Get up off the couch and start training now. On Dec. 18, a cross-country ski race series will kick into gear at the Dublin School Outdoor Center. Hosted by the Dublin XC ski club, the Headlamp Hustle will feature six Thursday night races, each one roughly five kilometers long and starting at 6 p.m.
This season’s Hustle reprises a popular race series that ran from 2016 to 2019 and drew up to 45 skiers for a loose-limbed winter fiesta. Dublin School headmaster Brad Bates, who helped coordinate the former incarnation of the Hustle, remembers fondly how it lured “people on wooden skis and people in Lycra. The first 15 skiers,” Bates says, “would treat it as a serious race, and then there’d be a middle group that wanted to try racing without pushing themselves too much. And then there were the 15 in the back who said, ‘We don’t care where we finish.’”
It’s likely that this year’s Hustle will have the same vibe. The region’s most serious Nordic honchos are already clearing their Thursday night calendars to ensure they can be at the races, gunning for glory on Dublin’s famously steep and twisty-turny trails. Victor Feofilaktov – once a coach at the Olympic Reserve Sport School in Russia, now an exercise physiologist at Franklin Pierce University – hopes to be on hand. Former U.S. Ski Team member Kathy Madock, a Wilton resident, is deliberating over how she’ll wax for the first throwdown.
Meanwhile, Dublin XC vice president Lindsey Burkhardt is intent on welcoming novice racers to the Hustle. A one-time University of New Hampshire skier, Burkhardt will be leading a Ski Racing 101 clinic an hour before the first race starts – that is, at 5 p.m. on Dec. 18. “Basically,” says Burkhardt, “we’ll do a course preview and we’ll say, ‘Here’s how you should take this turn’ and ‘You should go into the hill this way.’” Burkhardt is the head coach of the 50 kids who take part in Dublin XC’s youth program, and her long experience has shown that, for most beginning racers, the main challenge is jitters. “I just tell people, ‘Nerves are your superpower, your fuel,” she says. “They’ll give you a jolt of adrenaline.”
The Headlamp Hustle series is aptly named: While Dublin’s trails are lit, there are dark spots in between lights, and racers would do well to bring a headlamp. It’s not absolutely necessary, though: The lamp-deprived can simply follow other skiers.
The second Hustle will take place on Jan. 8. Then races will be held every other Thursday –on Jan. 22, Feb. 5, Feb. 19 and March 5 – as skiers vie to become season champions via a point system prioritizing devotion over speed. Three points will be awarded to a skier every time he or she finishes a race. The winners of each race, both male and female, will go home with two bonus points. Second and third place finishers, again both male and female, will notch a single bonus point.
Entry fees will be amiable – $5 per race; $25 for the season – and the whole series will, organizers hope, help fulfill the vision of the Outdoor Center’s first patrons, 50s-era Dublin School grads Michael Lehman and Nancy Haynes, who in 2012 joined to give their alma mater an 82-acre swath of Beech Hill. “What could be better,” Lehman has said, “than a sport which is in fresh air and sunshine, is fun, develops strength and stamina, and where there is the opportunity for competition?”
The Outdoor Center opened in 2014, and ever since it has been an obsessive project of Headmaster Bates, a one-time Dartmouth skier who still trains intently. Bates makes a point of visiting the trails, either on foot or on skis, daily, year-round, and is ever attentive to their condition: Whenever he sees a pine cone or a stick on the ski track, he flicks it aside with his pole. He does this so frequently, he says, that, “By springtime, I get carpal tunnel syndrome.”
Over the years, Bates has added lights and snowmaking to the Dublin trail network. In 2015, thanks largely to Bates, Dublin’s five-kilometer race course became one of only a handful in New England recognized by the Federation Internationale de Ski (FIS) as “homologated” — in other words, good enough to host international competitions.
But as Bates has labored to entice the Lycra-clad hardcore to Dublin, his main goal has been to make the Outdoor Center accessible to all who live nearby. “The trails here,” he said as he cleared brush off them on a recent Saturday, “they’re open to horseback riders, mountain bikers, hikers, snowshoers and skiers. On a winter weekend, we’ll cycle over 200 cars through the place.”
Bates is readying to leave Dublin next spring, after 17 years as headmaster, and he said, “I’m worried what’s going to happen to the Outdoor Center. But when you draw people here, as the Headlamp Hustle will, they’ll get involved. They’ll take ownership, and I believe that they’ll take care of this place.”