Memories from the Past

January 25, 2022

This last weekend I was rummaging through a cabinet looking for an article. While searching I found an old XC ski training log from the 1971/1972 season. When living in California I only skied Alpine, but when my wife Anita and I moved to Massachusetts I started training for XC racing again.

I started reading the log and discovered that 1972 was the first year I raced the Vasaloppet in Sweden. According to the log I had been training regularly and quite hard for the 90-kilometer race. The logbook showed that I returned to the US on March 9 and there were still a few XC races left that I wanted to enter. But when I came back to work my partner, Windsor Hunter, told me I had to fly to Seattle to visit Boeing, one of our major customers. This disrupted my training schedule but I decided to enter one of the last races of the year. The log showed I entered a race in Lyndonville, Vermont on March 29. In the Veteran2 class Rick Elliot won, I was second and John Caldwell was third. Without the log jogging my memory would not have remembered that race. I am now looking for all the log’s, from the early 70’s to mid 90’s when I stopped racing.

Len