NMU: Year in Review

April, 2015. That was that. My time in the magical world of ski racing was over. Or so I thought. I was preparing to accept a job in Minneapolis and leave for the "real" world after graduation from St. Olaf College in May. But something didn't sit quite right. I couldn't bring myself to do it. After praying with a friend one night in late April about the decision, I looked out a window of Buntrock Commons and to my surprise a huge snowstorm had erupted, wet ginormous flakes pouring over the St. Olaf quad. I was elated, and I knew I had to take a chance.

With a year of NCAA eligibility still remaining, I theoretically had a chance to ski another year as a graduate student at a D2 or D3 university. Northern Michigan and Alaska Fairbanks were two options I had always dreamed of being a part of, both with fantastic programs, teams, and coaching staffs, phenomenal snow conditions, and access to top-notch trail systems and racing venues. I was surprised that both programs were interested in taking me on as a first-year super-senior; I went with NMU primarily for the program's history and Midwest location, but a single year in Marquette led to so much more than just fast skiing. There I found friends, adventure, a new community that accepted me in as one of their own, two coaches that transformed my skiing, and a team hell-bent on working their tails off and performing, together as one, at the highest levels of US skiing. And for all this I am grateful. It would take nine months to relive my time in Marquette, but I wouldn't be doing the NMU program and my good friends and teammates justice if I didn't recognize their profound impact on my life, both as a skier and beyond. So here's a bit of a recap of 2015-2016, told in a handful of photos I collected over the year:

Krystof Kopal, the no-pole master and technique king (as well as recent NMU graduate- congrats dude!), leads the way.

Prior to August 24, when I first pulled up outside the yellow front porch of 410 Norwood St., Marquette, my only impression of training with NMU came from Pete Vordenberg's Momentum. The book is like the skier nonfiction version of Once a Runner (I've read it three times and I'm not a fast reader), and although Vorde eats ten times as much as a starving Quentin Cassidy and never runs 60 x 400m at 62 seconds, to me "Weeding out the Weenies week" and "the training weekend" was the stuff of legend. I was secretly hoping to be subjected to these tests of will and determination, and although we didn't recreate them exactly we did experience other facets of NMU skiing lore, and we did train HARD. Bounding, rollerskiing, running, lifting, and technique. Each was a part of a carefully constructed plan, one that we carried out every morning and every afternoon. There were no shortcuts.

I also got to know the Marquette pavement pretty well in more ways than one. At NMU we have two leaderboards: a stop-ahead-sign sprint victory tally and a crash tally. Most guys had a good twenty plus tallies in the stop-ahead column and a single mark or two in the crash column. I was an anomaly: the two tallies marking my two stop-ahead sprint victories both came when I took a tricky neighborhood shortcut to surprise the rest of the team, popping out just in front of the pack with a stop-ahead sign victory within my reach. For the crash column I had to switch from tallies to written numbers. That should give you a good idea. But in all honesty sprinting and skiing behind Freddy, Adam, Ian, Kopal, Sam, Leo, and Daddy (Kyle) was the single biggest help to my results since the invention of skate skiing.

Finding a groove mid-pack on the way back from 1 of a million runs to the dam.

Last year I pushed the limits of my volume more than I ever had; by the training year's end I had trained over 160 hours more than any years previous, and most of that increase came in the fall (in previous years I had run cross-country but then trained more in the winter than I did last season). That increase, along with graduate school work and research, made me tired. The fatigue seemed to hold with me through the end of November. Many a distance workout felt glossed over; I'd stumble along in a daze while Ian Torchia bounced along off-trail whooping and hollering. Most days I put myself in the middle of the pack, sometimes to force myself to hang on and sometimes to force myself not to go too hard (I learned that lesson after getting chewed out by Sten after pushing the pace on my very first fall OD). Morning runs and ergs with Adam "Joey Chestnut", "the bear", or simply "Marty" Martin kept my brain sharp; off-and-on afternoon mid-pack chatter and goofiness with Sam "Sambo" Elfstrom kept my mind in the perfect balance of fun and serious.

