Uhlfelder News

This morning, after honestly not sleeping at all (I’m jet-lagged about as badly as I can remember). We got an early start, ate a quick breakfast and took a 45-minute shuttle bus from Lienz Austria up to Obertilliach via a serpentine road.

One guy on the trip is a professor or something in Alaska and offers his very professorial opinions about everything. He reminds me of someone at home we know and is a Yale graduate. The group all went to the best colleges, some were very accomplished athletes on a college level, and are all really into supporting the US cross country team and the development teams and young athletes.

I overheard the professor tell Garrott about tourism and the mountain sports industry. Lots of free advice to be sure.

It was very cold, at least single digits and given my sleep, I seem to be susceptible to it. It was miserable. I think lack of exercise yesterday contributed.

Today was the classic race day, and a couple in our group participated. I’m waiting for tomorrow and the skate race. I estimate there were 750 people or so, from really fast to really slow. I saw a pretty bad fall at the start which given the chaos seemed inevitable. Garrott was remarking how cross-country just wasn’t that popular in Austria. Tomorrow’s’ race should have about 1,000 people. The average Aspen race has 15.

Anyway, Garrott, the trip leader, didn’t seem terribly interested in skiing and everyone was doing their own thing so I met one of our guides, Petra from Austria, and she told me to meet them at a restaurant in Rauschenberg. This was about four miles from the starting point in Obertilliach and one of Garrott’s “quaint mountain huts.”

It took 30 minutes of skiing to warm up, sort of, but when I arrived at the hut 50 minutes later I was still cold and uncomfortable. I sat there thinking I must have the wrong place since it wasn’t quaint, it wasn’t cute, or charming-it wasn’t anything more than a bar that served drinks and some basic off-the-shelf food. I had the Campbell’s noodle soup, then another, and waited.

If you tolerated the smell, the view was nice

Here was the atmosphere: next to the main road, filled with stale cigarette smoke and a table of Austrians enthusiastically watching the Hahnenkamm on TV. To be fair, it had a nice view, but it wasn’t enough to redeem it. I waited about a 40 minutes for everyone else to show up, and tried to warm up. Eventually another six or so people showed up along with the overly enthusiastic, borderline annoying daughter of one of the guests.

Rauch means to smoke in German. We Americans are simply not used to smoking and dealing with smoke anymore.

We went back down the trails to catch the shuttle back to Lienz and on a quick ski back to Obertilliach I was met by the trail police that asked for my trail pass. This is when English comes in handy, and I told him our group leader had it and she was right behind me and went on my way. Apparently she showed up and said Garrott was behind her with the passes (he wasn’t). It turns out Garrett was told passes were not needed during the races. Eventually I got to where the 42K classic race was still going on, and double polled with the slower folks watching the race. It didn’t seem to matter that a race was going on and I was skiing on the course.

Some notes:

We had a nice dinner and the group with some who even get my sense of humor.

We reviewed the race today as informed by the two people from the group who raced.

It’s snowing this evening and notwithstanding lack of sleep tomorrow should be nice. I slept this afternoon for a couple hours.

We decided to go alpine skiing in Cortina on Tuesday.

Garrott offered to arrange a biathlon ski for me in Seefeld.