I’m in Quebec for the North American Championships being held at Valcartier. The last time I was here, the last time that I raced in the spring, was in 2006, a few weeks after the Olympic Games. So much has changed since then, but most objectively is that now, I am 25 years old. I’m old.
Snow has arrived for the first time this season in Vermont. Not much, but Friday night was the first time that the highest of the Green Mountains have been white since last spring. It is a welcome sign that winter is not too far away. I was looking through my previous updates to the site and realized that I haven’t posted on a regular basis since January 2006. Though in my last update, I said that I was writing a recap of what I have been up to since I left for Basic Training last February; I really should post an update on what has happened since qualifying for the Olympic Team!
Writing this update is a bit nostalgic in many ways. First, of course it is nostalgic because I have to cover more than half of a year that I have not yet written about on here. Second, I am back in a place where I was four years ago: Jericho, Vermont.
Note: This was as of last week... I leave this evening.
I hope this message finds you all well, with plenty of snow, if skiing is your thing. I’m in Vermont now. “Vermont,” you might be wondering. Yes, Vermont. I am here preparing for next season so that when I come out of Basic Training in late April, I’ll be set to start training right away. “Whoa, Basic Training?” Yes, Basic Training. For the Army National Guard. The National Guard has a biathlon program in which athletes are paid to train and race.
When I first started in this sport, there were dozens and dozens of athletes. Most of them were better than me, and I was certainly ranked far, far back. Training camps were as much about having fun as they were about becoming better athletes. Just qualifying for World Junior Championships was a huge goal. The reward was the clothing we received, the jacket we could proudly wear around the next season that said we had made it.
Tomorrow, I will leave Fort Kent. Just now, I was paging through the guestbook we keep in the entrance of the lodge here. I have been here for four years, ever since June 2002. The previous season did not go as planned or as hoped; I missed qualifying for the Junior World Championship Team, probably by a small margin, maybe great. That’s insignificant now, but it wasn’t then. So I moved here. And I loved it, despite the smallness of the population. The grandness of the woods made up for that, as did the vastness of the silence.
After hugging and seeing my parents off down the access road to the 10th Mountain Lodge in Fort Kent, I set to packing up the most important bag that I would take to Europe. Dozens of skis stood idle against the fiberboard walls of the wax room. Only ten days earlier, I had methodically arranged them according to a well-thought out system based on base structure and ski flex.
Three weeks ago, I skied the trails of Soldier Hollow by the light of a crisp, full moon. The air was cold. There were deer everywhere. Perhaps they were excited by the lunar pull. As my skis glided over the snow and ice, through the sagebrush and grass that make up most of Soldier Hollow’s landscape, I kept looking at the moon. The Native Americans kept time by the moon. I keep place by it. Wherever I go, it is always there, always changing, just as I am always traveling.
I arrived in Heber City yesterday afternoon from Minnesota. It was a clear day, so out the windows of the airplane I could see the mountains surrounding Salt Lake City. Driving out of the city into the mountains, I was impressed by their size and greatness. The temperature was a little hot, but because it is so arid here, it actually felt pleasant. None of that Midwestern humidity!