Training hard can put you in a daze. One of the best things about Marquette is there are so many opportunities, whether mid-workout, on a walk to class, or on a separate expedition, to be awakened from that daze. Sometimes it was the psychological invigoration of a sunrise, other times the physical surge of adrenaline that accompanies a plunge into Gichi-Gummi's freezing water. Some of the best were the pickup hockey or broomball games that aliven the dead of winter like a match lit in darkness or the basketball games outside the ski room that split the sleepiness of spring. You always say you'll go easy, maybe play for fifteen minutes. It starts off chill, then slowly accelerates as the competitive fire gets stoked with each additional minute until you're hours in, competing for some backyard glory better than what any gold medal can give.

Whatever it was, last fall, winter, and spring alike were filled with many moments that woke me up and left me thinking, "God is awesome."

Taking our turns for the freezing plunge, water temp 36 degrees on April 16. I leave the gainers to Freddy, Kopal, and Ian. Photo credit to Abby Cook

Morning run, morning lift, morning sunrise. Marquette is on the western end of the eastern time zone; that along with great views of the Great Lake make for some incredible sunrises at the end of an AM session. Dome sweet dome.

Marquette Mountain: bounding mountain in the fall, some weird operation with all these chairs on moving wires in the winter, and campsite/tele-shredding locale for the spring. Photo credit to Ian Torchia.

Except for an undergrad physics/coding class I took upcampus, all my courses were at night, long, and after training. Sometimes I'd have time to make dinner at home before, often I'd wolf down a Jean Kaye's $3.75 pasty on the way, and other times I'd have some random leftover rice/bean/cheese/pasta/veggie mash during class. This all made for a sleepy 6-8:30pm class period... I usually sat toward the back and hoped the NMU professors didn't notice.

Exercise physiology at NMU is more or less the study of cross-country ski training. When a picture of a striding Adam Martin graced a powerpoint slide on the first day of class I knew I was in a good place to ski and study skiing. Conversations with my professors lasted for up to an hour after class. Opportunities to explore the "academic" field abounded thanks to their generosity, and I spent days performing VO2-max tests, researching biomechanics and technique, reading and discussing the latest studies with my housemates and teammates, and applying the findings to my own skiing. Sometimes it was a bit of a skiing overload, and I realized that if I'm not coaching someday I'd like to use science to help out others beyond the ski world.

Helping out Ian with his test. Photo credit to Kristin Bourne

Poster presentations and the like. Somehow Ian's face ends up on everything, funny how that is eh?

After weekend of time trials, getting dropped on stop-aheads and specific strength (death by single stick), getting my technique ripped apart (the kind of ridicule that is transformative and very much necessary - thanks Sten!), and dying on double pole ODs when Freddy was "on", December finally came. And the snow didn't. So, although I would've never envisioned it, I went home from the UP to Minnesota early to get on snow at masterblaster HQ: Hyland Hills in Bloomington, MN. Nearly all of my Wildcat teammates did the same, and we had a mini-training camp at Hyland for the two weeks leading up to Christmas. I loved training with my new team but my favorite part of every Christmas is training with my #1 team, team Brown, my family.

Family training camp at Hyland. Yes Nate Brown is making a comeback as a hot #masterblaster.

At Mt. Itasca Luke and I found ourselves in perfect starting positions to race a few laps together. It was the first time I had really raced Luke since high school. In 2027 we'll be making moves together (with Nate too obviously) in the ski classics, pulling away from LeasePlanGo and Bakeries. TeamItalia# Mooseit#

Chilling with the bros at Christmas time. YearOfTheStache# dyetilyoudie# (disclaimer: Nate Brown does not dyetilyoudie#)

From Christmas to Easter was the ski season! It had finally arrived, and it delivered! The joy of races are why we train, and, although the results I had hoped years for finally came, they were merely an added bonus to all the joy and lessons learned along the way. There were too many races to recap them all, so telling a story of a season with a picture here and there is my best attempt to do the season justice.

Photo credit to Karen Brown AKA Mom

It was surreal experience skiing with some of the best in the country at US Nationals, and even better to have teammates in the pack. Adam's results over the week were certainly a huge highlight, but I know even Adam would say it was really a week of team success: NMU won the college cup and sent eight skiers to Romania for U23/junior world champs. I was able to grab a few seconds of glory skiing in the lead during the 30km before I heard the wise words of coach Sten, "What the hell are you doing?!?! Get behind people!"

Photo credit to Jackie Schneider

Marty, King of Telemark. Putting the hammer down with these two is a blast, but painful. A painful blast.

Photo credit to Ian Torchia

Waking up to fresh snow in Marquette became a daily January ritual; these three inches were the first of the year and a sign of many more to come. More snow meant beautiful training, day after day. Every January day left me shaking my head in awe at the beauty of creation and how lucky we are to ski in it!

