the Vasaloppet that is hard to understand unless you are a) Swedish, or b) a real xc ski enthusiast.
30 min before the start. People claim their spot by putting their skis and poles up like a tent
I was thinking about this as I stood on the start line in the 2nd seed. It would be laying it on a bit thick to say I was overwhelmed to be there, but I was certainly very happy to be there. It is just really nice to be in the midst of 15 000 people who love this sport as much as you do. Especially when you are accustomed to having people's eyes glaze over as soon as you say you like xc skiing.
Even at the start, though, I was a bit worried about the condition of the snow : it was -2 C and warming up. Kick waxing for temperatures around 0 C are notoriously difficult to wax for. Either you wax too soft, and you end up with a big ball of snow stuck to your skis, or you wax too hard and have no kick at all. However, there was no point dwelling on it because there was nothing much I could do about the weather, and I certainly knew I didn't have the technical waxing skill to figure out the best wax to put on. So I just kind of figured I would see what would happen.
The start was not as chaotic as I had feared. I think this was largely because I was up front in the 2nd seed. The biggest uphill of the race is in the first 3 km, and the trail narrows from about 50 lanes to 4 lanes in those 3 km. It is historically a gigantic bottleneck, with the folks in the last seed waiting around for up to an hour just to start climbing the hill. But in my seed we flowed up the hill without hardly slowing down. Everyone in my seed were fairly good skiers, and I think they all generally understood that what happened in the first 3 km of a 90 km race had no importance at all on the final results. So there was very little jostling for position or aggressiveness. I was pleasantly surprised. What I had not counted on was how hard it is to pass anyone when there are only a few ski tracks and they are all totally full. It is like trying to pass cars in a traffic jam. Granted, everyone was moving forward at a good speed, but there was no room to pass anywhere. It was like that for the first 25 km at least. After that, the trail opened up somewhat. Of course, I had absolutely no kick. I stopped 4 times to try to fix my wax, and every time absolutely nothing changed. My glide was actually fairly good, and I was really worried about messing up my glide with too soft a grip wax. I knew that double poling was critical in this race, and slow skis would be deadly. The second thing I didn't count on was that although the Vasaloppet is generally very flat, there are still some pretty good hills. If you don't have any kick wax, you have no choice but to double pole up those hills. Which of course I had to do. This was OK for the first half of the race, but by the second half I knew I was going to be in trouble. At about 70 km my back and arm muscles totally gave out. After that I had to deal with the frustrating situation of having my aerobic engine on idle because my chassis couldn't handle the strain. I think my heartrate over those final 20 km never went above 120 or 130 beats per minute - a slow training pace. I lost 225 positions over those last 20 km. That sucked. Another thing that sucked was that my carbo loading seemed pretty inefficient. I always err heavily on the conservative side when figuring out how much food to bring on a race because I hate bonking. This race was one of those times that my conservative estimate was barely enough. I had 2 big waterbottles filled with calorie-laden sport shakes - I figure each bottle had about 1000 calories in it. For comparison, an average inactive male requires 2000 calories a day, total. I also brought 2 bananas and some gels. I had eaten all of it by about 50 km, along with lots of blueberry soup and sport drinks at the aid stations. Despite that, I barely held off a bonk during the race. Digesting that much food in a race is not easy. After the second waterbottle, I barfed. Just a little, and just into my mouth, you know? Not like a projectile vomit or anything. But definitely a puke. This hardly ever happens to me,and I can't say that I recommend it.
I was quite happy to see the finish line. I was not so happy to see my result. I was hoping for a top 500 result, and I didn't even break 1000. In fact, by placing 1052, I will lose my 2nd seed in next year's race by 52 places. That really sucks.
And yes, there will be a next year's race. I don't plan on leaving the Vasaloppet on a bad footing. Now I have something to prove. Especially because Phil Shaw placed 126th. I have raced Phil since I was in high school, and I had no idea he was here. I only found out when one of my colleagues called me with the results fresh off the Internet and told me that the top Canadian was... Phil Shaw. I beat Phil at the Montebello 25 km ski race in about 1989 or so. I run into him once every couple of years at a ski race. If Phil can place 126th, then I can too.
Vasaloppet 2008: Top 126. You read it here first.
P.S. Pete Vordenberg eventually bonked and ended up out of the top 100, as I recall. I have searched the Web for this story, in vain.
Number of registered Vasaloppet participants: 15 735 Number of Vasaloppet finishers: 13 082 Winning time: 4:43:40 Time between men's winner and women's winner: 4 minutes 43 seconds How much slower than average winning time was: 45 minutes My time: 5:32:09 My time after winner: 48:29 My time as % of winner's time: 85.4% My placing: 1052 Placing as % of total competitors: 6.7% Number of Canadians who beat me: 2 Number of women who beat me: 16 Number of guys with one leg who beat me: 1 Temperature at start of race: -2 C Temperature at finish: +1 C Number of times I rewaxed in first 45 km: 4 Point in the race I gave up on rewaxing: 45 km Time lost rewaxing: lots Amount I hate classic waxing: lots Total distance of race: 90 km Number of kilometers I double poled: 90 Number of kilometers I had amazing grip: 0 Distance at which my back muscles failed: 70 km Number of places I lost in last 20 km: 225 Number of calories I consumed during race (approx.): 4000 Number of times I barfed: 1
I didn't mention it in the last message, but for those who don't know, the Vasaloppet is this Sunday. I am deep in my carbo load, and I never want to see another noodle again. Blech. The only thing that keeps me going is the cold fear of bonking 25 km away from the finish line. Anything I can do to prevent that is worth it. Even if my eyes are gradually turning semolina yellow.
The final 100 meters
