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My little smoopie, Tanja Joy, is all growed up, graduating, starting her English Education career, and now, as of last night, she’s also engaged! Congratulations guys! It’s the start of a wonderful life together!
Can you imagine how cute their babies will be? And I'll get to spoil them, and then hand them back when they poop! The babies, obviously..not Tanja or Robbie. Cuz that'd be weird...
Let me just preface this post by reminding you that I went to Michigan Tech and got a degree in Mechanical Engineering. I love skiing, but i really liked all that nerdy engineer stuff too. Especially large data sets. Basically, I love Excell, and well…ever once an a while, i totally nerd out and crunch some semi pointless data.
So when I saw this graph on Fasterskier...well...guess what happened next...
I found my FIS points list history, averaged the 5or6 lists a year, and plotted them verses my age. Semi interesting, especially noticing the general downswing in the time since i graduated and joined CXC Elite. But still…to be really relevant, i would need to compare against the others. So I downloaded some other histories I’m interested in, crunched them, and got this:
Well dang nasty, isn’t that a pretty graph? It’s kinda interesting to see some of the histories laid out like this. For instance…look at Compton. She’s doing very well now, but there was definitely a hump in there that she had to ride out. And Winters…she just quit CXC and competitive racing, but her history shows the same kind of straight improvement as the US team girls.
And just in case anyone else is as big of a nerd as I am, and doesn’t want to waste the obsene amount of time I did, here’s my excell file. (Click Here to Download)
This weekend I flew back to Washington for a family reunion on San Juan Island. My family basically rocks. This isn’t a big huge fourth cousins type reunion, it’s just the immediate relations. They’re all skiers, engineers, or both. A reunion for us involves huge amounts of hiking, paddling, epic crochet matches, and visits to more national parks that you’d ever think could exist on a island of this size.
But tomorrow the crew is dispersing, and I’m heading back to the midwest. It’ll be tough to leave, but i’m looking forward to getting back to my new home in Houghton, and settling in a bit more. Plus, most of the Mich Tech girls team is back up there for the summer, so there’ll be plenty of training buddies! And as beautiful as this island is, the rollerskiing is absolute rubbish.
cousins, sticks.
The whole clan, sans cousin Kaelin
I think a lot of people think CXC is just the Elite team. While it’s true that we’re the most visible program, especially outside of the region, in reality we have programs spanning the whole development pipeline. We have a Masters Team, a Junior Development Team, Coaches Education and Certification Programs, an in-the-works Disabled program, and a very cool Youth Development Program. There is a significant amount of fraternization between the participants in the different programs. The Junior Development and Elite teams have camps together, the Elite are active in the Coaches Education, the Masters have the same coaching staff and race right alongside us at the Birkie, and we’re basically just one big happy family. I think that’s part of what makes us so successful…we all motivate each other.
It's all about the knee drive.
On Wednesday the Juniors and the Elite spent some time hanging out with our little brother/sister program, the Youth Development. It’s designed for kids ages 6-12. The Youth Devo program puts together sweet activities show these kids that skiing is fun. They’re the brains behind the hugely successful barne games that debuted at this year’s barne-birkie. With no snow in Stillwater in June, we spent the afternoon with a mass of energetic youngsters, doing a variety of dryland activities. Kids this age have a fairly short attention span, so we quickly rotated them through stations ranging from soccer and dead-ant-tag to hurdle drills and jumping mechanics. And afterward, the MN youth league (a partner program) treated them all to ice-cream at the local scoop shop. As I heard one of them say, it was “A perfect day!” Ok, that might have been in response to the ice cream…but they were all obviously having fun the whole time. And kids that have fun keep at it, which grows the sport, which is good for all of us. And plus, there really isn’t anything much more motivating that seeing a youngster loving sport just for the straight up joy of it. We all need that reminder once in a while.
