It’s easy to be embarrassed when you’re wearing a full body spandex suit and your feet at strapped to thin pieces of wood. Throw in a high profile race, freezing Alaskan temperatures, and a running nose and you’ve got me.

I haven’t always been a runner, that’s just been the past three years of my life. I entered the athletic world on skis, and not the cool kind. When I was younger, my mom loaded us all up in the blue Volvo Station wagon and trucked us to Barny’s Ski Shack in Anchorage, Alaska. She shepherded us around the waxes, and through the hats and mittens until we found the skis. Along with my brothers and sisters, I was outfitted with the necessities for getting out on the trails and enjoying the pristine winter wilderness.

Skiing has always been a family pass-time, and through elementary and middle school I often took trips with my mom and dad around the lakes, and through the parks of the Mat-Su valley. But that’s all xc-skiing was until high school, when I joined the Colony High School XC Ski Team. I had a lot of fun on the team, but I’ll be honest, I wasn’t fast, I wasn’t coordinated, and I flailed. There’s a fundamental difference between downhill skiing and xc-skiing… gravity. Propelling yourself forward when you can rely on the momentum of a downhill slope to pull you to the finish line is much easier than balancing while trying to double poll on a flat or nearly up hill section of a race in order to slide past your competition. On this fine winter day at the Kincaid Invitational, that’s what I was trying to do.

My first race was my Freshman year at Colony High School. It was a 10k Classic through the well known Anchorage Park (Kincaid). I slithered into my spandex onesie, buckled down my boots, and slipped up to the starting line next to my competitor. Like all of the marathons I have run, some xc-ski races have a mass start. For a shy first timer, this is a fantastic way to start a race–you blend in with the other skiers, totally hidden from the judgment of the crowd. For my first race, however, we had heat starts. It was me vs. McKenzie West, a cute red headed speed demon who skied like she was born with sticks on her feet.

At the start of the ski race, we lined up side by side in the chute. The start was flat, so the strategy was to double poll to gain momentum around the corner until the downhills started. Balance was key. BANG! We took off–correction–she took off. I put my weak arms to work doing the best I could to get going as fast as I could. And then the turn came. I channeled my inner confidence and broke into the turn. What I forgot to do was channel my inner ballerina. I looked up, saw a group of the cutest xc-ski boys I had ever seen. The very second I made eye contact I found myself tumbling into the snow with all the grace of a hokey player on figure skates, and I wasn’t even past the 1600 meter mark. Right away I heard the cute boys laughing, and then I looked down and saw a trail of frozen mucus clinging to my bright green spandex suit. I had two choices, ski off and forfeit the race, or pick myself up and take almost up to a minute loss on my first race. This was my first lesson in endurance–you can always do ten times more than what you think you are capable of. With that in mind I slipped on past the giggling boys, and onto the downhill section where I gained momentum and eventually caught that McKenzie West.

(NOTE: McKenzie did beat me in this race, but after some practice, I was able to pass her at Kincaid the next year.)