Photo credit to Karen Brown

With half a team we defended home soil and reclaimed the regional championship at Al Quaal! They're going to hold a SuperTour there next year and the new course is sicktastic! I ran purely on Birkie fever and some wicked fast Salomon soft grounds. #salomon #birkefever #wescoredpoints

And just like that NCAAs was upon us. We were off to Steamboat Spring, CO, where we eased our bodies into the altitude, trained smart, absorbed daily wisdom from Sten, and prepared for battle.

Mummy bag: TSA broke the zipper but made up for it by showing off how cool their tape is.

Despite being leader in the clubhouse at the time, Mr. Torchia still, as always, is there to welcome his brothers to the finish line.

At NCAAs we took the top score for a men's Nordic team, thanks mostly to Ian and Adam's heroic efforts (top 5 in both races!). It was living a dream to be a part of it- seeing the reactions of my parents, other parents, teammates, and Sten and Shane made the week for me. That and Freddy and my epic ping-pong battles that become a nightly event.

In the 10km freestyle I finished 9th and just barely squeezed in as an NCAA All-American, which had been a huge goal of mine for a long time. But it was even better to do it with All-American teammates by my side: Adam 4th and Ian 2nd. I have to credit the improvement I made to my family, coaches and teammates for motivating me to improve every year and those who educated me on how to ski fast beyond fitness. Having never made the Junior National Midwest team, I hope my improvement can be an encouragement to any undersized J2's (sorry, U16's) out there who are bad at classic sprinting! But honestly I wouldn't have had a chance if it wasn't for Fredrik Schwenke. Unfortunately Freddy got sick during the season, which gave me the chance to ski at NCAAs. But Freddy's impact goes beyond a simple opportunity: without learning from Freddy (and all the NMU guys for that matter) last year I would never have been able to ski at a level deserving of an NMU NCAA spot.

I was stoked when, in the middle of the season, Sten announced we would be sending a team to SuperTour Finals, AKA spring series. The week at Craftsbury was the most fun of the season, hands down. The pressure was off, more of our team was present than at NCAAs, we raced our bodies to the edge (the 50km classic in warm slush was the stuff of legend and second only to 24 hours of Lappe in my list of utterly exhaustive racing experiences), emerged victorious on trivia night (thanks to Felicia's clever tactics - go Fartmouth!) and pushed our ping pong skills to new heights (congrats to Luke on his well-deserved Spring Series Ping Pong Tournament victory - I recently walked into his room at Dartmouth and he wasted no time in reminding me of his victory with the trophy sitting front and center). It was good to see old friends and meet new ones as we were all crowded together in the beautiful Craftsbury metropolis -- which, by the way, did one of the most incredible jobs putting together a race course in history.

Ian and I also dropped a huge bolder off a bridge into a small creek. It was very satisfying and made for a happy Easter.

Our spring series 4x5km relay team; racing in a relay always gives me an extra reserve from which I can dig deeper than I can alone.

Thus concluded the 2015-2016 ski season. I didn't want it to end. But the best part about it ending is that we are now one step closer to the 2016-2017 season and it's getting closer every day! Yes! Go team!

Spring in Marquette is a happy time and full of activity. Even when the snow melts in town there's often still coverage on the inland trails. Marquette Mountain held its snow a good month longer; there's nothing quite like a good night of "backcountry" shred after a long day of studying for finals. And although I'm not that great at any of them, climbing, lifting, and basketball provided the competitive outlet I needed.

The chill climbing life. A great complement to the hectic competitive racer in me. I hope my life is finds more rock (with rope - I like safety) in the future.

Syruping with Marty and his family near Rhinelander, WI was a treat! Literally. The best part was doing work and feeling manly.

Who knew that Marquette Mountain was meant for more than bounding?!?!? Camping, slacklining, Midwest-style backcountry skiing, and sending it: Marquette Mountain became our playground for a handful of spring evenings.

Felicia, sending the final pitch!

There's a beauty in the barrenness of spring as seen from the top... but I prefer it when you're gazing at Superior over a colorful spread of fall foliage, sucking air post-bounding interval. I know the Wildcats will be back on the mountain with bodies swimming in lactate countless times this fall, and although I won't be there with them through it all, I'm thankful I got the chance. Go 'Cats.