Zen and the Art of Speedskating

wow, 4 comments on the last post! it must be the John Dimon Magic…. since my next post is still in mental rumination format (i.e. been thinking about it, but haven’t written it yet, it has to do with silly putty & coaches) I will reprint a John Dimon Story I wrote down a ong time ago, and that originally existed elsewhere on the web. I think many of the lifetime athlete crowd of traveling sweat-gypsies have unique & weird road trip racing stories, but I have met few who have such a plethora of stories as John Dimon, here is one of my favorites (and the weirdest):

In the late 70’s a couple of US Olympic Biathlon team hopefuls were traveling the Northeast, doing cross country ski races and generally having way too much fun. As this was cross country skiing in the 70’s, lets just say these young, spunky, extremely fit fellows were just a little on the furry side. In fact John Dimon back then sported quite the viking beard (see the picture below). He learned the hard way that when carrying a pair of skis over your shoulder, keep the klister AWAY from your full beard, it was only 3/4 of a beard after that incident.

So these extra furry guys were at a race and staying in a cabin next door to a cabin containing a bunch of French Canadian racers. During the night a rat got into the Canadian’s cabin, and after running around and scaring the bejesus out of the Canadians, it climbed into a bag of potato chips someone had left on the floor and started munching away. Awakened by all the racket, a bleary eyed John Dimon appeared at the door of the Canadian’s cabin in his underwear. Figuring out what the source of all the noise was, and being only half awake, he took a flying leap through the air and landed with both feet directly on the potato chip bag! Without a word he chucked the bag containing the now rat flavored potato chips out the door, and stalked off without a word back to bed. The Canadians were speechless, This american was crazy! They liked him right away.

The next day at the races, the brutal XC ski race course contained a lot of switchback climbing through the woods. John and the other Americans were in such a mood after the rat incident (and maybe suffering a bit of testosterone poisoning that is so common to 20 year olds), that they were howling like wolves at various parts of the climb, to encourage each other, and to see where they were on the course in relation to each other.

That was confirmation enough to the Canadians, After this race weekend, the Quebec racers began to call John Le Loup-Garou. That is french for “The werewolf”. The name stuck.

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