Here's a long rant that most people won't take the time to read but probably should

This morning the Bates crew showed up at Pineland for a quick, ripping 5k time trial at Oak Hill with Colby and Bowdoin. The past week has been break for us, and after going our separate ways for the first half, we have reconvened on campus for a mini training camp. We were all tired after the two hard intensity sessions and bigger volume hours we have done so far, but we still waxed the skis, put the bibs on, and skied kind of fast. The result was actually pretty awesome, and the team came out on top in both the skill and the fashion.

During some mad V2-alternate down the fast s-turns, I started thinking about the fundamentals of our sport. We spend 400+ hours a year off of snow, doing other random, pretty hard activities, and just thinking about how excited we are to ski and then when we do get on snow, we have a whole SIX WEEKS to see what we did right in the other 46 weeks. We attach pieces of plastic to our feet, wear fanny packs and think it's cool, and put straps around our chest to tell us how many times our heart is beating per minute.

Before we even start a race, we ski really hard for a while and after we ski a race, we ski more. In between, we suffer for a given amount of time, most of which is spent trying to move your body as fast as possible so you can stop skiing after you cross the finish line.

Not to mention how the trails got here in the first place: we literally cut down trees in the middle of nowhere and drive a long piece of metal through the forest with two heavier pieces of metal to make a track, an invention to keep our skis going the right directions for classic skiing. Classic skiing, by the way, is when you put something sticky under the ball of your foot and when you step on it a certain way it sticks, and when you step on it another way, it doesn't. Then, if you are lucky enough to ski really fast, you get to stand on a block of wood that is taller than the rest of the crowd and get your picture taken and then you make it to NCAA's where you get to be in pain more for longer into the spring.

After I had sufficiently psycho-analyzed the sport I was doing at the given time, I took a page from Descartes and asked myself, "then why the hack am I here right now?"

But this was the easy part. We do A LOT of work. We work hard all the time. A lot of the time, our bodies really hurt A LOT. But we love all of it. We love the long over-distance runs along the ridges in the Rocky Mountains as much as we love running up Saddleback mountain as hard as we can. We love the other awesome activities like biking, climbing, and kayaking that skiing lets us do in the summer. And we love racing: we are, for some twisted reason, addicted to pushing ourselves so hard we can't stand up after we cross the finish line. Racing is not all fun and games, and expectations exist and are not always met, but we would still rather be racing than not racing. Our sport is really weird, and we take ourselves really seriously sometimes, but the reason we keep nearing cardiac arrest at Lost Valley in the fall is because skiing and training are fun.

Next weekend, as we round out the last carnival at Lake Placid, the team goes off in various directions: for some, NCAAs is the next step, for some it could be the next step, some junior skiers are headed to Truckee for JN's, some are going to crush marathon season, and for the rest, the end of next weekend is the end of the season. But regardless of the end goals and expectations we all have set for ourselves, we have to remember why we are here. Why we go through all these motions that seem trivial to the majority of the population. We think skiing is fun, and we think fanny packs are the coolest things to hit since Justin Timberlake.

xoxo Katz