"Wait... how many miles is 10k?"

There are more restaurants within 3 blocks of my dorm than there are in the entire town of Rumford, ME. The elevation gain from the bottom to the top of High School Hill is at least double that of any hill on the entire Weston ski track. Chummy Broomhall's basement has more firewood than a person could possibly gather if he cut down every tree within a fifty-foot radius of where I live (and by Harvard standards, I live in the boonies). Thirty-two degrees and freezing rain constitutes some waxing complications in Rumford, whereas here it causes the national weather service to issue a hazardous weather warning. In Rumford, getting to bed any time after 11pm is staying up too late, but on Harvard time it's so early that one can sleep for eight hours and still get to the dining hall before breakfast opens.

In New England it only takes four hours of driving to reach another world. As we drive north every weekend, it doesn't take long for the buildings to get a little shorter, for the trees to get a little thicker, for the snowbanks to get a little taller and whiter. My friends, classmates, and professors look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them that I'll be far away from campus at least every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday until sometime in March. Crazy turns to insane when I add that I'll be doing back to back races that are at least 5 kilometers in length, and insane makes the transition to maniacal when I add that I love it.

Our sport is not an easy one to understand. In the summer, we spend hours sweating under a hot sun as we rollerski over hot blacktop. We return home thirsty, hungry, tired, and proud as all hell of the sunburns that show off our sports bra or heart rate monitor tan lines. Maybe the next day it rains, and we train in the rain. We return home thirsty, hungry, tired, and proud as all hell of the mud spattered from the tops of our boots to the bottoms of our necks.

In the fall we congregate in Cambridge and pretend to concentrate on academics as it gets colder and muddier and rainier. Our roommates watch with a mixture of amusement and pity as we return home day after day, drenched, exhausted, and sometimes so sore that they can't help but laugh at the way we walk up the stairs. They ask us about our practices and then ask us to translate "8k time trial" or "max heart rate track test" or "6x4 level 4 bounding intervals" or "2.5 hour skate OD" into words that they can understand. So we do, and they feel bad for us and ask us why we're Nordic skiers. For a long time, I wasn't really sure how to answer that question. To be a Nordic skier is to be a crazy person. But being a crazy person enables one to experience things that the sane world misses.

Only crazy people run up mountains in the near-dark after work just so they can see a sunset.

Only crazy people will rollerski up a tall, windy, cold mountain just because it's a challenge. And only crazy people will spend 70% of the money they have to their names to travel to places that are far away, foreign, and cold.

Being crazy has its benefits. It takes us out of Cambridge every weekend and, extracting us from the frenzy of Harvard during exam period, plunks us down in places like Rumford, where the "civilized" world seems far away and racing turns into the only thing that matters... and having spent the last nine months preparing, it suddenly matters a whole lot. So we race hard, and even when we finish far ahead of where we did last year, it's still not enough. Crazy people just aren't satisfied with solid - not ideal, but still very solid - races. We return to the frantic Harvard world and try to study, pretending that's what matters because according to most sane people it should be what matters. But really, we're just waiting for the next weekend, the next set of races, the next chance to test how tough we really are.

It snowed yesterday in Cambridge.
Everyone says that it's really pretty, but I'm fairly sure that you have to be at least a little bit nuts to really enjoy several inches of snow in the city. I guess that's why us skiers love it.

-Schulzy