The XC Skiing thread

[caleb]

I have skied that loop 9 trillion times this year. At least we have manmade . . . for now.

I have a mental limit of about five laps of any loop, doesn't really matter the distance. 1k, 2k, 5k, 10k, doesn't really matter, I'm not going around more than five times. On a year like this, I find myself going for lots of short skis.

[vertical_doug]

I have a mental limit of about five laps of any loop, doesn't really matter the distance. 1k, 2k, 5k, 10k, doesn't really matter, I'm not going around more than five times. On a year like this, I find myself going for lots of short skis.

You need to swim laps in the morning to train your mind for numbness. . .

You wanna know how many laps I swim in 1 hr.

Do it long enough and eventually it is like sitting in a recliner staring out the window. Nothing goes through your mind.

[ides1056]

This is not winter, here. This is April writ large, the tug a war between cold and warm a tie.

I am riding a Peloton to music and soccer.

I used to love to ski myself into a coma. Drive three hours to decent snow when the former is the problem with the latter? Makes no sense to me.

[j44ke]

Wow. Diggins led most of the 20k at Goms and then blew the doors off Frida Karlsson in the finishing stretch. Nice move in the last turn really set it up. She had noticeably great skis for the first time I've seen this year. Usually she's slipping and sticking in all the wrong places. This time she was catching other skiers - the Swedes! - on the descents. Plus Sophia Laukli got fifth and Rosie Brennan got 7th. Laukli actually made a successful move to get into 3rd before the final climb but couldn't hold onto it.

[72gmc]

I love her emotion at the finish. She believes in herself.

[72gmc]

Today’s race finish reminded me of 2012, when we didn’t yet know what she could do. Fast forward to 48:00 to see Bjoergen the great, then Kalla, then Jessie finishing as only Jessie does.

[j44ke]

Bjoergen is so smooth.

[vertical_doug]

https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/sp...ultra-135-race

It's pretty crazy when you think the Arrowhead 135 from International Falls to Tower, Mn had to cancel the cross country ski and sled categories of the race this year for lack of snow.

And the bicycle and running portion had to deal with open water and mud.

Statistically, this is the coldest part of the year.

[vertical_doug]

The end of an era.

It’s 50 Degrees in Minneapolis. Goodbye, Ice Shanties.
2024-02-02 15:37:51.555 GMT

By Patricia Leigh Brown

(New York Times) -- The Art Shanty Projects opened to crowds 10,000-strong on
a frozen lake in Minneapolis. But after the first zany weekend, March-like
temperatures set in.

It’s not every art installation that instructs visitors to take small steps
like a penguin. Then again, there’s nothing quite like the Art Shanty
Projects, in which intrepid Minnesota artists in insulated jumpsuits and ice
cleats annually recreate traditional ice fishing huts, called shanties, in
their own eccentric style on a frozen lake in Minneapolis.

The structures they dream up — such as a “Hot Box Disco Inferno” wrapped in
space blankets, with a pulsating LED floor — draw thousands of visitors to a
temporary public space resembling a Burning Man on ice.

This year, it was thin ice.

The idea that 19 artists’ shanties would rise on Lake Harriet — Bde’ Unma in
the Dakota language — for this three-weekend event was never a foregone
conclusion. A cold snap in late November followed by a balmy early January and
then subzero temperatures led to wildly inconsistent and potentially dangerous
ice conditions on many of the state’s famed 10,000 lakes. Already this winter
there have been four fatalities from people driving vehicles onto the ice. In
late December, more than 100 people had to be rescued from an ice floe that
broke free from a fishing area on a northern Minnesota lake.

But on Jan. 27, for Art Shanty’s opening, there was a miraculous 13 inches of
solid ice on Harriet, and some 10,000 people showed up on ice skates, fat tire
bicycles and sleds packed with bundled little ones to commune with zany
interactive huts.

Then, this week, March-like temperatures wreaked havoc on the event, leading
its organizers to conclude that the lake was no longer safe for crowds. On
Thursday they ended the program. Moving the structures to shore, which is
snowless and muddy, was not an option.

