Coercion

One of the best things about getting hooked on endurance sports is the community of folks who want to support and/or join you in your pursuits. Since I've started running and entering events, I've had several different friends join me: Jenny and Amy have run several 5K's and Amy did a 10K with me, Robyn jogged along with me for the 1/2 marathon, Mamie and Kev and Katie have all biked along with me on some of my longer training runs, and now my mom and her husband are interested in doing a 5K! It's fun to exercise with friends, and great to think that I'm helping to inspire others to get healthy and have fun doing so!

Not to say that my friends are totally willing to join me all of the time. In fact, sometimes I have to be pretty persistent and persuasive to get them to buy into my crazy schemes. See below for an example of me trying to convince Amy that we can and should do the 20k part of the OSCR (am I persuasive enough? If so, you should join us!):

From: Amy
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2008 12:40 PM
To: Walker, Carly
Subject: moment of panic!

Hey,I just had a moment of panic...I was checking out your blog and proceeded on to the OSCR website. I checking out the times for the women in the 25k and the slowest 2 hr 49min (I think). Anyhow, I believe all these people are skate skiing because we are doing about 6 miles in 3 hours or a little less. Is there going to be anyone at the finish line when it takes us 6 hours to finish the race? Is there anymore people doing the classic ski in the 10k race??? Maybe we should call the phone number and find out if there are any classic skiiers. I don't mind coming in last but twice the time of the other racers they might just put a dnf next to our names:) What do you think?amy



From: Walker, Carly
Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2008 8:10 AM
To: 'Amy
Subject: RE: moment of panic!

Have no fear, dear Amy. We won’t be left stranded. First, it only took us 2.5 hours to ski the 6 mile loop the other day, and that was on ungroomed trails. So I don’t think we did too badly there. Without any more effort, Kevin and I skied 6 miles in 2 hours on groomed trails two days before, and that included a 15-minute photo shoot at the top (by the way, Kev, send me those photos when you get a chance, would ya?). So I think it’s reasonable to count on averaging at least 3 miles/hour. I mean, heck, that’s slower than the pack test!

Anyhow, I called Lynn Carey, the coordinator of OSCR, and talked with him about it. I told him that we are very novice classic skiers who have no illusions of racing, but are just in for a good challenge. He totally encouraged us to come along, and said it’s a fun time. As you learned from Steve Clark, they no longer run the OSCR from Ovando to Seeley (bummer), but instead do it all on the Seeley Ski Trails. There are three different distances: a 10K loop, a 20K (twice around the 10K loop), and a 50K. (Apparently they decided to do a 20K instead of a 25K and just make it two loops, because they were suspecting that some people were cheating and skipping the extra 5K loop in previous years.)

So if we do the 20K, that’s about 12.4 miles. The race will start at 10:15am, and they want to have everyone done by 2pm. So that means we’ll have 3 ¾ hours to complete the 12 miles, i.e. we need to ski about 3.3 miles/hour. I think it’s totally do-able, especially if we save the picture-taking and whatnot for the end! After the race, they’re having a big Chili feed at the Community Center that everyone’s invited to. Mmm.

They’ll have registration forms online in a few days (http://www.missoulanordic.org/) and want folks to sign up early so they can order the right size t-shirts (yes there are t-shirts… why else do we enter races?!)

Yeah, we’ll probably be the slowest goobers out there. But hey, it’s a good way to 1. Get a t-shirt, 2. Burn some buns, 3. Celebrate my 30th B-day, and 4. See some guys in spandex (ew!) - carly