Race Report - Royal Gorge Gold Rush (50 km Nordic Freestyle)

Soda Springs, CA, March 23 2003    [Results]

So I woke up at 5:30 and was like, "This is going to be the biggest ass-pounding ever. I hope my pre-race dump is a good one." I looked outside and it was still raining after having rained all night. Great, that's just freaking great. A 50 km cross country ski race in cold rain and slush. The Royal Gorge Gold Rush? More like the Most Painful Experience Ever, except for the time I slammed my head into a tree while chasing a frisbee. Whatever. What does not kill you makes you more deranged. Time to get ready.

In anticipation of extreme pain

My breakfast meal consisted of a Sobe Adrenaline Rush and three slices of toast with butter. I had a sneaking suspicion that this was not going to be enough food, but the clock was ticking and I had to get out the door. The parking lot at the Gorge was this heinous morass of slush mixed with mud which actually kind of looked like a massive pile of diarrhea. I got out of the car and imagined what it would be like to ski through that for 50 km. Mmmm, delicious. A cold drizzle lifted my spirits from -40 to -30 (on a scale from 0 to 100) and I trudged over to the area where everyone was getting ready. Pro-looking dudes were trying out different pairs of skis from a set of like 6 pairs, looking all slick and whatever. I have one pair of skis and I look like a total moron. And I suck, and I'm tired and stuff. I warm up in a sort of ineffectual way and then stand around wasting time until they call us to the line. Then I line up in the second row (behind the "Elite" row where all the badasses are) and freak out because people are lining up too close to me and I'm going to fall over and take everyone out when the gun goes off.

"Royal Gouge"

Let me take a brief moment here to tell you about Royal Gorge. It's a huge-assed cross country ski resort near Donner Summit off of I-80 in Northern California. They claim to have over 200 miles of trails. I don't actually believe that claim because I've skied all the trails and there's no way they add up to 200 miles. Still, it's a huge resort, and it would be a totally awesome place if it weren't run in such an annoyingly commercialized way. They have this tactic of hiring all these 19 year old kids from Australia and New Zealand who are just so psyched to be there that they'll do and say anything in order to keep their jobs. These are the perfect vehicles for the enforcement of Royal Gorge's many infantile rules and generally asinine policies. Say that it's a Tuesday afternoon and there are like 6 cars in the parking lot and you want to buy an afternoon pass. They start selling them at 1pm, it's like 12:52, you'd think they'd just be like, "Screw it, here ya go buddy". Nope. You actually have to wait those 8 minutes, because Royal Gorge is the biggest and the best and they have all these nice Southern Hemisphere kids who are super-courteous in this annoying way like the cop who helpfully directs you to the onramp (which is right in front of your face) after giving you a speeding ticket. You want to be like, "I rail against your policies you capitalist pigs", but all you'd get is a bemused stare and maybe a "Cheeahs, thanks". Actually it's just the girls who are all super-courteous like that. The dudes are always off standing around somewhere, smirking at you in this inscrutable way as if they've been sleeping with your girlfriend for the past 8 months.

Why cross country skiing is better than cycling

OK enough of that crap. The gun goes off and everybody has to double pole until the black flags. When I started doing cross country ski races, I vastly underestimated the importance of this part of the race. If you don't go completely apeshit right from the gun, you end up getting passed by like 50 people who shouldn't be in front of you. In this race it's super, super important to go from the gun because there's like a 4 kilometer descent that begins like 400 meters from the start. So I freak, settle into around 30th position and we all start cruising downhill. There are some totally bad-assed skiers in this race. Justin Wadsworth is the head honcho. This is somebody who gets results on the World Cup circuit against all those crazy Scandinavian freaks. In contrast, I'm a totally insignificant jackass in my second season of racing and I will never amount to anything. But that's one of the things that I really like about cross country ski races. They're often mass start events, which means they're REALLY mass start, which means that if you're at the level where a 17 year old high school senior named Bethany can totally kick your ass, you KNOW it because she DROPS you and you CANNOT ignore it. I think it helps cut down on all the bullshit that you get in sports like cycling where everything is I tell myself, "Retard, you cannot get dropped from this group, stay with them, stay with them". That works for about 2 km. Then we hit the descent and the group pulls away from me as I try not to crash again. Everything's cool at the bottom but when I try to bridge back up, they've somehow gained like 20 seconds on me and I am just dying. Tiny little inclines, which I would blast over in V2 on the first or second laps, become these massive ascents through huge mounds of slush. I flail in slow motion (I'm too tired to flail quickly) and begin to realize what's about to happen.

