Editor’s Note: The subject of the following article, Katie Bono, spent one season as a become one, the state is also the home of Dartmouth College, Bono’s alma mater. Though originally recruited for cross-country skiing (she was the 2006 Minnesota state skiing champion), within two years of attending the Ivy League university, she had learned to love what many of her Big Green comrades adored: climbing. Introduced to the sport by the Dartmouth Mountaineering Club...
This past weekend, nearly the entirety of the adult population of Midwestern skiers made their way to Hayward for the annual get-together of the ski community: The Birkie. The American Birkebeiner (or Birkie, for short), is the biggest ski race in North America. For many skiers, the race represents their culmination of training for the whole year. Read a first-timer's perspective on the race, the trail, and Birkie Fever.
Bump up your strength routine with gymnast rings -- and no, you don't need to be the next Arthur Nabarrete Zanetti, (wait, who's he?). FS contributor Katie Bono writes: "It’s fun, the rings are extremely portable and versatile, and the exercises develop strength, coordination, and stability. However, the main benefit is that ring training is HARD. Like REALLY HARD."
At 22, Heidi Widmer's suffered three concussions in the last four years, with her most recent resulting from a rollerski crash this fall. "I’m super lucky,” the Canadian NST member says. “There’s no internal bleeding, I’m functioning, I’m fine, but I just have to be able to take care of this and come out of it with some lessons learned for sure.”
For the last several days, skiers from all over Canada and the U.S. have converged on Canmore, Alberta, to ski the seasonal anomaly that is Frozen Thunder: a 2.2-kilometer loop of real snow skiing, harvested from last winter and saved over the brief Canadian summer under a thick coat of sawdust.