UVM Journal: Quebec

by Eric Carter
November 28, 2005

The UVM Ski Team returned yesterday from our week long training camp in Quebec. We left for Canada last Saturday and stayed just over a week. The week leading up to camp was pretty stressful; most of my teachers assigned some sort of final paper or project due on Monday (today) so I had lots of homework to get done while I was gone. I have also been trying to deal with some roommate issues that I mentioned last time.

First off is my room situation; at the beginning of the year I was assigned to live in a quad room, which means I live in a large room with three other people. Our room also happens to be the lounge for our floor so one nice thing is that its pretty big. I was a little worried about living in a room with three other people but when I met my roommates on move-in day, they seemed like reasonably cool guys. As the semester got started my roommates settled in and made themselves comfortable. I usually go to bed around 9:45 or 10:00 but they usually stay up partying until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. At first they were pretty cool about letting me turn off the lights early and keeping the noise down but as they began to realize that our huge room was the perfect party room this went out the window. I tried everything to get to sleep, I hung sheets around my bed so it was dark, I wore headphones and I even tried sleeping pills. This didn’t help; I started to lose sleep and got sick pretty quick. I talked to my coach and the student-athlete liaison and they said that I needed to talk to the residential life representative in my dorm. When I went to talk to the representative, he explained that the reason that I was in a forced quad is that there were literally no other spaces to put students. People were living in lounges, study halls, bike rooms, anywhere there was space. When I told him I was having difficulty sleeping and was having trouble doing homework and getting sick. He said that I needed to talk to my roommates. He suggested that we all sit down with him to work it out. I told him that my roommates were drinking and partying in the room. He said his stance on underage drinking and partying was: “I don’t say kids should drink and I don’t tell them they shouldn’t, I just say be responsible”. I knew I wasn't getting anywhere with the representative and told him I would think about it and get back to him. My dad talked to the director of residential life at UVM and they decided the best temporary option would be to sleep in the room of two of my teammates who had a futon and said I would be welcome to stay. At the end of the semester I will get to move into a single in a brand new dormitory that is still under construction.

While this situation might seem like something you would want to avoid at all costs, I can safetly say that 95% of all the people I know are more than satisfied with their roommates. The chances of being forced into a quad or triple room are very small, I just got unlucky. What matters is that the issue is being solved.  It's going somewhat slowly, but on some campuses it may not be dealt with at all. While I love UVM, I do want people to know some of the other things that go on in college besides homework and awesome skiing.

Camp started on Saturday with getting up brutally early to finish packing. Since we were staying for a week I brought almost every piece of ski clothing I own. Even though I tried to pack as little as possible I still ended up with 4 huge bags full of stuff. We left Burlington around 7:30 and started driving north. We hit the border an hour later after only one wrong turn. Unfortunately, Chris Ziegler (Zigs) wasn't with us because he was still sick with a fever from the last few days. He planned on meeting us up two days later with another teammate who had to stay back for class. As soon as we crossed the border, I was surprised to see everything was in French. I knew that French was spoken in Quebec but I didn’t realize to what extent. Everyone thought it was pretty funny that I was the only one on the team who hadn't been outside the U.S. Nope, not even to Canada. We got to Foret Montmorency around lunchtime and had our first meal in the cafeteria. After that we went out for our first real ski of the year. Conditions were just below freezing so we went for a classic distance ski on the trails. There was probably around a foot of snow on the ground and the groomers had done one main trail, an out and back on a road for a total of about 20km. That night we moved into our rooms, which were small two person rooms with just beds, a window, and a shelf. I was assigned to room with Anders Folleraas, a freshman from Norway. We didn’t have too many problems rooming together other than when he demanded that have the window open and the heater off at night. He likes to sleep in the cold. Every night I waited until he fell asleep and turned the heater back on.

The second day was the beginning of what would become a fairly repetitive schedule for the next week. We woke up at 7:45 and waited in line for breakfast. After breakfast we trained from 9:30 to 11:00, then showered and got in line for lunch. Lunch ended around 1:30 and we had from 1:30 to 3:30 as quiet time. At 3:30 we had another training session until 5:00 when we showered again for dinner. After dinner was time for meeting with the coaches, and watching videotapes. Before bed we had time to do homework and watch movies. We also got word that Chris was still sick and wouldn’t be able to come up to camp, but would be heading home for the rest of break.

