Tom Keefe Ski Life Diary

Its 7AM my cell phone starts vibrating from my girlfriend Anik’s night stand. I’ve been staying with her for a few days in Portland Maine before making the journey to Finland for 3 ½ weeks. I pick it up and look at the caller ID; Will Sweetser is displayed across the horizontal screen. Figures, who else would call at this time in the morning? Will is my coach, and he is responsible for setting up this early season on snow camp in Finland for my teammate Dave Chamberlain and me. Will is full of enthusiasm and is always fired up to get things done, he is a great coach and he’s on top of his game. Will sets up the best training camps…hands down, they are awesome! That being said, I’m fired up to get on snow in Finland! Before I continue, I’d like to note that Ed Hamel is also the training camp king. Ed is up there with Will for top honors in this category.

“Hey there Bubba,” he says as if he has been up for over two hours already! “I’ve been up since 5:30AM and I’m already driving down there, so I hope you’re ready to go,” Will says in a fired up voice. We discuss our plans to meet up around 1pm at C&J Trail-ways in Portsmouth, NH. From there we will take the bus to Logan and begin our three week training camp in northern Finland. “OK Bubba I’ll see you there,” I said as I hung up the phone and fell back asleep.

Several hours later I boarded the plane hoping to get a decent seat assignment, but of course I was given the iron shaft as usual. To the left was an over weight man from India who wouldn’t stop talking about getting his green card. To the right sat your typical Frenchmen, a twenty-two year old guy from Paris who had a BIT of a stench. I guess I’ll just throw my hopes of sitting in the exit row right out the window! For the next six hours from Boston to Paris I sat crunched up in my seat waiting for the plane to land. Finally we touched down in Paris, but not after a long flight of the Frenchmen sneezing everywhere and India taking up two seats. Unfortunately this is not out of the ordinary for me when traveling long distances.

The plane’s intercom crackled and the pilot’s voice was loud and clear, “current conditions in Rovaniemi, Finland -6 degrees Celsius… party cloudy… and the time is around 10pm.” Finally after more than twenty hours of traveling and a few other connections, we had landed in central Finland; thank god, I thought to myself. Will, Sarah, and I deplaned, picked up our luggage, the rental cars, and proceeded to the City Hotel in downtown Rovaniemi. We stayed the night in Rovaniemi to wait for Dave to fly in early the next morning before heading to Voukatti, our first destination. Dave came in early the next morning and the four of us had breakfast at the City Hotel and headed to Voukatti. Voukatti is where we would spend our first five days training on a hilly 5k loop before heading north to Yllas and Muonio.

Oct 29th, 2006

We have spent the past five days skiing in Voukatti and getting adjusted to the seven hour time change. We were able to ski twice a day on a 5k loop of blown snow. The loop was very hilly and crowded due to the many different national teams training there. Voukatti is a hot spot for national teams because of the ski tunnel and early season snow. Voukatti is a really good place to train, but I was happy to be heading north today where there would be 30k of groomed trails waiting, and not nearly as many Russians blasting around!

After getting a massage from our main-man Tony, a massage therapist at the Voukatti ski tunnel, it was time to rally. We had met Tony on our first visit to Voukatti a few months ago, and were happy to see him again when we returned. Tony is a great guy, and a good masseuse! What I remember most about Tony is his broken English, and his attempts to hold a conversation as he beat your muscles into the table. His English was rather good, just very slow due to pausing while he searched for the next appropriate word. Tony will forever be remembered as saying, “Is this…..first……..time…..to…Voukatti?” There was a long pause between these words until he got to the only Finnish word in the sentence, which he said quickly and very clearly; VOUKATTI.

More to come soon…

Tom

Tom Keefe is a member of the Maine Winter Sports Center team currently racing on the national circuit with goals of being ranked among the top 20 skiers in the US for 2005-2006 and to be chosen for the 2010 US Olympic Team. Follow Tom's ski racing adventures this season on SkiReg.com to get an inside look at his progress to be a top ranked US skier!