Axel Teichmann saw me pee

It’s true.  For real.  Like, 2 time world champ Axel Teichmann.  He caught me makin yellow snow.

Let me set it up for you in 4 parts that had to come together all at the right moment, like a perfect storm:

So as you should know by now, it gets dark here early in the day.  That means when we ski twice, we skin once in the light and once in the dark.  It’s actually kind of cool because it’s all lit up so it’s a new feeling to ski like that.  But that’s not the point.  Well today we went skating in the afternoon, and it was full on dark out.  And they just groomed and lit a 10k loop that was finally in great shape after a little more snow last night.  That’s part number 1.

So when we skied I did two loops of the 3.8k thats been open since we got here.  Roughly, I’d say I’ve skied this loop 50 times.  Not that I’m complaining about great skiing at this time of year, but it does get a little boring.  Then I was looking for adventure and I knew they had opened this loop and I hadn’t skied it yet.  So at the turnoff I just went for it.  And I was off.  There’s part 2.

Muonio is a pretty sweet place right now and there’s big races coming up and the world cup opens not far away.  Because of this a lot of national teams are hanging around, including, as of yesterday, the German team.  That’s number 3.

Part 4 is simple.  I drank a lot of water yesterday and today and had soup for lunch and didn’t pee before leaving the house to ski.

So when you put all that together, you have a beautiful, lit, 10k loop which I am skiing on because I’m bored of the 3.8k.  At the same time, you’ve got superstars like Axel (yeah, I’d say it’s first name basis after the intimate moment I shared with him) skiing around all over the place, like this exact 10k loop.  Finally, I needed to pee.  Badly.  So I’m cruising along, looking for a good stopping point.  So far, I’d skied about 2-3k and seen nobody, so I wasn’t worried about getting spotted.  I picked the top of a big hill and stopped, pulled over right under a streetlamp, and started doing my thang.  Well just as I started, I looked down the track that I was basically standing on, and there’s a person there.  Shoot.  Too late now.  Wouldn’t be my first time getting caught yellow handed.  Well as this guy comes up I get a better view and realize he’s a German, and he’s pretty good.  Doesn’t matter much, it’s still a guy who’s seeing me pee right?  Wrong.  I start to realize that he’s real tall and has this look of pain in his eyes like he just gets routinely outsprinted by Northug.  Actually, I couldn’t see that.  But I did recognize him.  As I was squinting at him I think I started to turn towards him (as I would later realize from my yellow trail) which seems, in retrospect, like a bad idea.  Woops.  But he definitely saw me.  Fully lit up, almost in his tracks, taking a pee.  And that was it.  My brush with fame, my 15 seconds, my moment in the spotlight.