For Max Hammer ’12, there is nothing better than a good day of skiing. It has been a major part of his life since he could walk, and will be until it is no longer physically feasible, he said. Hammer recently shared a part of his skiing experience with the Dartmouth community at a movie screening in Dartmouth Hall. Hammer was one of a handful of freestyle skiers to star in “Wyoming Triumph,” a movie about skiing in Wyoming, where Hammer grew up. KGB Productions made the movie in partnership with Trevor Hiatt, who had the idea for the film and organized the group of skiers, including Hammer. “It was a new approach to something I already loved doing and I just got really absorbed in it,” Hammer said. Unlike most ski movies, which feature fast clips of extreme skiing, they wanted to create a more narrative film about skiing in Wyoming. Everyone involved in the film had day jobs in addition to their life as a skier, and they wanted to put together a work not about professional skiing, but about regular Wyomingites doing what they love. Over half of Wyoming’s land is public and the group capitalized… Read more »
Sweet victory at last! With dominant performances by the men and women’s Nordic teams and the season’s first win for the women’s alpine squad, we brought home the gold this past weekend at Middlebury Carnival. It took five tries, but finally unseating UVM is a huge relief. Friday felt positively balmy, with temperatures in the upper 40s and a light drizzle. Trying to glide downhill felt like skiing over upturned vacuums, but that didn’t keep us from racing well. Eric Packer ’12 and Erika Flowers ’12 both went into the weekend ranked right near the top, but without individual victories. That all changed on Friday, as Packer and Flowers each took top honors to lead the men and women to team victories. Five of the top eight women had ‘DAR’ next to their names on the results sheet, leading to a rock-solid C-Stat of 42. Our Dartmouth men weren’t too much worse, at 49. We returned to the venue on Saturday to contest a sprint relay. EISA’s version of the sprint relay is similar to the internationally-recognized “team sprint,” one of the events at World Champs — see below. In a team sprint, two teammates alternate skiing laps of a… Read more »
Schools on the Eastern skiing circuit have varying amounts of pride in their respective Carnivals: Middlebury gets a few students out to watch its races, for example, but not many people made the drive from Saint Lawrence University to Lake Placid, N.Y., for the Saint Lawrence Carnival. Certainly nobody has a campus celebration that stands up to Dartmouth Carnival, what with the ice sculpture, Polar Bear Plunge and weekend festivities. So when the Dartmouth Carnival ski races roll around, Dartmouth skiers want to win. It’s that simple. We have a deep-seated pride in our school, our skiing and our Carnival, and that pride translated directly into stellar results this past weekend. Racing began with five- and ten-kilometer individual skate races for the women and men, respectively. Friday was sunny and frigidly cold, and the Oak Hill trails glistened with fresh corduroy grooming. Those of us not skiing in the Carnival itself mobilized early to mark the course, perform course control (i.e. make sure nobody cheated or got lost) and most importantly, to cheer. By the time the races got underway, temperatures were climbing and the sun filled a cloudless blue sky. Ah, paradise! The men raced first, turning in the… Read more »
“A little of Austria in Vermont” reads the sign by the road up to the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vt. I’m not sure that the Green Mountains stand up to the Alps, but I think Trapps is the closest we come. The lodge sits up high, overlooking stunning valleys on both sides, and the ski trails wind for kilometers through maple forests. In short, it’s a skier’s heaven. Every year we look forward to skiing the University of Vermont Carnival at Trapps. It’s one of the three carnivals that are held at the same place every year (the other three rotate through different schools), so its familiarity and predictability are a relief. As I wrote last week, Trapps is the site of the upcoming 2011 NCAA Championships, so last weekend was a stellar opportunity to practice the course and get some racing experience. For the top guys on our team who will race at those championships, Friday’s classic race was especially important. Friday was a 20K classic mass start, one of the best (and toughest) races on the college circuit. Mass start races are truly a different animal than individual starts — they reward finesse while skiing in a… Read more »
A day of ski racing is similar to a day on a battlefield. We wake up at 6 a.m. and assemble our troops (the team), our gear (the equipment), our commanding officer (the coach) and go out ready to fight. First, we need to make sure we have protective equipment for the brutalities we suffer out on the slope. In slalom, we need shin guards, pole guards, a mouth guard and a metal bar to protect our face. In giant slalom, we need extra padding — called a “stealth” — on our arms and plastic guards on our forearms. All of this is crucial because hitting 30 mm*** thick plastic poles at 50 miles per hour is the equivalent of running at full speed into a wall and then continuing to run like nothing happened. Think of your older sibling beating you up when you were younger. It’s like that but one hundred times worse. So without these very necessary items, it would be like going to war without any armor. The other important items on our checklist are our skis. Just as war isn’t fought with a set of butter knives, ski races aren’t won with your grandma’s skis…. Read more »
Ask most people what a “week off” means and they probably won’t describe seven days filled with more exercise than usual. But during this carnival-free quasi-midseason break, most of us on the team used this week to accomplish some quality training and distance skiing. We frequently talk about our fitness like bank accounts — put training in now, cash in on it later. The metaphor isn’t perfect, sure, but there’s no doubt that if you don’t keep doing a good amount of training as the racing season ramps up, you’ll feel great in January — and be deathly slow and out of shape in March, when it really counts. In fact, in the NCAA field, looking at January race results is generally a poor way to predict NCAA Championship results in March. In the end it’s not a question of who had the most speed at the beginning of the season, but how each guy managed that fitness and conditioning. But it’s hard to train a lot when we’re on the road for racing. Hence this week’s goal: just train. There were no carnival races this past weekend (the circuit resumes with UVM Carnival in Stowe on Friday)… Read more »