We were in the bland hinterlands of Greater Boston, skiing along the ho-hum Leo J. Martin Golf Course—otherwise known as the worst golf course in America. The traffic of I-95 hummed nearby; a freight train clanged in the darkness. But my mind knew nothing of the setting, for I was at war.We clambered toward a narrow hairpin turn, four Lycra-clad cross-country ski racers so close I could see the dried white spittle on my competitor’s whiskery face. The pack constricted like water through a pinched hose. Then suddenly we were on a wider expanse of groomed trail, snow glimmering under the floodlights at the Weston Ski Track’s winterlong Tuesday Night Race Series (TNR), which has been around since the facility’s inception in the early 1980s, and I knew it was my moment to pass. I squeezed past the guy flagging before me, our ski poles clacking. Then I kept digging, hoping, a mile into this 3-mile Nordic race, to hang onto 12th place in a field of about 100 competitors spread between two waves.
The TNR Series is essentially a beer league, offering amateur skiers the same thrills and bare-knuckled rivalry that basketballers might find playing pickup at Peters Park. The series’ nine annual races, staged between January and March, are cumulatively scored, with everyone scrapping for age-group bragging rights. And they typically play out, thanks to climate change, on tight stripes of manmade snow—on snaking, polycone-lined courses that deliver what may be Nordic skiing’s closest approximation of stock-car racing. Still, a sporting bonhomie prevails. Passing people at Weston, I often get a kindly wheeze of solidarity: “Go for it, dude!”
Often, but not always. Now, in Race 9 of the 2025 season, the guy I’d passed shouted, “I’m going to fucking deck you after the race!”
I skied on, gratified that he was receding behind me, and I reflected on the absurdity of my quest: I am 60 years old, and even three decades ago, I never had the zip and power you’ll see on TV this month when the world’s best cross-country skiers—among them, Johannes Høsflot Klaebo of Norway and Julia Kern of Waltham—take to the snow at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy. Still, for me, Weston is the Olympics, for my AARP years have come with a swarm of anxieties. My career as a writer has not gone gangbusters. In my family life, there’s an estrangement so painful I cannot divulge the details. My late middle-aged campaign to find wholeness hinges in large part on skiing. Living in the sticks of New Hampshire, I ski daily in winter. I own 10 pairs of skis. I study technique videos on YouTube. I endeavor, with each race, to eke all I can out of my diminishing sinew.
I finished Race 9 in 10th place, and when my impassioned friend crossed the line 30 or so seconds later, he was yelling and jabbing his finger at me. I considered the possible headlines: “Man, 60, Mauled at Cross-Country Ski Race,” and then I drifted away to find safety in a crowd of recent finishers doubled over in the snow, catching their breath.
Weston Ski Track in February 2021, after a winter storm. / Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images
For years, I’d heard about the Weston Ski Track. Its habitués would show up at the races I do in northern New England, telling improbable tales of a ski venue whose only sizable hill—a 30-foot-high, skateboard-ramp-steep massif referred to as Mount Weston—was shaped by a bulldozer. I knew that the place had some claims to glory. Kern learned to ski there, taking to the snow as soon as she could walk and then improving so quickly that, by around age 12, she was mixing with grown men in the A Wave every Tuesday. Kern placed fifth in the sprint at last year’s World Ski Championships. “I credit a lot of my drafting tactics to those Tuesday Night Races,” she told me.
Still, I’ve always harbored a northerner’s snobbery toward podunk Weston, with its man-made snow and its rinky-dink hills. That changed only when I decided, early last January, to enter Weston’s Race 1. I found myself hooked by the urban vibe—the rush-hour jostling, and the way 100 skiers would crowd post-race into Weston’s barracks-like, concrete-walled golf shop to scarf down pizza and beer. Their voices formed a happy din; their sweat steamed the windows. I liked how there were skiers who’d recently relocated to Boston bearing the accents of the world’s chicest ski locales—Norway, Sweden, and Japan—and I liked how everyone found joy amid the industrial inflections of Weston’s orange polycones.
Soon, I developed a ritual. Traveling south to visit my partner, V, in Worcester each Tuesday, I’d detour to Weston to race. Each week, I’d arrive to find but a few stray novices poking around like lonely ants on the snow. But then, gradually, the TNR faithful would show up to glide along through their warm-ups. We’d strip off our jackets, and then we’d stand on the starting line, shivering in tights, to share an almost spiritual moment.
Since the early 1990s, the jefe of TNR has been Andy Milne, a retired high school teacher who says he’s witnessed, over his decades in the classroom, a sad decay of the American social fabric. “I used to see kids walking home from school in big groups,” Milne says. “Now they’re almost always alone.”
At the TNR starting line, Milne forces skiers to shake the hands of their competitors. He endeavors to salt the races’ cutthroat energy by telling a groan-worthy dad joke each week. (“What did the snowman say? I don’t know about you, but I smell carrots.”) In a booming, rasping, and slightly menacing exam proctor’s voice, he enunciates a distinct social code. “You are expected to talk to people when you are warming up,” he tells the assembled starters, “to congratulate the person in front of you and in back of you.”
There’s a bit of the tyrant about Milne, but his approach draws the multitudes. He says TNR attendance has increased fivefold under his long watch. Which, of course, makes the racecourse more crowded and the dogfight more intense. Moments after Milne’s weekly disquisition, almost inevitably, some chucklehead will eat it trying to make a dicey pass on the 180-degree turn 200 yards into the race.
