The Hanover Collaboration

Parts 1, 2 and 3

When we left off, we were at Barnard hut with 10mi of “rolling” terrain. We just finished our mandatory 10min break at about 7AM. We’re in 7th with 8 or so min to 6th and 90 seconds to 8th.

I finally get to take the skins off which feels great (except of course on the uphills) since the skis run free and smooth again. The snow is mostly pretty good since a lot of snowmobiles have been through. In the open fields where they could spread out, it was generally pretty uneven, but in the trees it got packed out pretty well. The machines had chewed the crust into death-cookies ranging from egg to grapefruit in size. Sure it’s not Pisten Bully work but the skating was pretty managable, all things considered.

Pretty much right after the hut we hit a “short” steep climb. It might have been easy enough to be FIS legal. It took us several minutes to climb it which gave our chacers a very good look at us. I was dogging and they looked pretty intent on catching us. Next is a gradual downhill that is faster to double-pole than to try to skate, but before long we are in a long (2mi?) gradual uphill in the woods.

The funny thing about this uphill is the way the snowmobiles have destroyed it. Imagine an ordinary uphill (2-3% grade) and then add to that a cycloid with a period of 4-5’ and an amplitude of 1.5-3’. Some people tried calling it “Washboard” but washboard is like an anoying vibration effect. These were more like breakers in the ocean. They are far too big to be ignored.

You’ll note that the wavelength of the things is less than a ski length. There was a very real ski-breakage threat from the buggers. But they were also far apart enough that you had to do a lot of up and down between them. I don’t think I’ve ever skied on anything worse.

At only 4’ wide, it was too narrow to skate the way you would have to skate it. If you were the strongest man alive, a valid strategy would be double-pole at about the same period as the “washboard” and try to not stop. But did I mention that this was, at least on the averate, a gradual uphill? Even if you weren’t constantly driving your tips into a speed bumb, it would have been a hard to do. Really, the only option available to us was to take the skis off and walk. Frankly, if it were the olympics and there was a section like that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the winner took his skis off too.

Based on the tracks, pretty much everyone in front of us ended up coming to the same conclusion eventually. It was fun to follow the ski tracks and recreate the obvious struggle of the makers. But walking over a mile in ski boots well packed snow (with death cookies) on a cycloidal gradual uphill was no treat either.

The team behind us has closed back to visual range by the time the hill rolls over. I should probably remind you guys that I am thoroughly bonked at this point. It is pretty clear we’re going to get caught if it keeps going like this. Luckily we get a downhill.

The downhill we get is pretty much exactly as if we went down the crap we just came up, except shorter. About 2-3% grade 4’ wide, death cookies and horrible, ghastly bumps.

On the downhills, the ski breakage threat is constantly palpable. Even with all the concentration I can muster, I am putting my skis into positions for which they were not designed¹. Some of them are puctuated by a lurch forward or backward with a nausiating bend of the tip or tail; others simply by a wham of the center of the ski against a bump. In any event, staying up was a complicated dance that took a little bit of poise… Poise and effort.

¹ My Fischers performed most admirably and I was glad I didn’t use my Rossis.

I think I managed to clear the first such downhill. Maybe I bailed because I got going faster than I felt I could control. No, that’s not it. I was totally out of control and I knew it. I should say that at some point perhaps I deemed that the probability of a bad fall got high enough that it warranted a “good” fall (away from my poles, face, trees etc).

Then there was a sequence of alternating ups and downs on the shittiest trail of all time. We walked all the ups. Things that you could classify as flats we walked too. Eb had the brilliant idea of carrying my skis for me as we walked. Typically I would have been upset at the patronage but: The upsides of the cycloidal waves were often several feet high and icy, which made them difficult in ski boots. With my hands free, I could use my poles at these moments which was quite helpful.

At the end of these sections (although always a few meteres earlier than I would have wanted) Eben would cast my skis down with distain and wait for me to put them on. Then he would ski ahead ostensibly to scope out the terrain. I was always expecting some sort of “It’s Okay, run it out!” or “Holy shit, take your skis back off!” but instead he usually just disappeared. I noticed that regardless of how technical the downhill got, I could handle it for about 45 seconds. Then, regardless of how easy it became, I was jelly-legged and unable to hold my technique together. So the obvious new strategy was to ski fast for that long and then sit down. Then stand up, brush myself off and descend again. On one level this was a very frustrating strategy to have to use, but I could at least tell myself, “Man, Tom, you really nailed that first little bit”. It also worked well enough to put that double-X back behind us again.

This continued for about 7 miles with the occasional field to mix things up with only one really notable moment. There was another one of these bumpy death-cookie downhill that began with a sign saying “Go either way… But choose wisely.” As far as I could tell, both ways were unskiable unless you were willing to risk some tight corners at about 35 mph on death cookies. They were both bobsled tracks. Eben skied down a little way and then sat down and took his skis off. Taking my skis off on a downhill hadn’t even ocurred to me as an option. When I saw him do that, I thought “I’m going to be pissed if we have to walk the rest of the way.”

