A summer of work during Covid-19
Written by GRP Biathlete Hallie Grossman
If you are familiar with the structure of the Green Racing Project, you may know that athletes are required to do a minimum of 500 hours of work per year, around the Center or in the Craftsbury and greater Northeast Kingdom community. This work is exchange for a tiny fraction of the support that we get on this team. The work is as varied as the athletes themselves; some people enjoy crunching numbers and building apps while others enjoy coaching kids while still others enjoy creating mountain bike trails. This blog post is primarily about the work that I have done over these past few months, so is only a snapshot of one person’s experiences.
Somehow, five years have flown by and I’m solidly in my sixth year on the team-don’t ask me how this has happened! As the years have gone, I’ve become more and more involved in the Craftsbury, and now Albany, communities. Me and a former teammate and forever friend, Heather Mooney, like to say that the GRP is the greatest internship ever. We are encouraged to undertake work projects that are fulfilling to us, while also making sure that basic tasks and duties are completed around the Center. For me, most of those rewarding projects are people-orientated and sometimes off of the Center premises. I am going to share a slew of pictures from June through December 2020, and explain a little bit as I go along. These are roughly chronological, but not entirely!
Tuesday Night Races. The Tuesday Night Races, especially the summer series, are something that I have been involved in for a long while now. This year, not surprisingly, they took on a slightly different tone: they went virtual! Each week Running Director Heidi and GRP’er Kelsey publicized a course to be run solo and participants would submit their times. My job was to bake giant cookies for the random winner!
Cookies! This year, delivered right to your doorstep.
Gardening. Two thirds of the COC mission involves the environment and sustainability. As part of this, extensive gardens are maintained around the Outdoor center to provide some super local food for the dining hall and athletes. One way that the GRP fits into this is by helping take care of these campus gardens. For years, GRP’ers have helped Garden Queen Amy Schulz and her posse of garden ladies (and occasionally a daring gentleman!) maintain several abundant vegetable and flower gardens at the Center as well as up the road at Hosmer Point. This year, with the addition and assistance of Jonathan Gilbert, there was a dedicated GRP garden as well. Jonathan and Amy took lots of time to not only show us what to do, but also why we were doing it. Much of the produce went straight to the COC kitchen or GRP tummies, but some was also donated to the Albany Food Share! [picture: labeled garden, Margie and Jonathan, garlic braiding, squash cleaning].
Some of the garden goodies
Here we see Caitlin cleaning squash. We planted, harvested, and stored a boatload of squash for the Dining Hall to use all fall and winter long.
Braiding garlic may be a lost art, but we’re trying!
Jonathan harvesting spinach with GRP’er Margie
In the vein of sharing food: blueberries. Boy, did we pick blueberries! We picked several hundred pounds of blueberries from Brown’s Beautiful Blueberries, owned by GRP ski house neighbor Phil Lovely. Brown’s was unable to open to the public this year, but Phil invited us to pick for local non-profits including the Craftsbury Community Care Center, as well as Craftsbury Academy and the Outdoor Center. It was fulfilling to help a neighbor harvest his crop, as well as share it with those around us.
And while we are talking about doing a lot of something: wood. Summer 2020 could also be called the summer of the wood. The Craftsbury Energy Committee sponsored the purchasing of a ton (precise measurement) of wood from local loggers to be given to local families that may have otherwise had trouble heating their homes. The Craftsbury Albany Neighbor Group helped identify families who would benefit from the wood. And who better to split and stack (and restack?) that wood than a bunch of athletes? This wood project tied together many community members, which was really neat to see.
I got to work on my splitting technique many times, though I’d still rate it a solid C at best.
Wood that was formally at the Garage, now being stacked at a local family’s home.
Wood stacked at the Craftsbury Town Garage, waiting for distribution
Food and food insecurity. These are words we have heard so much recently, not just on the national news but right here in our own communities. So, the Outdoor Center, both staff and athletes, have been working to help provide food to our neighbors. The Craftsbury Albany Neighbor Group has been working tirelessly since March to make sure people are fed, houses are warm, children are cared for, you name it. On a weekly basis, in both towns, food boxes are distributed to families with staples and often a meal. GRP athletes packed lots and lots of containers of peanut butter, bags of rice, sacks of flour and other necessities. The kitchen staff cooked several delicious and hearty meals that were distributed with the food boxes. Several athletes have helped with the actual (no contact) delivery of the boxes to community members. For the Thanksgiving food boxes, GRP’ers and other COC community members baked more than thirty pies of all sorts of flavors.
Rowers Alex and Andrew packing a car full of food for distribution. Somewhere in the annals of my computer’s photo albums is a picture of the beautiful COC kitchen community meals, but they are currently among the missing.
Making some pie! Safety is the utmost priority these days-so masks on for community baking!
Community Fitness. Since my nascent years of the GRP, I have been a comfit instructor or co-instructor. I sorely miss the days of gathering in the gym, former teammates Liz and I guiding ten community members through a series of exercises, but these days have forced us to get creative! From April through December, I sent out weekly workouts with accompanying goofy videos to class participants, we had a brief stint of being able to hold outdoor classes in September, then we moved on to Zoom classes in October! Phew! I know that so much of the Comfit allure is the social aspect, and I dearly hope we can have that back again sometime in the future, but in the meantime, the participants are subjected to my unstable internet and barking dog and bad jokes that everyone is muted for so I don’t know if they are laughing. [photo: comfit, zoom comfit].
1. The beautiful few weeks where we could have outdoor class, very distanced, until it got too cold and dark and weathery and this sort of activity was suspended.
2. So we moved to Zoom! Here, we can all become familiar with each other’s living rooms!
Kids! Since my early days in Craftsbury, I’ve spent at least an hour or two a week at the Craftsbury schools. In the summer months, this moved more to tutoring at the library. But alas, that was not to be this summer! I started outdoor reading and math with “my two girls,” including trying to find creative ways to work on fractions, but at some point the topic of BIKES! Came up and reading turned to bikes and reading then to just biking. Now, we’ve moved to “Zoom book club,” a real stretch for the NEK internet but worth it nonetheless. The absolute highlight of my summer was helping one of the girls learn how to ride a bike without training wheels! There were tears in both her mom and I’s eyes and she scooted around the driveway under her own power. Additionally, I’ve been a Four Winds Nature Program Volunteer for a while now, which usually includes monthly classroom visits. Not this year! In May, I created seed packets for the kids to plant at home then in November, we did an actual taching session-over the internet! It was a learning experience for me, for sure.
1. Some picnic table fraction practice.
2. Once you learn how to ride the bike, you also need to be able to maintain the bike! Friends helping friends learn about simple bike maintenance at the Craftsbury Green Space, with tools provided by WonderArts.
More than a dozen mini gardens in newspaper packets!
Coaching kids. Helping with the kids program this summer took on a very different feel than in past years, no big surprise. We were unable to hold the much-anticipated Bike Club, but were able to bike with small groups of kiddos. There were small group practices, which definitely brought a smile to kids’ faces, though they were without the favorite games. We did have some biathlon practices and kids even got to do a “race” of sorts, which consisted of a shooting test and a 1500 meter or 3000 meter run.
A BKL biathlete with his race prize!
As we transition to winter and I head to Europe soon to race, my work will solely be on the computer: in-house newsletter, Member eNews, and a few other odds and ends. Perhaps I’ll regale you with that later on, from a faraway land!