The critical question at Weston, I learned, is: How and where to pass? On the turns? Hazardous. On the course’s short, gentle downhills? Not easy, because descent speed is dictated in large part by the type of wax under one’s skis, and my peers and I were equally waxed. On uphills? Yes, that does work, but being old—and thereby lacking in fast-twitch muscle fiber—I didn’t have a ton of game there.
I fared poorly in the first two races, finishing 15th, then 21st. Meanwhile, there was a frustrating inevitability at work: Seconds into each race, a clump of five or six twentysomething chums who’d connected while racing in college bolted out in front. Leading them, always, was James Kitch, recently an All-American at Harvard. Kitch is tall and ripped. In his resplendent white Harvard race suit, he seemed to occupy a caste of his own. Not far behind, always, was the Crimson’s assistant coach, 2022 Olympian Hannah Halvorsen. Her poles punched the snow with smooth, machine-like power and precision.
But every race was a new ball game. When the days were warm and the evenings cool, the slush froze, and the track was a skating rink, wicked fast, so that the leaders averaged more than 15 miles an hour. On cold days, Weston Ski Track made lots of snow, and we skied amid a slow, sticky powder reminiscent of confectionery sugar. As the snow guns opened up new terrain, more polycones appeared. The races grew to 4.02 miles and, eventually, 5.75 miles long.
Race 3 came after a blizzard. Weston was, for a few days, a paradise of soft, fluffy snow, so the Tuesday series time-traveled back to skiing’s roots. Almost invariably, Weston races see skiers invoking a fast, newfangled technique: Ski skating, invented in the 1980s, involves skiers pushing their legs to the side, as ice- and roller-skaters do. But skating through deep powder is laborious, so Race 3 was a “classic” race, with participants scissor-stepping their way along, just as Norwegian émigrés like Herman “Jackrabbit” Smith-Johannsen did when they brought skiing stateside in the late 19th century. I so wanted to be there, racing classic, but the snowy route south from my home was impassible, and I missed the season’s most magical night.
During Race 5, I embraced a new tactic: start as fast as you can and hang on.
During Race 5, I embraced a new tactic: Start as fast as you can and hang on. This actually worked. I’m an ornery old bastard, and midway, I found myself eerily all alone under the lights, way ahead of my old peers. There was a fiftysomething guy ahead of me, and the recent collegiate stars were roistering along, as always, in their own rarefied bubble ahead, but I’d arrived in a new land. All I saw before me was a thin white line of snow, spooling out into space like a rope, and it seemed that if I clung to that rope—if I thought of nothing else but clawing my way along it—all the troubles of the world would fall away and, for a moment at least, I’d glimpse bliss.
Could I have arrived in such a flow state skiing alone through the woods of New Hampshire? I don’t think so, for there was something communal about the moment: It sang because I was laboring with like-minded diehards, with some of the few people around who understand that our obscure sport is worthy of fanatical devotion.
I finished 12th that night (trust me, I am a student of results sheets) in a stacked field. In Worcester afterward, I was so ecstatic that V had no choice but to stay up late and listen as I told the unabridged tale of that evening’s journey, polycone by polycone.
In the next race, I finished ninth. It was becoming clear that I’d take the 60-plus men’s laurels for the season. Then came Race 9, during which I wriggled past bodily threat and managed to take a three-way finish-line sprint and crack the top 10 for a second time. Afterward, a friend emailed me, dropping the name of a young Weston racer who typically finished around eighth. Could I reel him in?
It seemed mathematically possible: Race 9 fell on March 4 with tons of snow still on the ground. Hopes for a rare Race 10 rippled through the TNR regulars, and as if to celebrate winter’s lingering bounties, one competitor, Will Meehan, cradled a can of craft IPA as he skied a few dawdling post-race laps. Later, on social media, he proclaimed, “If you aren’t doing the no pole, beer in hand, cool-down ski, why are you even here?”
Meehan, mid-20s, stocky and mustachioed, was my favorite among the series’ top dogs, for he brought a punk-rock insouciance to the proceedings. As I skied beside him after one race, he reveled in the cat-and-mouse game that played out among the leaders, and on the TNR email thread, he encouraged all of us to head north to Vermont for bizarre “Nordic Ski Cross” races featuring “jumps and downhill slalom turns, all on Nordic skis,” he wrote. “It is truly awesome.”
I was with Meehan in hoping that our weekly Weston bacchanal would play on forever—or into April, at least.
But winter is shorter and shorter these days, and in the week following Race 9, temperatures reached the mid-50s in Greater Boston. Race 10 became a costume party—an unscored tragicomedy that played out on tiny islands of melting snow. I skipped it, and now my Weston racing career is officially over. V is no longer in Worcester—she left the city this summer, and we now live together in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region, where, inspired by those Tuesday nights, I just helped resurrect a moribund ski-race series: the Headlamp Hustle, held Thursday nights at the Dublin School.
Whenever a highlights reel of the TNR series plays in my mind, the racing action seems high octane—it’s as though the soundtrack should be AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” But then I see pictures of myself racing, and the story becomes more poignant. I see an old man, stiff and hunched, fighting to hang on.
I’m pretty sure that I was not the only TNR skier bringing my foibles to the starting line. None of us on hand, not even James Kitch, was a pro. No, we were all amateurs, and sometimes we stepped on each other’s skis. Sometimes we even yelled at one another. But we found connection under the lights. In the darkest season of the year, we shone brightly. We lived.
This article was first published in the print edition of the February 2026 issue with the headline: “The Other Winter Games.”
