Owing to the organizers’ unique three-year medal strategy that started in 2015 and my innate inability to let certain things go (one of them being the want of materialistic memorabilia since there is no display case for memories), I had signed up and completed the 2015 and 2016 editions. And the quest (read: want) for the final piece ensured I at least signed up, and would find ways to complete it given my very limited training.
In all seriousness and retrospect, this should have been my fourth ski race/event of the 2016-17 season. But owing to many reasons beyond the scope of this journal entry (read: excuses for not making time to train consistently in any way, shape or form) and with the cancellation of the 2017 American Birkebeiner (I wasn’t prepared for that either), Great Bear Chase became the final and only test of my skiing this season — cumulative (since January 2014) and newly…
The 2016 edition of the Prince Haakon 12k served as my gateway to the American Birkebeiner festivities marked by various variants of the #BirkieFever. Hoping to move up a rung and partake in the 29k Kortelopet in 2017 was probably a residual effect of this #BirkieFever thing. With grandiose plans of putting in dedicated training hours throughout rest of 2016 as well as through 2016-17 winter, I did sign up as soon as the registration opened up in May 2016.
Running events for the most part are solo endeavors — runner against the clock, runner against an older version of her/himself, and occasionally, one runner against another — irrespective of whether another runner knows about it or not. Relay events of the running kind have a knack for blending the individualist aspect with the concept of a team. Though the very reason I took to running many moons ago was to move away from team sports, there’s a part of…