Flashes of Panic

With highs in the 40s for the past few days and green grass on the park across the street, of course I’m thinking about cross-country skiing! Except that my favorite, Notchview is now an excessively long drive for an hour or two of skiing. So I’m doing some research on where to go around here.

A few years ago, A and I read Bill McKibben’s book Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously, in which he sets out to spend a year training hard for ski racing. Not long into the book, a familiar theme of athletic-training stories cropped up: training conditions are less than optimal. Runners’ books tend to be litanies of injuries kept at bay during heroic racing seasons; McKibben’s could have been subtitled “The Quest For Snow” if it hadn’t been for other family issues which came up in the course of the year. McKibben’s choice of coach also intrigued me: Ray Browning, co-author of Serious Training for Endurance Athletes.

Anyway, in snowless winter, McKibben sometimes mentions the Weston Ski Track, a 2K loop in the Boston suburbs where a small team of dedicated maniacs with snowmakers maintain a 2K loop throughout the winter. From their website:

Our snowmaking and grooming expertise means that under almost any circumstances you can cross-country ski on our trails. … Even though your backyard is green, our teaching area has plenty of snow.

He made it sound roughly as attractive as a twenty-miler on an indoor track, but looking at the site now, they seem to have quite a bit of trail out there—even if they’ve only got 1K open right now. I’ll have to swing out and check it out sometime soon. All the other interesting places seem to be in New Hampshire: next on my list is Windblown.

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