“It was 52 degrees yesterday,” Erin Lavelle, the artistic director of the
projects, lamented, “and 32 degrees at 5 a.m. — but only for two hours. We
didn’t want to be in an emergency situation.” The artists, wearing life
jackets, began dismantling huts one by one.

At least two other cultural events and numerous ice-fishing tournaments were
also called off because of rising temperatures.

Diminishing ice has become status quo in Minnesota. Winters have warmed five
to six degrees since 1970, “one of the strongest signatures of climate
change,” said Kenneth Blumenfeld, a senior climatologist with the state’s
Department of Natural Resources. The current spike, with 40- to 50-degree
highs, is because of natural El Niño weather patterns on top of human-caused
climate change, he said.

“We see where things are headed, so there’s a bittersweet edge to our
festival,” said Kate Nordstrum, the artistic director of a concurrent event
called the Great Northern, whose partner organization, U.S. Pond Hockey
Championships — which draws players from as far as Belgium — was canceled
because of water on the ice.

To safely accommodate the shanty village and visitors, county officials
required that lake ice be at least 10 inches thick. Right after New Year’s,
Lavelle began drilling a hole in the ice and sticking her bare arm into the
frigid depths, assessing the results. On Jan. 18, Lavelle postponed the event
one week, and the much-awaited day when the ice was smooth and pristine
finally arrived last weekend. “I think I’m the only artistic director in the
country wielding an ice auger,” she said of a tool resembling a giant
corkscrew.

Among the highlights of opening weekend were “Klezmer on Ice,” where
spectators danced the hora without slipping. Then there was “Fro-Gahhh,” the
opposite of hot yoga, in which the ice was strewed with colorful mats and
yogis in hats and boots, who downward-dogged, their breaths visible in the
cold.

At the center of the erstwhile village square stood a bright red hut from
“shantiquity,” a re-creation of the original shanty — part clubhouse, part art
studio — built 20 years ago by the artists David Pitman and Peter Haakon
Thompson on a lake west of Minneapolis. In keeping with the Art Shanty
Projects’ D.I.Y. aesthetic, the insulating walls were made from gym mats
recycled from Minneapolis public schools, with Covid barriers for windows.

“Frozen lakes are beautiful, desolate places where you wouldn’t expect to find
art,” Thompson said. The artists’ mission was to engage viewers as active
participants; more than half of the project’s $200,000 annual budget typically
comes from visitor donations and goes toward paying the artists. Those funds
are now in jeopardy, organizers said.

Like snowflakes, which were conspicuously absent, no two shanties were alike,
each built over ski-shaped boards that allow them to be moved close to shore
when fickle conditions prevail. “Folks park their sense of propriety at the
lake’s edge,” said Robin Garwood, a 44-year-old printmaker and installation
artist who was on his fourth shanty. Called “NatureGrafter,” it was a homage
to the Minnesota wild, with images of animals, plants and aquatic life
handsomely wood-burned onto boards.

Garwood, who has canoed the length of the Mississippi River solo, an odyssey
that lasted 84 days, has a deep reverence for his home ground, and the winter
that is part of a Minnesotan’s identity. But he is gradually accepting the
inevitable. “We can’t depend on having reliable winter ice in Minnesota,” he
said. “We stand to lose a lot of things we love about our state.”

Some of the shanties’ themes had presciently focused on the warming planet. In
one, named “A Poem for Entangled Living,” a young team of environmental
activist-printmakers crafted a pyramid with seesawing arms meant to suggest a
world out of balance. Visitors added their own pithy quotes and images. The
idea was to “engage with climate grief,” said Dio Cramer, 26, one of its
creators.

Young architects gravitated to shanties too, a very different exercise than
the stereotypical one of designing a first house for one’s parents. In an
effort bristling with cleverness, four master’s degree graduates from the
University of Minnesota College of Design built a hut from construction waste
that doubled as a xylophone, incorporating a dismantled chain-link fence and
sawed-off struts from a metal bed frame. They distributed xylophone mallets to
those waiting in line.