Dead-Ant-Tag: When you’re tagged, you have to lay down a play dead until the other ants drag you back to one of the bases. Obviously, some are harder to transport than others…
We love it when Yuriy comes to training camp, because most of the time, he comes bearing gifts. And once again, we were not disappointed. He showed up on wed with a sweet new summer training uniform for all of us. They’re from Salomon, which I’ve always thought makes stylish stuff. And stylish is exactly how I’d describe our new shorts and tops. It’s probably the old orchestra-geek in me, or possibly I just find comfort in conformity, but for some reason I still get really jazzed up about large groups in matching attire. And seeing us all skiing along in our little uniforms just makes feel all kinds of proud and professional and part of something sweet. I love it.
New teamate Kelly loves them too...
We’re smiling, because this was the first day in a week that that the van hadn’t reeked of sweat. Yea for new clothes!
From Chuck:
Hello Everyone, Last night, June 16th at 10:37pm, Marybeth and I welcomed the newest addition to our family, Samantha Lea Liebsch. She is healthy and weighed in at 7lbs, 6oz and 21 inches long. We are very excited to introduce her to her big brother, Grant. Hopefully we will be going home from the hospital tomorrow morning.
Matt, Marybeth, Grant and Samantha Liebsch
A good excuse for missing training camp...
Can i just blatantly spread some ski world gossip? Yea? Okey. Well…first CXC camp with all members present…and all members does NOT include a Miss Compton. Whoa. Kinda knew this was coming after the Bend camp…but still. Whoa. I’m not positive what her plans are now, but i’d suspect the new FinnSisu team and Rossi skis. She’s awesome, and i’m sure she’ll do well wherever she ends up…so best of luck girl! We’ll miss you!
I haven’t written in a while, but not much has been happening. Well, actually, i moved, which i guess is pretty big and life changing…but not very interesting to read about. So I’ve been spending the last week-ish settling into my new house in Houghton.
It’s certainly different than Hayward. Out my window, I can see three “greek organizations”. Sig Epps is right across from me, and they’ve already proved to be excellent neighbors, when the brothers there kindly helped me break into my room on the first day. Yes, because all the rooms in my new home have locks on them. Locks which self lock when you shut the door… I wasn’t really aware of this, so when i was handed keys, i promptly locked them in my room. Ahhh…a good start, for sures.
But I’m starting to figure stuff out a little more now. Including settling some details about how i’ll be training up here. One of the reasons I moved was so i could be more in a team atmosphere again, which i find really motivating. I was hoping the MichTech nordic coach, Joe, wouldn’t mind me showing up to a few practices a week. In fact, he’s totally cool with that. Really really cool, actually, and they’re even going to make me a “volunteer assistant coach” for the team! How sweet is that? I’m pretty pumped, because one of my life goals is to end up as a college coach somewhere, and this will be a great opportunity to learn from some great coaches (i’m including Jason Cork, the ass. coach, in this statement) and work with a team that’s (in my opinion) on the rise. Sooooo….excite!
And we start our second CXC Elite camp of the year tomorrow. This one will have everyone there, and we’ll finally get to meet our new members! So stay tuned, more updates to come!
I’m back at home now, after a sweet week spent skiing in Bend. The trip was, simply put, awesome. The skiing was great, the weather (aside from the first day) was perfect, and the company second to none. Every day was a snapshot of why I love to be a skier.
Laura and Naney...PNSA kids, all growed up.
Gregg pointed out that we've been skiing together in Bend since we were J3's. Crazy.
These are the best skiers in the nation. The work very hard, train a ton, but i'm convinced that they're the best simply because they LOVE TO SKI. Then again, on a day like this, with crust like this, who wouldn't?
Books KO checked out from the Library:
Books LAV checked out from the Library:
Contents of KO’s purse:
Contents of LAV’s purse:
Essential Camp Items forgotten by KO:
Essential Camp Items forgotten by LAV:
I swear, sometimes I don’t even know how we became friends in the first place, much less how it’s lasted 15+ years.
Click Here!