Ask LAV
Dear Lav,
Wassup! I could use a little advice and I like your candor, if I may say so, so here goes.
I'm sort of a middle aged dude skier, kind of just got into it, takes me away from the workaday you know, and I want to get into racing a little bit this year. Get the proverbial toe in the water. I like to skate I like the rush of wind in my hair and the sweat and the full body workout. Like a lot of people probably. Test myself.
Here's my inquiry. Regarding getting a race suit. Geez Louise to bite that off or not, you know? I'll be honest with you here, some of them look a little fruity tooti. Not that that isn't okay for some people but this is what I'm seeing out there:
This one's pretty bad but I don't ever go to Minnesota:
This one looks like some kind of outfit you slip into before the ship goes down. Help the Coast Guard find you:
Then you got this, which is a little more subtle with the Evel Knievel thing going on:
Jury's out on that.
How about this?:
I'm thinking luge team here, I'm looking for the big helmet! Whoa!
I'm kind of digging the Shark, though:
What do you think of the Shark? Those are like gills or something, that's a nice touch.
I'll be honest with you. I like the ladies and the ladies like me. I don't want to blow my cred out here and look like a Fred or something if you know what I mean.
Can you help a guy out? Stay cool!
Stosh in Tahoe
------
My Style-Sensitive Amigo,
The sad truth of the matter is that all race suits are garish. Instead of agonizing over which race suit to get you need to recognize that the crucial point here is WHEN to wear a race suit. That being said, it's far worse to not have a race suit on when in a race-suit situation than to be wearing a race suit for a casual training day. If you show up to the start of the California Gold Rush with your training pants on and a polar fleece you won't be walking away from that race with any phone numbers. (Or at least not mine!)
Then again, the coolness factor of spandex is inversely proportional to your distance from the ski trails so the usefulness of a race suit compared to the price (I think these babies run $100+) is depressingly small. I mean, sure you could probably get some coffee (hot chocolate for me) at the little cafe at the trail head, but stopping at the grocery store in your matching racing spandex is not gonna fly no matter how fast you can ski.
Speaking of skiing fast, don't think you have to be able to ski fast to wear a race suit. As long as you're racing as hard as you can treat yourself like a pro: wear the sweet suit, match your hat, jump up and down and swing your arms around before the start, bury your ski bases in flouro powders regardless of the actual snow conditions. Do not, however, wear a white racing suit unless you're real fast, like on-the-swedish-national-team fast.
Of the suits you chose to bash I do think the Sportful and the Craft Shark suit are the least offensive.
LAV
p.s. Ask LAV posts only exist when LAV gets questions. LAV would be particularly pleased to field math questions lately... need help on your linear algebra homework?
Wassup! I could use a little advice and I like your candor, if I may say so, so here goes.
I'm sort of a middle aged dude skier, kind of just got into it, takes me away from the workaday you know, and I want to get into racing a little bit this year. Get the proverbial toe in the water. I like to skate I like the rush of wind in my hair and the sweat and the full body workout. Like a lot of people probably. Test myself.
Here's my inquiry. Regarding getting a race suit. Geez Louise to bite that off or not, you know? I'll be honest with you here, some of them look a little fruity tooti. Not that that isn't okay for some people but this is what I'm seeing out there:
This one's pretty bad but I don't ever go to Minnesota:
This one looks like some kind of outfit you slip into before the ship goes down. Help the Coast Guard find you:
Then you got this, which is a little more subtle with the Evel Knievel thing going on:
Jury's out on that.
How about this?:
I'm thinking luge team here, I'm looking for the big helmet! Whoa!
I'm kind of digging the Shark, though:
What do you think of the Shark? Those are like gills or something, that's a nice touch.
I'll be honest with you. I like the ladies and the ladies like me. I don't want to blow my cred out here and look like a Fred or something if you know what I mean.
Can you help a guy out? Stay cool!
Stosh in Tahoe
------
My Style-Sensitive Amigo,
The sad truth of the matter is that all race suits are garish. Instead of agonizing over which race suit to get you need to recognize that the crucial point here is WHEN to wear a race suit. That being said, it's far worse to not have a race suit on when in a race-suit situation than to be wearing a race suit for a casual training day. If you show up to the start of the California Gold Rush with your training pants on and a polar fleece you won't be walking away from that race with any phone numbers. (Or at least not mine!)
Then again, the coolness factor of spandex is inversely proportional to your distance from the ski trails so the usefulness of a race suit compared to the price (I think these babies run $100+) is depressingly small. I mean, sure you could probably get some coffee (hot chocolate for me) at the little cafe at the trail head, but stopping at the grocery store in your matching racing spandex is not gonna fly no matter how fast you can ski.
Speaking of skiing fast, don't think you have to be able to ski fast to wear a race suit. As long as you're racing as hard as you can treat yourself like a pro: wear the sweet suit, match your hat, jump up and down and swing your arms around before the start, bury your ski bases in flouro powders regardless of the actual snow conditions. Do not, however, wear a white racing suit unless you're real fast, like on-the-swedish-national-team fast.
Of the suits you chose to bash I do think the Sportful and the Craft Shark suit are the least offensive.
LAV
p.s. Ask LAV posts only exist when LAV gets questions. LAV would be particularly pleased to field math questions lately... need help on your linear algebra homework?
Labels: Ask LAV
posted by LAV at 09:19
12 Comments:
Laura,
I think it's suit not suite in your response.
Math question: Why is "borrowing" not taught in schools any more!!! My daughter in 2nd grade uses the method of finding 10s and adding those. Borrowing is less steps in my opinion!
here's a question that is utterly not worthy of an "ask-LAV" post:
Laura, what happened to your rss feed? I was re-adding my feeds to a new reader and your front page doesn't have a feed anymore :(
if you do your own html, it was the thing in the [head] block that looked like this:
[link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="??" href="??" /]
replace those ['s with <, of course.
Sorry, I dont have any lin alg...but if you really want to help, I have a bunch of aquatic chemistry work Ive been putting off...its just equilibrium chem and rate law stuff applied to purely aqueous systems
This post has to be one of my favorites! I love it.
I dunno, I kinda dig the crazy ones, Colin has seen the old University of Wyoming ones, brown and gold waffles, pretty BA. I think that city of lakes one is pretty sweet.
I'd wear a nice Burberry pattern.
Hmm, been wondering whether the real part of any non-trivial zero of the following is always 1/2?
Sum(1/(n^s), n=1..inf)
clearly my spelling skills lag pretty far behind my skiing skills.
I'll get back to the delicious mathy comments...
anon- aquatic chemistry? Throw it at me: laura@lauravalaas.com.
Although I might spend my entire reply debating about the pronunciation of aqueous.
yeah laura, it works now. i have no idea what was going on for a while there.
to keep it on topic, can you remind me what the heck an eigenvector is?
Valaas,
I'm flattered you would post a picture of me on your website (four actually) from my one day modeling career at New Moon. Can you guess which ones are me?
see ya next week,
kuz
kuz- obviously you are the hot model. Another guess is that you are modeling the suits from New Moon (the images are links).
Post a Comment
<< Home