The Adventures of Sam Tarling: One Long Road Trip

Note: This article has been updated.

Peering up at a sign inside a pizza joint in Colville, Wash., Sam Tarling saw an opportunity. Like so many other spontaneous offers 21-year-old Dartmouth College racer seized to get out West, Tarling jumped at the chance to eat for money.

With an evening to kill and a stomach of steel, Tarling reasoned he couldn’t lose. The defending NCAA 10-k champion trumped similar challenges in the past.

Three quarters of the way through the seven-pound pizza less than an hour later, Tarling rethought his decision.

“I sort of did it on a full stomach,” he said almost two weeks after during an interview in Rossland, British Columbia.

He had already ordered a different meal when several Bridger Ski Foundation (BSF) juniors dared him to get the pizza. If he finished the seven-pounder, the restaurant would eat the cost and give him $100 dollars and another pizza for free.

“I’m a total sucker for eating challenges,” the 6-foot-2 college junior said. “I was probably a little too confident going in.”

The pizza proved too mighty. Tarling got sick and paid for the pie.

“It had every topping on it and was a little undercooked and … was a little too doughy and sloppy for me,” he said. “Instead of paying for half of the cost of the trip to Canada, I ended up losing like a quarter of it.”

That was Tarling’s life in a nutshell — at least for the last three or so months.

Since late August when he wrapped up finals and left Hanover, N.H., Tarling had been on the road training and racing independently for Dartmouth. While he chose a similar route last year as a sophomore, taking the fall semester off and attending classes in winter and spring, Tarling has been more places and slept on more couches than expected.

His travel-intense schedule — starting in Middlebury, Vt., and ending in Canada — wasn’t entirely unplanned, Tarling said. It wasn’t exactly organized, either.

“I haven’t really told many people about my plans because I know what’s going to be good for me,” he said. “On paper, it might not look like the best plan to be traveling around, but most of this sport, to me, is mental.

“As long as I’m happy and eager to go training, I’m going to train my best,” he added.

While watching football with friends during his last night in Bozeman, Mont., Tarling considered extending his trip. Sun Valley racer Mike Sinnott, Team Homegrown’s Sylvan Ellefson and the Bridger crew were all headed to Silver Star, British Columbia. They suggested Tarling come, too.

Tarling called up his Dartmouth coach, Ruff Patterson, who said the team would rollerski in Hanover rather than travel to Mont-Sainte-Anne, Quebec, for its annual camp. There was no natural snow back east.

“That was kind of a deal breaker right there,” Tarling said. “I called up the airline and luckily there was another flight that mimicked my flight pattern exactly two weeks later, same flight and no extra fees or anything, so that was an easy decision.”

The next day, he hopped in one of the BSF vans and started chatting with head coach Dragan Danevski. They decided to work out the financial details later and chatted about the Bridger program in the meantime.

After two nights on the road — one of which the pizza scarred — Tarling found himself in western Canada without a place to stay a few days before the NorAm races at Sovereign Lake. Upon hastily planning the trip, BSF athlete Leif Zimmermann suggested his friends in Silver Star might have an extra room, Tarling said. They didn’t.

“I found a nice little couch in the BSF house that I could put my stuff down and sleep on,” Tarling said. “But it was kind of like my head up on the arm and my feet were up on the end.”

He slept in his first bed in nearly a month in Rossland, where Tarling ended up by default when there wasn’t enough room in the BSF van back to Bozeman.

Since September, Tarling had bounced around seven states and provinces, joining the U.S. Ski Team in Lake Placid, N.Y., and Park City, Utah, and working out with teams like the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation (SVSEF) in Idaho and Team Homegrown in Vail, Colo.

He spent three days mountain biking in Moab, Utah, camping in the dirt outside a friend’s house because there wasn’t enough room inside, and lived at 8,000 feet (nearly 2,500 meters) in Vail for a month before first racing in West Yellowstone, Mont.

The idea was to get in as much training as possible before his college season started at U.S. Nationals in Rumford, Maine, Jan. 2-8. With about two years left before he graduates college — most likely with a degree in environmental studies and/or geography — Tarling figured it was a good time to check out ski programs as well.

“I didn’t really plan this to be like a review of all the clubs, but it just sort of worked out that way,” he said.

Most were extremely accommodating, he said. While staying with a friend in Middlebury, Tarling trained with the Craftsbury Green Racing Project in northern Vermont. His next stop was Lake Placid, after USST development coach Pete Vordenberg invited him to join as many national team camps as he could.

Tarling looked at his school schedule and training goals, and found a way to make two of them. He worked the rest of his fall travel around that.

Based mostly out of the east last year, Tarling rode around with the Maine Winter Sports Center. He similarly spent most of the preseason on the road, but occasionally stopped to visit his parents in Maine.

This year, he made it home to Cumberland for one night after Lake Placid. He spent the summer at school and went to Maine once in August for a few nights while sick with a stress- and sinusitis-induced migraine. That was an isolated incident, he said, which hadn’t happened since.