Oops

Bonking on cross country skis is just about the most painful thing that can happen to you, short of having your face pounded in or something like that. In other sports, you can survive in bonk mode by adapting your technique and not trying as hard. In cross country skiing, you still have to go through all the motions, and you're using pretty much every muscle, so even though you're going a lot slower, it still hurts like hell. Going up hills is the worst of all because your legs no longer have the strength to propel you, so you end up sort of balancing on one ski (with all this pain surging through your leg), in slow motion, while you try, for what seems like an eternity, to launch yourself onto the other ski. What ends up happening is you sort of fall onto that other ski and come to an almost complete stop, and you have to do it all over again, and again, and again, until you get to the top of the hill. And of course, all the while, you're trying desperately to use your upper body to help yourself along; only all the strength is gone from there too, and you've got all this snot hanging from your nose, and you're also too tired to reach behind you and get your water bottle so you can take a drink.

Cheese, blind date

Mental focus goes out the window in situations like this. Usually in a race you're checking in on yourself continuously, gauging your effort and making little adjustments as you go along. In cross country ski bonk mode, it's a lot harder to do that because all the news is bad, and eventually your mind starts to dissociate from the race, and you start thinking about other stuff. I started thinking about food. I saw this movie last night starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche, called "Damage". I would not recommend this as a pre-race film selection. It is closer to "Boxing Helena" than it is to "Chariots of Fire" or whatever (but Juliette Binoche is super-hot, and I have to admit that I spent some time on Google after the movie ended). Anyway, at the end of this movie, Jeremy Irons is standing at a counter cutting himself a couple of slices of cheese in this really methodical, precise way. His life has been ruined beyond description, but he has this cheese. So I started thinking to myself that I would be willing to trade my life for his life if I could have that cheese. I seriously spent like 5 minutes thinking about this, and then I started to laugh out loud. Of course, when the sound came out, it didn't resemble laughter at all. It was more like a coarse coughing sound mixed with a snort, and a bunch of snot came out too. I don't think anybody was around to see it, which is good. Then I started imagining myself on a blind date like in the TV show "Blind Date". A friend of mine was on that show once and supposedly he made out with his date. Anyway, I usually imagine myself being all suave and stuff, kind of in this Robert Redford, "The Horse Whisperer" sort of way where you answer every question with a question and eventually the woman just wants to make out because she's so freaking confused. But this time I was thinking that it would be cool if I could just slither down to the floor at dinner and kind of lie there quietly curled up under the table while my date talked about her career and whatever. She'd be like, "what's wrong?" and I'd just breathe a faint "I'm just going to lie here for a while, keep talking". The TV camera would focus on me under the table and I'd have this slack-jawed expression and there would be drool on the floor. My eyes would be half open, half closed, focused on infinity.

Wow, I really suck

After about 20 minutes of this, I came to the last couple of kilometers, which include the main hill on the course. I just wanted to get up it without having to stop. The gradient is seriously like 4 percent, which is not at all bad. Still, I think my average speed was somewhere in the vicinity of 8 to 10 kilometers an hour, which is utterly pathetic. It had been a while since I had been passed by anyone (I had given up two places so far due to my bonk) and I started having visions of this huge pack of racers cruising by me and inadvertently knocking me off the trail into a pile of snow where I would lie motionless until someone found me. In the end, only three more skiers passed me before the finish line. Each time, I summoned all my strength and was able to stay with the passing skier for about 10 seconds. I considered this a major victory and then sank back into a morass of fatigue and apathy. The final 400 meters were unspeakable. I had some trouble seeing and focusing on things. Like, I would have to look at someone for around 5 full seconds before I could make out their face and figure out if if was someone I knew. I coasted down the final stretch to the finish and limped over to the table where they had the food. There were pieces of bagel with cream cheese on them, and I had around 80 or 90 before the cold rain forced me to my car.

By my calculations, I lost about 8 minutes in the final 10 kilometers. Definitely one of my more impressive bonk results - but nowhere near the same league as my 2002 Everest Challenge Bonk, where I had to dismount my bike 4 times in the final kilometer of a 20 km climb that took me something like 3 hours to do. That episode remains unchallenged as my most unbelievably horrific bonk of all time, and I don't think I have the will to surpass it.

Sappy and trite conclusion

So like I said this is my second season cross country skiing seriously. As you can probably tell, I totally love it and I think I'm going to keep doing it and collecting these little anecdotes of pain as I go. Maybe somewhere along the line I'll figure out how to race the way I believe I can. If that happens, that's great. If not, it's still totally awesome. There's nothing like busting out at 30 k an hour for a little while on those warm spring mornings with rocket-fast freeze-thaw snow and nobody around. I wouldn't give that up for anything.