UM YA YA Homecoming!

Happy Homecoming! Today after an interval session in Sogun Valley the nordic team met up with the piners (alpine team) at one of the alpine team member's houses for a joint team alumni barbeque! We had delicious tacos and Honeycrisp apples and too many chocolate chip cookies to count. It was awesome to see a few of our alumni - Hillary Boyce, Ian Gunsolus, Brandon Piechowski, Zach Hudson, and Anders Nienstaedt all came down for the festivities. And don't forget Tom Jorgenson, who is now our coach! It was a great day with family and friends.

Will, Nate, Gretchen, Eli, Amanda, Amy, Kai and Paige (left to right)

Alumni! Zach, Hillary, Ian and Brandon (left to right)

Gretchen, Robert, Emma, Nora, Nate, Allie, Elise, Will, and Julia (left to right)

Ian and our new coach Tom :)
The official season starts the first week of October, and with a team around 25 people, we are super excited to start training with Tom. Captains' practices are going well, and snow is coming, there was some in Hayward last night! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dog Days

Image
     Seeing as summer is rapidly drawing to a close, it seems fitting that St. Olaf Nordic should offer an update on all of their summer adventures. In the absence of snow, we still manage to train (and even have fun!) in the dog days of summer. Our team is scattered all around the United States from the east coast to the west coast and our activities and training are just as variable.      Mitchell has been spending the summer at Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve in Maine as an assistant camp counselor. He has collected an impressive variety of nicknames from his campers, such as “fungi,” “fathead” (hopefully named for the minnow species), and “Sensei.” Although he misses his teammates, he has been managing to have fun and train by rollerskiing and hiking around Maine. Mitchell found Mark Trail on the backroads of Maine      Moving westward, several members of St. Olaf Nordic have remained in the general Minnesota area...
Read more

Wrapping Up CCSA

Image
For our last CCSA race of the season, the Oles took our largest team up to the infamous hills at Al Quaal, in Ishpeming, Michigan. Unfortunately, our attempts at intimidating the NMU’s and Green Beans with large numbers weren’t super successful and they still showed up in full force. Saturday’s races were mass start: a 15k skate for the women, and a 20k skate for the men.  It was a beautiful day, and more than a few of us went home with a sunburn!  Bri and Shelby took advantage of a great opportunity to race well, finishing 22 and 28, respectively.  The men were led by two fantastic freshmen, Tyler in 40th and Spencer in 44th.  Chris and Leif also made statements with their headwear choices: a sparkly red baseball cap for Chris, and a Pokemon had for Leif.  In their 2017 debuts Andrew and Molly performed well and we were glad to have them back from the Mediterranean.  I’d tell you where they were, but I wouldn’t want to get it wrong and make that the o...
Read more

USCSA's aka The Bend Blizzard

Image
This year, we traveled to Bend, Oregon for US College Nationals. We fought through altitude and more snow than we have ever seen in MN to 1) find the trailhead and 2) race! It was an absolute joy to see so much snow. St. Olaf killed it at USCSA’s with 10 top 10 finishes! As we all know, 10 is better than 6. Before the racing started, we got to explore the beautiful Smith Rock State Park. Brochman ran while we walked. We also took our first trip up to Mt. Bachelor and were met with more snow than most of us had ever experienced before.  Over the next week the mountain received about 4 feet of new snow, making for some soft conditions during the races.   The parking lot snow pile. No wonder we couldn't find the Nordic Center behind all that snow! Smith Rock State Park We finally found the mountains when the sun came out on the last day! The Women's and Men's USCSA Teams The first day of racing was the 7.5k classic individual start, which too...
Read more