Pulling Adequacy from the Jaws of Defeat

In some races, everything goes well - in others, it's a complete disaster. Today's race was a combination of the two. It was a nice chilly 9 below (C) in the shade this morning, but the sun came up on most of the course by the 10AM start. I didn't get the 'call-up' to the first group (Hauptklasse) so I lined up with the Volkslaufer in the second wave which started 3 minutes behind. I had a pretty good position - 4 row of about a dozen - and was ready to really give it everything on the initial 2km of icy and slightly downhill track. The gun went off, I gave a few good double poles to get going and realized that I wasn't getting any push out of my left side. When I looked down, my hand was still holding the pole grip, but the pole was nowhere to be seen. Someone had stepped on my basket and pulled the shaft right out of the grip. Nothing to do but stop and work my way backwards through the rest of the field to find my pole. Then it took 30 seconds or so to cram the shaft back into the grip, during which the grip broke! When I finally got things reassembled, I was essentially at the very back of the second wave, with 400+ people ahead of me. A little adrenaline works wonders, and I skated and double-poled past about 150 people over the next 2km.



Everything kept going well for most of the race, as I reeled in one person after another. Of course, as I moved up, I was passing faster people so it went slower, but I was moving steadily until about the 3km-to-go point. We were back on the slight downhill and I had a good rhythm going. I took another good stroke, and my left side just kept going - no pole! Somehow it had gotten pulled out of the broken grip. I completed my pole stroke by smashing into the icy track with my left knee, which now has a major case of road rash. Another 30 seconds or so to retrieve my pole and reassemble it, and I was off again. I passed back the few people who had just passed me, and was ready to crank up the final slight uphill when I noticed that I wasn't getting any grip on the left. As I suspected, the spike had fallen out of the pole, making it almost useless on the icy track. I still managed to pass a couple more people, but it was essentially a one-pole effort. I finished the 21km course (which I measured at 18.5km) in about 55 minutes flat, of which at least 90 seconds was devoted to mechanical problems. (It's amazing what a low-altitude flat icy course will do for your times - last week's Frisco Gold Rush in Colorado was only 1km longer, but took me another 22 minutes.)

To add insult to injury, the only food available after the race was for sale at the usual Swiss prices. This is my sixth race in Europe, and all the others provided a full meal and sometimes beer. Not in Switzerland...

After paying the local ski shop $30 to fix my pole (quick service, no labor charge, probably inflated parts prices), I decided to get out of the theme park as quickly as possible. I drove east past some spectacular limestone mountains that make you realize how ugly most Colorado mountains are. I took a brief detour into Liechtenstein. The royal family used to make their money by manufacturing Curta calculators (Google them!), but now it's the money-laundering capital of Europe. Finally back into Austria, through the Arlberg Tunnel and into Imst where I found a decent room for 23 Euros. I dropped a bit on dinner, but nothing like in SwitzerLand(TM). And they had Schneider Weisse, one of my favorite Weissbiers.