JoAnn Hanowski has been one of the top female skiers on Team Rossignol for the past 15 years. She resides in Duluth, MN and is an avian ecologist at the University of MN Duluth.
It seemed like a simple plan, after 5 marathons in 8 weeks, I would end my ski season by skiing across Finland. No race entries and travel logistics, no flourocarbon waxes, no worries about mass starts and snow conditions. The idea was just to get up every day and ski, after all, “sometimes racing gets in the way of skiing” (a Gene-o quote). But here it was, day 5 of the 7 day trip and I am being asked to do an interview with the local newspaper reporter from Ranua (hardly low-key). It was my first finnish-english translated interview. Seems like I was the news of our group of 86 that were making the trip from the Russian to the Swedish border. I was the fast, American, professional woman skier, who was skiing the fastest of all the skiers in the “tour” this year. Apparently this was big news just south of the Arctic Circle.
. After a repair with some tape at the first service station, I was on my way through the Finnish countryside, stopping for some food and drink at the service stations along the way. Most of the stations had warm blueberry soup, raisins, and pickles (quite the combination). The next 40 km was rolling terrain and mostly well groomed trails that connect the little towns around Kuusamo.</p>
<p>When I got to the end of the day 1 ski, I found myself alone in the building where we would pick up our clothes and keys to the cabins where we would stay that night. About 10 minutes later, another skier came in and asked if I was the first skier to arrive. I told him that I thought that I was first and then he asked me if I had started from the beginning. (Was he accusing me of cheating?). I told him that I had and then he asked me where I had passed him on the trail. I really did not remember passing him, so I told him that it must have been at the last service station, which I did not stop at. It became obvious that the tour was his race and that he wanted to be first. I sensed that he was a bit upset, but also intrigued at the fact that I had beat him to the finish. He said that perhaps it was the first time that a woman had finished first in the “tour”. </p>
<p>There was a lot of talk the first night, Finn guy sent Finn wife to ask the other American skiers about me. Who was this woman who beat her husband? Oh, I was a racer, which explained it, after all they were not racers. The German skiers were also quite interested in me being first, but we never did figure out what they were saying (at least half of the time). </p>
<p><B>Strategy and unwritten racing rules</B></p>
<p>I had no tour (race) strategy the next day, I was just going to go out and enjoy the72 km ski from Kuusamo to Taival-Koski. That was until Finn guy asked me how many service stations I planned to skip that day. I told him that I would stop when I needed to and that I had enough food and water with me to not stop at all. This was when he informed that it was perhaps like cheating not to stop at all the stations. Now this was getting interesting and he was accusing me of cheating. So I replied that I did not think that there were any rules for the “tour”. Then he told me that it was an unwritten rule. I said, ooooooh, perhaps that unwritten rules are the worst ones to break (Finn guy was starting to get to me).</p>
<p>We got off the bus, and Finn guy was off to the races-frantically double poling down the trail. So, I thought, what the heck, I would go after him, ski by him and have a little blueberry soup with him at the first few stations. So that’s how the first part of day 2 went as we skied along a beautifully groomed (and fast) railroad grade that was built by Jewish prisoners of war. They were serving reindeer soup and fish stew at the lunch stop, but I was not really hungry. But I stopped and had some coffee and chocolate and then Finn guy told me that it was necessary for me to wait for him. I think that the pecking order had been established and that at this point he had accepted the fact that I was just a better skier than he was. </p>
<p>After the second day Finn guy had pretty much conceded the “tour”. We skied together some during the next 5 days, but I found that he could not stride at all. He could double pole like a fiend, but when it came to hills, he shuffled and skated most of the hills. Yes, I was going to tell him that skating was perhaps like cheating, but I didn’t really want to go there. Most of the European skiers did not think that it was “wrong” to skate during the classic event. The Germans were especially prone to skating whenever they got the chance. They would ask me every night how much I had skated that day.</p>
<p><B>Beautiful trails</B></p>
<p>Over 7 days we skied through remote and beautiful Finnish countryside and saw no other people. The trail conditions ranged from beautifully piston-bullied tracks to single tracks that were bushwacked just to get us from one point to the next. A snowmobile would go ahead every day to set track and there were 5 different regional ski organizations that hosted the service stations (all volunteers). We had excellent hard track skiing conditions each day, TOKO blue most days. I skied the first three days on the TOKO green binder that I applied at home before I left and just three layers of blue (that was 190km). The days went by exceedingly fast and I never felt tired (except for the one day that ended in a big climb to the ski hill). I mostly felt very privileged to be able to ski from point a to point b and have my stuff hauled around and ready for me at the end of each day.</p>
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