In this section there were some milage markers saying “N miles to Aspen” where N actually meant the number of mile to the top of Ajax. I’m not even sure the N = 0 point was the top of the Gondola—it might have been a hike up to some king of summit. Back at N = 7, it was nice to think that they meant the town of Aspen, but once N got down to about 3, you started to realize that they were dicking with you and that there was a ways left to go since Aspen mountain itself was almost a 3 mile descent.

You might think that it shouldn’t matter since it was all downhill from there but you aren’t thinking about it like we were. We were deducting in our heads the amount of downhill we knew there to be. When it said 2mi we thought “Great there can’t be much more of this stupid snowmobile shit left” since we knew the mountain to be over a mile long. It turned out that at that point there was a full 2 miles of snowmobile shit left to go.

Eventually we get dumped onto artificial snow (as evidenced by the brownish death cookies at the baby-head to toaster range) and we pop out at the top of the Gondola at Ajax. It seems like we got away from the team behind us on the technical stuff as evidenced by the fact that I stopped to pee at about 3 miles to go and didn’t see them².

² Yes, it was fear induced urination. I had to pee for a while but were I not so frightened, I could have easily used certain specialized muscles (which are less out of shape) to hold it back.

Finally, we begin our descent of Ajax. We are going to go down on Star Gulch which is a pretty steady grade blue square. It is about 8:30 and the lift hasn’t opened yet but everything is groomed. There are the tracks of the racers in front of us and those of the ski patrol and nothing else. This is another one of those moments where it would have been pretty fantastic were I on different skis or less tired.

For those of you who’ve never downhill skied on cross country skis I should make a few things clear. On nordic skis, The relation between turning your skis and changing direction is not one-to-one. Most of the time, you turn your skis simply so that the tail-tip vector is not coincident with the fall line and or your velocity vector—the goal being that you don’t go quite as fast. Rather than swishing back and forth across the fall line, a more accurate picture is going essentially straight down the fall line with skis alternately pointing to one side and the other. On classic equipment it is markedly harder to keep control of ones tips and tails while doing this.

As I said earlier, I could ski well for about 45 seconds at a push so tried to take it in bites of about that size. Put another way, I had falls or near-falls that generally necessitated stopping at about 45 second intervals. The mode of failure was to catch the downhill edge of my left ski. (It was always my left ski and I have no idea why.) When you catch an edge, that ski/foot/leg get momentarily pinned in the snow referrence frame or equivalently shot backward in the skier frame. From here there are two sub-scenarios. If the ski that got caught was the downhill ski, game over—there will be no recovery. If it is the uphill ski, all you need to do is ballance on the downhill ski while you sort out your new momentum configuration. This is made more interesting by the random perturbations in ski angle as a result of how impossible it is to stabilize a classic ski while sideslipping like that.

The first few such intervals where on the top of the mountain where the snow was cold and hard and turns were pretty ineffective. We managed a pretty good GS until I caught an edge going fast enough that the fall would have been ugly, just barely salvaged it and decided that it would be prudent to go slower. In the event that the double-X came by me, I would know exactly how much risk it would take to get down the mountain first. I was pretty confident that I would be okay in that scenario assuming that I was at that point uninjured and on unbroken equipment. So I adopted a pretty conservative approach. Eben on the other hand was still fresh enough to be enjoying the downhill—he was skiing it pretty agressively when not waiting for me.

Then we turned and got into the main gulch where there was a shadow on the trail almost exactly like on the trail map. The right hand side of the trail was glazed and the left had gotten a little sun so that the top surface had gotten a little corny. It was bowled out so that both sides sloped towards the bottom. This made the only managable line off-camber. Add to that the fact that I only caught my left ski (I suspected the binding²) and you get a long sideslip. Just to keep up appearances, I would throw in a quick little turn every 10 seconds or so. This went on for about a mile and about 4 control cycles.

² Here’s my best explaination for the asymetrical problem (except maybe that my right turn degrades quicker with fatigue than my left): We had to have “ski retension devices” to ski down the mountain. In our case this meant a piece of elastic with a plastic clip from the binding to our shoelaces. Eben engineered it and it came off pretty well. The plastic clip on my left ski was cracked such that it didn’t attach to my shoelace anymore and just dangled. I think that skiing over the clip could cause enough torque to explain the edge catching.

At the end of the gulch part there is a long flat as you traverse around a ridge. Sick of sideslipping like an old lady, I pointed them from pretty high up only wind-checking to keep the speed under control. The snow was nice and smooth so it wasn’t a problem.

Soon after rounding the ridge we can see the base area All that stands in the way is about a quarter-mile of smooth, well-groomed, slushy corn snow about a hundred feet wide. Eben busts out some very good slalom turns and I try to spoon into them. I fall. Eben is waiting for me on a ridge ahead, presumably the last so I get up and try faster GS turns but the weight of the slush on the length of the ski is too much for me and I fall again. When I catch up, Eb skis down just as well as before to the next knoll, this on only about a hundred feet before the finish. I am no longer planning on impressing anyone so I plod back to him more conservatively.

Eb throws pulls a half-dozen competition quality telemark turns that I guess he carried with him the entire race up his ass and crosses the finish line. I throw about 3 turns that aren’t so much telemark turns as parodies of them, the last one of which sends me sliding across the finish line on me chest… In seventh, with a time of 8:42:40.