Normal.
When they decided to change the Junior Racing Category Names
OJ’s=U20s, J1’s=U18s, J2’s=U16
I don’t think I can handle MY ENTIRE CHILDHOOD BEING MESSED AROUND WITH.
Exactly! How am I supposed to categorize my youth now?!?
Four amazing background photos currently in rotation on FasterSkier, courtesy of the talented Eric Packer. Equally awesome is this video.
Crust skiing: when trails become boundary-less.
(Also, FS hot top: to reveal the image beneath the text just click the little camera icon in the top left corner of the page. Magic!)
"…In cases like these our devotion to fact can also conceal a lie. This is the lie: that the kinds of stories journalists tell can somehow help us isolate the event, allow us to see it from every side, like a globe we’re free to spin. The fiction of nonfiction is that if we line up the facts, if we assemble them into objective sentences in chronological order, then we will know what happened. We will understand. Whereas in truth, catastrophe is always a matter of particular, lived experience — of so many hundreds or thousands or millions of particular experiences, or of one particular experience.
…
Our flight to fact following a disaster can sometimes feel, and can sometimes be, brave, but I think it can also be a way to sever the trauma from our own points of contact with it, to construct a world where real life encircles but does not quite touch the tragedy."
…
Our flight to fact following a disaster can sometimes feel, and can sometimes be, brave, but I think it can also be a way to sever the trauma from our own points of contact with it, to construct a world where real life encircles but does not quite touch the tragedy."
— Brian Phillips, “Death and Information.”
articles about Boston that have comforted me today:
“Yesterday…every runner I know spent the day wandering around in a daze, then either going on an angry run or curling up in the fetal position at 9 pm.” - Erin Gloria Ryan.
That about sums it up. But her words (and others listed below) have started to make me feel slightly better today.
Jezebel: The People Who Watch Marathons by Erin Gloria Ryan.
The Nation: The Boston Marathon: All My Tears, All My Love by Dave Zirin.
Grantland: The Marathon by Charles P. Pierce.
ESPN: Attack will test marathon community by Bonnie D. Ford.
Medium: It’s Ours, And You Can’t Take It Away by Caroline McCarthy
Medium: I Love That Dirty Water by Jared Keller
The Atlantic: You May Leave Boston, but Boston Never Leaves You by Andrew Cohen
Runner’s World: Eyewitness to Bravery, Horror by Peter Sagal
Buzzfeed (yes, actually): 29 Reasons to Love Boston
It will never cease to amaze the places this sport has enabled me to go. Italy, Turkey, Montana, Utah…I’ve started to forget all the incredible opportunities I’ve been blessed with because of my involvement in cross-country skiing. (Dis-)reputable skiing blog Johnny Klister recently wrote that “it’s small, it’s a perfectly valid way to organize a life,” and I couldn’t agree more. There’s a reason so many people have been involved in this community for so long.
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In 2005 I left the East for the first time in my life to ski at JOs in Truckee, California. Eight years later, I’m back covering Spring Series in the same stadium. Skiing around these trails I can remember exactly what it felt like to see western snow for the first time, to be at altitude for the first time (7,200 feet still hurts), and to get my ass handed to me by the best skiers in the country. Those athletes are the very same folks I now talk to and write about on a regular basis. I checked — back in 2005 Rosie Brennan and Ida Sargent were winning a lot. Not surprisingly, they’re still doing that.
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(Also, I’ve apparently been wearing the same sunglasses since 2005. I should look into getting a new pair…)
