New Years Resolution - Head West …
Lake Placid, New York, - The third significant rain event of year has virtually wiped the weekend’s racing off the map. Jan 1st races at Old forge have been canceled. Jan 2nd Race at Salmon Hills has been canceled. Jan 2nd ski-o Race (what ever that is) at Glens Falls has been canceled and there is little hope that it can be moved to Garnet Hill. Pretty Grim. Ed List and I briefly considered a cross boarder trek to Gatineau but, a check of their website was equally bleak.
A back drop to these reports is the news of literally feet of fresh snow in the Sierra. At times like these one seriously finds oneself considering a move to more reliable snow country such as Park City, Bend or Lake Tahoe. It might be a good idea to start mapping ASM alternatives to the Lake Placid Loppet and the Keskinada Ski Marathon. With this in mind, here’s a event list for the well heeled XC ski racer.
Happy New Year!
There were thirty-nine of us Masters men, so getting out ahead with the double poling was more in the order of “Da-un-do-dow Dow-du-un-do-dow” than it was “Fa la la la la la la la la.” Nonetheless, Sproule and I managed to open a little space ahead of the field before the first of what would be twelve significant climbs on this course that reminded me of a long strand of schizophrenic spaghetti. Climbing these little steep beasts put a stress on my efficiency, tempo, and, eventually, my thighs. I’ve done plyometrics, rollerski hill sprints and a fair base of distance, but nothing replaces this actual experience of racing. I had forgotten the pain of V1ing up hill after nasty hill - but now I’ve gotten a valuable reminder to put sugar in my coffee and tea. 
As the race wore on and the field became increasingly the backup chorus, it became something like a tempo ski with a familiar training partner. We talked of the relative paucity of windsocks in Lake Placid, as compared with West Yellowstone, how it felt as if someone had glued cinder blocks to our tired lungs, and of the poor M7 skiers whose poles we apologetically nipped in passing them up the hills. For a time, we benefited from the prior night’s work in a waxy, smoke-filled room in a corner basement. But just as the booming chorus of “No Sugar Tonight” speaks to the lack of something rather than its richness, I began to feel the Roy Rogers Gold Rush chicken sandwich creep up. I struck an unwelcome kinship to the modern day Cummings, Bachman and Vance Masters (an oddly appropriate name for this Canadian) and I commenced my haunting visions of bloated 70s rockers smiling through their graying beards on stages of Nebraska country fairs. I felt my own gut spilling over the wet, slowing snow. If the muse of nordic skiing had sussurated the way to sweet sleep, I had fallen from her skies. 
As Sproule and I toiled up the twelfth hill, I had well moved to the next chorus of the song; again, a rather defeating one. There was indeed a “New Mother Nature takin’ over,” and he did just that with a couple hundred meters to go—I had nothing to throw at him but the aftermath of Biggie Fries; and though I wished for a redux of Alsgaard/Daehle at Nagano, this Love was clearly gettin’ us all. For him, I raise my bag of goodies and my bottle of wine for getting it right. 
December 19, 2004, Verizon Sports Complex, Lake Placid, NY - Team CW-X athletes Sproule Love and Tim Donahue scored a dominant wire to wire victory and a 1 - 2 finish in today’s NYSEF Season Opener. 
That the New York City boys would do well here was not a forgone conclusion. 4 laps of the tortuous 2.5 km biathlon course is hands down the hardest 1o km I’ve raced. To put it in perspective, a lap consists of little flats bit punctuated by three sweeping technical decents followed each by three steep anaerobic acents. The rhythm consists of working yourself into oxygen deficit and trying desperately to pay it off. Try as you may, your efforts will end in vain. Each lap is a loosing battle the rising red tide of lactic acid flooding your system. It’s not a pretty picture and it gets ugly fast.
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