Jerry Carlson, an emergency medical technician, helped his family create a
mock “Banned Books Reading Room” with crocheted blankets, a fake fireplace and
shelves lined with banned volumes, and paper flames inserted into the pages.
Among them were E.B. White’s classic “Charlotte’s Web” (banned by a Kansas
school district) and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (banned in at
least two states).

Carlson grew up ice-fishing, a hallowed tradition in the Upper Midwest, where
anglers typically pursue perch and walleye (and are often fortified by
alcohol). Before current vexing conditions, most Minnesota lakes were dotted
with colorful shanties, and sometimes custom R.V.s with underwater cameras
that project fish strikes onto 65-inch flat screens, a phenomenon captured on
the YouTube series “Show Us Your Shanty!”

On Wednesday, he said, a man in an A.T.V. misjudged conditions and rolled his
four-wheeler onto what he thought was solid ice. Before his vehicle sank into
frigid open water, he was rescued by Carlson’s E.M.T. colleagues.

So this Sunday’s nighttime stroll through lit ice sculptures — including the
Icecropolis and Icehenge — has been moved to land. “It’s a struggle to keep
them from melting,” said Claire Wilson, executive director of the Loppet
Foundation, a group dedicated to getting people out in nature.



Goodbye grumpy old men, I remember watching Vikings playoff games on the rabbit ears in the ice house.

[j44ke]

Jess Diggins won another one in Canada.

[72gmc]

Jess Diggins won another one in Canada.

In November she said it was a very tough offseason, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to line up for the season opener in Ruka. Big credit to her and the people around her for the season she’s having.

[72gmc]

Another! And Sophia Laukli finishes with the front group. She's so darn strong, has to be a bit ominous for others to see her gaining race savvy this quickly.

[j44ke]

German team, both biathlon and XC but mostly biathlon, seem very frustrated with their ski prep. One of the biathlon women (sorry, can't recall her name) actually called out the condition of her skis after shooting perfectly in the World Championships in Nove Mesto. Tough conditions but quite obviously the French have amazing skis. Julia Simon was a rocket.

I guess it is an old story, but skiers blaming the skis outright seems different.

[j44ke]

Another! And Sophia Laukli finishes with the front group. She's so darn strong, has to be a bit ominous for others to see her gaining race savvy this quickly.

20km was a great race, and the back and forth between Kerttu Niskanen and Frida Karlsson for first was great. Karlsson at the finish was incredible. So much power and speed after 20km. And the per lap elevation at Canmore is kind of nuts.

While double poling in classic, Niskanen looks like her feet are forward of her entire body. Like she is repeatedly pushing herself up out of a chair onto her feet. But her head stays almost level which makes her form look very straight and tall while skiing. Different than other skiers.

[caleb]

2-4" of snow are predicted in Minneapolis tonight, followed by a string of temps below freezing up to the race start.

It's shaping up to look and feel like winter for the big weekend, thankfully.

[caleb]

Delayed coverage on Peacock at 3pm Central. Don't check the results in advance. It's not going to be the American story anyone expected.

[72gmc]

A nice read after a day of driving, especially those four introductory paragraphs.

https://fasterskier.com/2024/02/a-dr...n-minneapolis/

[j44ke]

Sundling destroyed the course. The power of the Swedish team is just amazing. Strategy sometimes doesn't work 100% but they have the jets.

Too bad the Norwegians ran out of money so they could only bring a handful of their skiers. Hah!

They kept saying Schumacher on the coverage of the women's race, and I was thinking not the American - German? Austrian? But yes, the American! What a great day for him.

[72gmc]

After a rough sprint day that brought Linn Svahn within 42 points, Jesse does Jesse things and significantly improves her chances for the big globe with just one race left:

https://fasterskier.com/2024/03/ever...-classic-10-k/

[j44ke]

After a rough sprint day that brought Linn Svahn within 42 points, Jesse does Jesse things and significantly improves her chances for the big globe with just one race left:

https://fasterskier.com/2024/03/ever...-classic-10-k/

Saving this up for tonight. Nice weather for cycling outside but have some sawing to do today, and then I'll get on the Tacx for the 20km race.