Author Archive | Adam Terko

The wacky Halloween storm laid another well-planned NENSA rollerski race to waste…a big bummer, but it seems like teams across the region made up for it with races of their own. That’s the New England spirit for sure! UVM was racing up Bolton, St Mikes was racing at Mud Pond, and the Pugs were racing up Road 101 with some friends from Ford Sayre and Putney.

It was the first-official Smuggs Invite! Actually, anyone was welcome so it wasn’t quite an “invitational”, but in light of the Trapps Invitational being cancelled the name just needed to fit. You could say things were pretty official: we had Rosemary timing with her computer, and the starter and Chief Of Course was none other than US Biathlon CEO Max Cobb. That freed me up to drive the van and capture the action on film (see below).

It wasn’t everyone’s best day out there, which is bound to happen. BUT, what makes me the most excited for winter was seeing just how well everyone was skiing regardless of how their race was going. This was a pretty tough course climbing all the way up our favorite Road 101. Much like the Trapps race it is rolling at the start before a very steep finish to make the ending, when you’re most tired, the toughest segment. As the video shows though, there were a lot of surges at the top of the hill, and a lot of high-quality skiing:

Smuggs Invite Results:

Congrats to Ava Thurston who took home the State title at Thetford last weekend…it should be noted that Ava was the fastest runner in ALL divisions! Way to go!

Many of our Juniors have been racing hard for their XC teams all fall, and got to put it all on the line at the State Meet. Thetford’s course is actually a hilly, twisty XC ski course designed by John Morton, so it’s no surprise to see Nordic names racing strong. Some will head to New Englands while others are finished with one season and beginning to turn the focus toward snow.

The Middle School championships were a day later in some BRUTAL conditions at Hard’Ack. Way to tough it out!

You can read up on Ava’s win in the Waterbury Record right here.

On a whim and thanks to a text conversation on Friday night between Ben Lustgarten and Hanna, we were lucky enough to have Ben join us for some bounding intervals on Saturday. All week, these intervals had received complaints from the gang…

“The worst thing we do”

“These make me grumpy just thinking about them!”

“Why don’t we go mountain biking instead”

So it goes without saying that motivation seemed low going into these. Luckily it was in a begrudging way for the most part. People realize that hard bounding workouts can be some of the best ways to develop those last few drops of fuel that tops-off the tank after a summer of good training. It’s just that, well, it takes a lot of effort to get that reward.

Getting situated before the start

I like to think of hard bounding intervals as an epic character-building experience. Sure, a lone skier striding through a farm field with a barn in the background is an iconic scene. But for a racer, the image of a lone figure in mid-bound up a steep hill in the woods (often at either extreme of soaked in sweat or drenched in sleet and snow) is easy to come back to for motivation. I encouraged this imagery on Saturday, although spirits were still a bit low. Maybe this also had something to do with Ben’s warmup which involved a lengthy 45 minutes at a pretty darn fast running pace! As it got harder and harder to handle just the warmup it was good to remember that was a World Cup skier we were being dragged around in the woods behind. New experiences and takeaways.

We have a system that I think works really well for this workout. It should be noted that this becomes MUCH easier with the use of a van! In the past we’ve done bounding up the ski hill, or alternatively at Honey Hollow down the road. In both cases, the only way back down after the end is to run all downhill. For this workout, we met at the alpine parking lot and then actually shuttled DOWN to the start of the Broadway trail which is actually a snowmobile/Catamount trail segment a ways down the access road. That way, the intervals end at the same elevation as the cars, meaning we can cooldown on mixed terrain rather than destroying our legs and joints even more. So with the shuttling underway and the long hill ahead of us, we squashed the last of the negativity within the first interval and continued up, up, up.

Follow Ben…if you can!

With some varying recovery times among the group, Ben was able to leapfrog through the group a few times during the early intervals so that most people got a chance to hang with him for as long as they could. That alone was character-building even if it was an early interval…these take a lot out of you. The real sign that we have some strong skiers in this group: the more intervals completed and the higher up the hill we got, the more people seemed motivated for more. At first it was a challenge to do 4, then everyone did 5, most did 6, and the number 7 was tackled!

Ready for another one?

For the last intervals, all the cards were on the table! Full-gas, as Matt Whitcomb would say. Hunched on the ground, breathing at maximum, and all that negative energy converted to ski racing energy. The sign that we had completely turned the tables from a doldrums of the chilly arrival earlier that morning was when we got back to the van and the team asked if we could hike up the alpine mountain for a cooldown. The fear of the hills had turned into a hunger for the climb, so up we went even further.

Onward and upward