On the other side of the V-Boards

It’s been a long time since I’ve gone a winter without suiting up to compete almost every week. As far back as I can remember, winter weekends have always been spent either running gates, chasing jumping meets, or generally cruising around the northeast race circuits. This winter was no different, except for this time I wasn’t the one doing the racing.

My first winter of full-time coaching was a big learning experience. Jumping from the EISA to the USCSA level opened my eyes to what the other side of collegiate racing is like: wide ranges of attitudes and abilities, teams ranging from the lone Marlboro and WPI skiers to UVM and Clarkson rolling up with 20+ athletes every weekend, and a much more laid-back race organization that values effort over results and ritual.


That last bit is what took the most getting used to. Having raced EISA and USSA, we always took it as SOP to have fully marked courses, a maze of fencing and V-Boards in the stadium, and race officials around every corner. At this level, teams run their own races, each one with their own standards (though technically under the same rules as USSA and FIS). It wasn’t uncommon this season to have athletes warming up backwards on course, something that the next level would’ve been a disqualifiable offense.

The other big change for me this year was how race-days went from a preparation standpoint. With 24 skiers almost every weekend, classic races were very much a race to get skis prepped in time for everyone's start. The skiers were more than willing to help, but at a point it gets to be too much when eight or ten people are testing waxes and they all say different waxes work (or worse, the same wax works for one person but doesn’t for the next).


That being said, my biggest fear this season was not being taken seriously by the athletes, but as it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. everyone on the team was more than helpful with anything I asked of them, including driving personal vehicles through horrid lake-effect snow storms to deliver equipment on less than an hours notice. While the team captains were my primary source of team information, my real brain-trust this season have been the sophomore and junior classes, who have been more than open with me, expressing concerns and changes they’d like to see in the coming years.

The team was very accepting of me as a new (young) coach, to the point where many were looking to me for personalized training plans to supplement/augment the ones provided by the head coach. A majority of them have even asked me to step in as the head coach next year after the current one retires at the end of the season (We’ll see guys, we’ll see).

So far this season has exceeded my expectations immensely, and I can’t wait to see how it concludes. Yesterday, we arrived in Jackson Hole for the USCSA National Championships, which start for us on Tuesday.

Clarkson XC does Nationals

What a crazy weekend. Two weeks ago, we had no idea that we would be spending the last weekend before Thanksgiving somewhere other than Clarkson, let alone spending it in Wisconsin at the NCAA DIII National XC Championships. Coming off a career and program best placing at Regionals, Abbie Sullivan qualified for the big show as the top-ranked individual in the Atlantic region, and the top runner from the Liberty League Conference. It was a wild ride there in many ways, with three NCAA Champs rookies making the trip.
Marc Messer photo

After a warm-hearted and chilly-weathered send-off from the team, we faced logistical setback after setback en-route to Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Our airport was about to get hit with a 10” snowstorm as we were supposed to depart, and our first flight was delayed to the point of us being automatically rebooked from our connection to a new flight Friday morning. We scrambled as soon as we could make contact to try and move rental cars around, preparing to make the 2.5-hour drive from Chicago to Oshkosh. As luck would have it, our connection was also delayed just enough for us to sprint through O'Hare terminal 3 and join the boarding line. Except we had already been rebooked. The standby passengers that got bumped from the flight were less than pleased, but hey, we made it. Then that flight spent 45 minutes on the deicing pad, pushing our arrival time back from 10pm to almost midnight. Oh yeah, and we were in a new time zone, so really it was more like 1am. We finally rolled into our hotel at around 12:30, 11 hours after we left Clarkson, and only 4 hours earlier than if we had just driven. *shrug*


We took the next morning to sleep off our travel hangover, rolling down to our hotel breakfast at around 930. From there we planned how are we going to kill the hours before we would be able to officially check in and run the course.

If you’ve ever been to Oshkosh (and you're not from WI), it was probably either for D3XC nationals or the Oshkosh Air Festival. Other than that, there's not a whole lot going on. So we moseyed on over to the EAA museum for a few hours, checking out planes and stuff before the coaches meeting.



Abbie went solo to the course after dropping me and Allott off downtown, and we quickly found our North Country neighbors SLU at the meeting. At least we could follow someone who’d been here before.

Later that night was the NCAA Awards banquet, where we managed to snag a table with other individual runners: one from our hotel (via UC Santa Cruz), and another we found out was sharing a start box with Abbie (via Suffolk). The dinner was good, there were awards, speeches, and lots of denim.


The next morning was a little different race morning than we were all used to. No team, no bus, no team tent, no parents. Just our small travel party, a rental car, our bags, and the short drive to the golf course. And boy was there a crowd for this one.



 I sometimes forget that XC fans are the most physically active fans in any sport.