We spent a considerable amount of time doing no pole drills, primarily classic technique. This was especially useful for me because I've done very little technique work and my classic technique is pretty awful. I spent a lot of time trying to cut down on sloppy upper body motions such as swinging my arms side to side. I also have a tendency to bend over quite a bit at the hip, which causes me to slip. This is quite obvious when I ski without poles and then review it on videotape.

On Tuesday morning, the 4th day, conditions were steady, right at freezing, and light snow was falling. Everyone was talking about how “harries” were the perfect thing for classic skiing that day. When Anders explained that harries was just aggressively sanding the kick zone to bring up hair, I wondered if I was missing something. I had sanded my kick zone before but always to help kick wax bind better. Would it really work with no wax? I went outside to try it out and sure enough it worked perfectly! Everyone was so surprised that I had never seen many conditions like this. I had to explain that when we have snow in Minnesota it is way to cold to even be thinking about something like harries. My coach explained that it worked for the same reason you could make a snowball. The temperature was just right and the loose falling snow was grabbing onto the tiny hairs just right.

On day 5 we took a trip to a place called 'the chute'. We had to break our own path through the fresh snow but conditions were perfect so it was no problem with a little blue kick wax. To get to the chute was a 10km trek around a mountain on logging roads and small one-skier-wide trails. Half the group got ahead and took a wrong turn. We all took turns breaking trail and got to the chute, which was huge waterfall with ice snow, it looked really pretty. After taking pictures we turned back and followed our trail back to the lodge.  We got that afternoon off from training and I took the time to get some homework done. Most people watched movies or hung out. We had a cool fireplace where I started a fire to sit and do homework by.

Day 6 – Thanksgiving – was our rest day so we took a trip into Quebec City. We stopped at the University Laval to do our weightlifting routine and then headed into the old city. It had started snowing pretty hard by the time we parked and we planned on heading out by 4:30 so we could make it back to the Foret at a reasonable time. We wandered around the city for a while and stopped at all the tourist shops. Anders and I stopped at an Internet café and checked our emails. At 3:30 the mens team met at a restaurant for our Thanksgiving dinner. Anders Osthus put it best when he said grace for the meal, while we all wished we could be home eating turkey with our families, we were very happy to be eating in the company of our friends.  By the time we left the restaurant, the snow had turned to a full-blown blizzard. It took us 3 times as long to get back to the Foret as it should have but we made it.

The next day it was back to the grind. We were supposed to have a time trial but because of the snowstorm, the groomers had not groomed the trails we wanted for skating yet so we pushed it back the next day. When Saturday came our time trial had grown to include racers from Colby and Williams College. The race was on a 6km loop that we did three times for a total of an 18km individual start skate race. Conditions were pretty cold and the snow was loose in places and very squeaky. I started last, right behind John Swain, a Colby skier from St. Paul. The only interesting part of the race was that on my second lap when I was coming down the one big hill, I stepped out of the classic track into the skate lane and hit my German teammate Juergan Uhl. He was climbing up the hill and was fine but I bit it hard and my boot came undone. The rest of the race was uneventful and I finished in about 57 minutes, just two minutes back from the next UVM guy.

Our last day at camp was Sunday morning and we only had time to ski in the morning. Saturday was scheduled to be our long ski but because of the time trial, it was pushed back to Sunday. Most of us classic skied but a few people skated, we all felt pretty dead and I ended up skiing for about 2 hours and 45 minutes which was a little below the 3 hours I had planned but I think that’s okay. After our ski we packed up all our smelly clothes, had our last meal in the cafeteria and loaded up the vans. The drive back was pretty long but I got a lot of work done. I had some Canadian money left from the trip into town so I was glad when we stopped at the border to go to the Duty Free shop. I was able to load up on chocolate. I think I ate more chocolate in the hour from the border to Burlington than all six of us should have eaten in a week. We got back to UVM around 8:00. Over the 8 days of camp I totaled over 26 hours of training time.

This week is a bit of a rest week as we get both today and Tuesday off. On Wednesday we hope to be back on snow as most of the ski areas here are now skiable. The general feeling is that we really don’t want to have to get the rollerskis back out. Keep out an eye next week for a report from Chris.