Momentum: Chasing the Olympic Dream Paperback – Import, 1 December 2002

If you ever went for it in life, suffered for a sport, came to hate it and then love it again in a new and different way, you need to know there are other people out there who can put your feelings into words. This book is that. Enjoy.

This is a great read. Now let's face it, you have to be Nordic skier to understand the guy's drive and focus. Then, if you understand those components of his brain, you'll also understand the hilarious and peculiar situations in which he finds himself.Honestly, a must read for Nordic Skiers.

This is a brilliant book. When I bought it I read it from cover to cover three times in a row, even though there were lots of other things I should have been doing.It is the story of a young American's attempt to become an Olympic cross-country ski champion, of how his early dream developed into a firm commitment, and of how he lived and worked when pursuing it.Sports biography is hard to write, for the lives of athletes - endurance athletes in particular - are not in the main exciting. As Vordenberg himself says, for most of the year the life of a ski racer can be described as "eat, sleep, train . . . eat, sleep, train . . . eat, sleep, train".He makes his own biography interesting by opting for an episodic structure, rather than a strict chronology. The book opens in 1993, with an account of a summer-long training season in Southern Washington State. Vordenberg was then 21 years old, yet he had been training hard for years. He had kept a training log since the age of 12, and had nursed Olympic ambitions since his mid-teens. As the book proceeds he flashes back to adolescence in Boulder, Colorado, and to his years as a scholarship student at Northern Michigan University, all the time training hard and finally making the US team for the 1992 Olympics in Albertville. Then he takes the story forward through the 1994 Games in Lillehammer.The book succeeds on many levels. Athletic skiers will like the technical content. If you want to know about periodised training schedules, then you'll enjoy the excerpts from his diaries from summer and winter 1997 when he was logging 30 hours hard training a week; and you'll find many other useful snippets throughout the book. If you want to improve your technique you'll mull over the descriptions of power and glide, "explosion and calm".But the technical stuff is interwoven nicely with amusing, interesting and sometimes moving accounts of incidents and people, and you can enjoy the book even if you know very little about skiing (though you'll pick up a lot of knowledge in the reading of it). There is a good human story in the writer's successes and failures in races, and there are some gripping accounts of major events. There's another good story in the way he quietly copes with the chronic lack of funding: by doing manual work in a national park, getting into a college for a year in Mora, Sweden, where skiing was a major curriculum subject. "Being an elite cross-country ski racer in America can be compared to going through medical school while being homeless", he says, highlighting the clash between high performance expectations and inadequate support systems.There is a good collection of well chosen and well told anecdotes - about adolescent romance, student high-jinks, alarming nutrition (at a notable post-exercise dinner each member of the university ski team puts away five platefuls of pastie and mashed potatoes). There are surreal episodes - a training run with a Bigfoot hunter in south Washington, a downtime period with flamboyant ex-pat dropouts on a beach in Mexico.And there is a love story, which comes near the end of the book at an otherwise low point in the adventure, a point at which you will be thinking: this guy could do with a bit of happiness.Vordenberg writes mainly in an easy, freewheeling style that has been compared with that of Jack Kerouac. Some sections of the book justify that comparison, but others don't. For example:"How many chances do you get to really do something? One? None? You might get ten but you don't know that. How many chances to you get to be great? Maybe one. So there had better be some urgency, some serious one-shot intensity, because this is it."Passages like that help explain why Pete Vordenberg got into coaching when his own racing career came to an end. He is now Head Coach of the U.S. Cross Country Ski Team.

Great read, couldn't put it down!

There is something seriously wrong with the Kindle edition of this book. File is corrupted or something. I have downloaded it twice. Tried downloading to my kindle app on phone. Always same issue. Words are mashed together without spaces. Never had a problem like this with the hundreds of other books on my Kindle. Would like to read the book and give feedback on the contents..