U.S. Cross Country Ski Championship skiers hope to get back on the trails

ANCHORAGE — Kikkan Randall is eager to race for a national championship on her home course at Kincaid Park — but not if it compromises her health.

Due to the coldest weather pattern Anchorage has seen in at least a decade, the classic sprint at the U.S. Cross Country Ski Championships was canceled Sunday for the second straight day. “It’s disappointing. ... (But) they made the right decision. It’s not worth risking our health just to race one day when we’ve got a lot of good days ahead of us,” said Randall, who last year became the first American woman to win a World Cup race.
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Protecting the athletes’ health is the reason for the minus 4 temperature requirement.

“In a sprint, you’re just breathing so hard that cold air reaches so far in your lungs that you essentially burn your lungs,” said Randall, the defending U.S. sprint and classic champion. “Then, your lung capacity is pretty diminished for the rest of the season and you’re more susceptible to respiratory illness, so it’s a serious concern.”

Science fiction author Bruce Sterling still believes in the CO2 scam

Last, and slowest, and worst, there's the climate. The planet's entire atmosphere is polluted. Practically everything we do in our civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff. Climate change is a major evil. It's vast in scope and it's everywhere. The climate crisis would be a major issue even for a technically with-it bright-green secular Utopia, where every single citizen was an MIT grad. Of course our world looks nothing like that. Nor will it. The people fighting climate change -- they look like Voltaire combatting Kings and Popes. They're still eighty percent witty comments. They have a foul, hot wind at their backs, but they don't yet have the battalions. Communism, capitalism, socialism, whatever: we've never yet had any economic system that recognizes that we have to live on a living planet. Plankton and jungles make the air we breathe, but they have no place at our counting-house. National regulations do nothing much for that situation. New global regulations seem about as plausible as a new global religion.