Day 4 - Tuesday Rest Day

Tuesday – Rest Day!

No ski races today, as it is the official “rest day” of the World Masters. We had a leisure breakfast of Bill’s famous oatmeal and some sufficiently strong black coffee. I think Bjorn had to dilute it with 2/3 water just to drink it down. Will, Odd, and Bjorn headed back to the Ponderosa State Park for additional skiing and analysis of the race course, as preparation for Odd and Bjorn’s relay races on Wednesday.

John, Bill, and I opted for a change of venue and prepared our classic skis for a day of diagonal skiing at a location called Blackhawk On The River. Blackhawk is the title sponsor of this year’s Master’s World Cup, and they are a real estate company that is developing land and properties along the Payette River, just west of McCall. As the title sponsor, they hosted an open house at their property and gave us the opportunity to ski on their 12 kilometers of private groomed ski trails. The skiing was beautiful, as it offered spectacular scenery of the Payette River, just feet away from the ski trails, and the surrounding mountains.

We were even filmed during our ski!! As part of the promotion, Blackhawk hired a film crew to take shots of the open house and skiers out on their trails. While out skiing, we ran into the cameraman out on the trail. Bill, never shy about conversation or additional attention, recommended that the three of us be filmed skiing down the track. We skied back down the trail 30-40 meters, turned around to face the camera, lined up shortest to tallest (Bill first and Eric in the rear) and then began to double pole towards the rolling film. However no more than one double pole in (or maybe while he was still standing still), John stumbled and fell over his skis. It must have been those magnets in the boots again, like what happened in his 10K race on Monday, that caused his fall. So, we took a 2nd take of video, this time with Eric in the lead and yelling Hej! Hej! Hej! as we passed the cameraman. Instant rock stars, we believed. The cameraman said that he would possibly post the video on their website. (http://www.blackhawkontheriver.com/). We’re anxious to see if we very actually make the promotional video and what royalties that we may receive so that we can retire early and focus our second careers solely on the World Masters circuit!!

By this time, we were convinced the free food was likely being served back at the Blackhawk lodge house, so we quickly headed back to the start of the trail. Exceeding our expectations, we got in line for a nice complimentary lunch buffet of meat perogees, platters of sliced bratwurst, onions and garlic, diced beef, chili, snack mix, Mirror Pond draft beer and bottles of wine. A nice way to get nourished after an hour of skiing.

After our trip to Blackhawk, we returned to the rental house and rested for a short time before heading into McCall to hear a 3pm presentation by a sports physiologist on health and performance, especially related to Nordic skiing. We picked up two Italian skiers walking into town and gave them a lift. We tried to explain to them we were from Minnesota by showing them Eric’s “Minnesota Finlandia” ski hat, but we think the result of this was them believing we were from Finland instead! Lots lost in translation during this international exchange. The talk was interesting, but humbling too, as he showed depreciating performance and muscle strength curves as a function of older age.

Pasta again for us tonight back at the house – spaghetti and Prego sauce.

Tomorrow we look forward to cheering on Odd and Bjorn in the relays as they ski for the US in the M8 and M10 classes, respectively. 4x5K relay races (1st two legs are 5K classic racers followed by 3rd and 4th leg as 5K skate racers) start at 10am tomorrow at Ponderosa State Park.