Marc Messer photo

When the women started, we had no idea what to expect. Abbie had done well at regionals, mixing it up with a top-ranked team. We forgot that now there were 31 other teams that were all similar, plus another 50+ individuals. But it didn't matter, Clarkson was represented at nationals, and it was a great way to cap off the season.
Marc Messer photo

Abbie finished 121/279, ten seconds out of the top-100, twenty from top-75.

Our trip wound down with some nice meals around Oshkosh, and the flights back weren't nearly as eventful as the ones out. At least for us. I hope the Oberlin Women's team made their flights out of O'Hare.

There's so much more about this event that can't feasibly be written down, more than just a "You had to be there" type of story. The people we met, the things we saw, stuff that just can't be given justice written down.

You had to be there, and hopefully next year, I can tell you that again.

Going out with a bang: Concord and L-A Criteriums

After a season of ups and downs, my time going around in circles is coming to a close as I prepare to enter grad school in the coming weeks.

Last weekend, I capped my season early by racing my 'hometown' Concord Criterium, as well as the nearby Lewiston-Auburn Rotary Criterium. This is another tale of poor to mediocre preparation culminating in surprising results, so lets settle in.

A couple of weeks after Shoe City, I was given some pre-requisite classwork to complete prior to entering my graduate program, a two-year MBA at Clarkson University. The catch: I had until August 3rd to complete five classes worth of assignments, for which most of the syllabi said should take two weeks to complete if I put 3 hours a day into each class. By the time I received this work, I had 15 days to complete all of it. Needless to say, the saddle time took a back seat.

In the four weeks between Shoe City and Concord, I managed to squeeze in nine rides, not typically enough to sustain top performance. Adding to that minimal sleep thanks to trying to crank out school work, I was just killing it at this 'long term race prep' thing.

Rolling in to Concord, I had dropped out of the NHMS training race that Thursday because I felt like I was falling asleep during the race, so wasn't too sure about what was going to happen after a wet morning of volunteering pre-race.

My afternoon 3/4 field wasn't terribly stacked, a few strong riders but things played out mostly as expected. We got off to a good start, Staying together for the first handful of laps until Owen Wright took a flyer off the front and stayed away for a good chunk of the race. A few half-attempts to bring him back were quickly stopped by his teammates, until suddenly he was off the course looking for a helmet.


As it turns out, our breakaway guy had some helmet strap malfunctions and was DQ'd for not having a proper helmet (or something along those lines). Amateur/Pro-tip: If that ever happens to you in a race, yell to someone you know to find you a new helmet, go to the pit, get your new lid and a free lap before the officials yell at you.

Onwards with the rest of the race.

I managed to collect a couple of primes (two of the nearly twenty prizes up for grabs for our field!?), but started to feel it around the midpoint of the race, and started drifting towards the middle of the pack. Kramer saw that I was having a hard time focusing, and kept yelling to me when I drifted too far back or was making stupid moves.

I got the message, and got myself into the top-5 with a few laps to go, and then the rain hit.

Still a little wary of riding in a bunch post-crash, I eased back a little bit so that I could keep things upright for racing the following day. It seemed the rest of the field aside for Tate Kokubo had the same idea, so with roughly two laps to go, he went. And nobody chased.

Tate stayed away for the solo win, and I rolled across in 13th, wet and still looking for points.

The next morning in Lewiston, everything I owned was still wet: shoes, helmet, saddle, gloves. Luckily I had thrown the skinsuit in the wash/dry when I finally got home from Concord. The course was short, only 1k with a punchy climb right before the finish line.

It was a decent sized field for a 4/5 race in northern central Maine, a little over 30 racers, with a handful of power hitters like Donnie Seib, Tate, Mark Carpenter, and Adam York (basically the usual cast of characters from the front of any Cat 4 crit field this year).

We started the race pretty smoothly, trying to gauge the field a little bit, but quickly ramped up the speed to try and crack riders off the back. It worked, sorta.

With this race being run as a more low-key, local crit, the officials weren't too eager to pull dropped or lapped riders. Once we had created our selection, we still had to fight our way through traffic for a majority of the race.

Speaking of the selection: we ended up with a pack of ten riders, and we hammered this race. Mark and I went after every prime, and took home a few gift cards each. But other than when we were trying to kill each other for Dunkins, this may have been the smoothest Cat 4 (3.5) 'breakaway' I've been in. It's almost as if we all should've been in a higher category...

The laps quickly ticked down, and aside from the occasional car driving on course or guy-on-motorized-mountain-bike-riding-backwards-through-an-apex, things were pretty uneventful. We wound up for the sprint going up the final hill, but Mark and Cole Williams got a good, early jump that I couldn't cover in time, and rolled in among the lapped riders for third, just off of Cole's wheel.

With that result, I finally managed to get my Cat 3 upgrade, just in time to call it a season. After that race, I went home and started packing my things for grad school.

All photos from Concord by Connor Koehler, L-A courtesy.