Nordic Meisters - Week 1

At my place of employment, we run a weekly cross country race series in the winter called Nordic Meisters. D and I have being skiing in the series for the last few years, and it's good way to keep the fitness up in the winter.

This year I'm hoping to do a little better as I usually finish...well, depending how you look at it, way behind the fast people or just ahead of all the middle people. In other words, I'm not very good. But, like I said, this year I've been running more and I'm in generally much better shape, so I'm hoping to move up a notch or two.

The races are held every Tuesday, so after our Acadia excursion, we headed up on Tuesday morning. At this point, we were in the full grip of the ridiculous thaw that crushed the snowpack throughout New England. It was in the mid 50's in Pinkham Notch. In other words, completely ridiculous. Of course, that meant klister. Klister is the opposite of hard wax in the sense that hard wax is painless and easy to apply. Klister is the stickiest, gunkiest, nastiest, most wonderful stuff on earth. I love skiing on it. I'm good at. I can make it work. Applying it to the ski, however, involves a great deal of care and swearing. Otherwise you end up like this...


"I superglued myself...um...to myself..."

So let's be careful out there.

Anywho, klister applied, I went to ski. It was really, really frickin' hot. Africa hot.

I skied slow. That's the end of the story. Here are the results.

You'll find me in the Men's Classic. I'm the guy getting crushed by all the old guys. That's what I hate about skiing. So much of it is based on technique. With running it's more about who's good a suffering. I'm great at that.