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Skating on natural ice amid the elements at Lake Morey in Vermont - The Washington Post

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The sky was sliding toward periwinkle and the skate rentals had closed for the day, so there were few witnesses when my daughter pushed off onto the frozen lake. She had brought her own figure skates, and she stroked away decisively. In my boots atop a thin layer of snow, I watched her, as I’ve done so many times at skating lessons for five of her 14 years. Except on Lake Morey in Fairlee, Vt., in the January twilight, there was no wall to lean on, no high-powered spotlights, no pop songs pumping from speakers and no reason for her to have to turn around.

I couldn’t see my daughter’s face in the distance, but I tried to gauge her reaction to the lake’s organic expanse, so different from the gated, manufactured ovals she was used to skating on. She pivoted, played with footwork and whirled in a scratch spin. She finally whooshed to a stop where I stood. “I feel like I’m flying,” she said.

Maybe, I hoped, this crazy trip was worth it.

When my daughter shared her wish to skate on natural ice, Lake Morey Resort seemed an easy answer. Just off Interstate 91 along the New Hampshire border, it is known for maintaining one of the longest groomed and monitored skating loops in the country, about four miles following the lake’s perimeter. Although longer U.S. trails have been created by volunteer-run organizations during the pandemic, this one has a toasty hotel, as well as dining next to the lake. I wouldn’t have to spend any time outdoors in Vermont’s single-digit temperatures unless I was exercising.

And there were plenty of ways to do that. The resort offers so many kinds of gear that guests inspired by the Winter Olympics in Beijing can try several of the sports played in the Games. Figure skates, hockey skates and sticks, cross-country skis, and fluorescent-colored sleds that can be pulled on the lake or used as a pseudo luge at a sledding hill on the resort grounds are on offer. The Nordic skates, ideal for stability over the small bumps and natural fissures on wild surfaces, are like skis in the way the boot and long, wide blade are separate pieces that clip together. The blade only connects to the boot at the toe with a hinge, so when skaters lift their foot, the back of the blade releases and swings free. There are also snowshoes, ice scooters (to be used with provided crampons for traction), and a bicycle with one fat back tire and two yellow skis in lieu of the front one.

At home, my daughter spends hours at rinks indoors and out, but she prefers to skate in the elements once our local outdoor rink opens for the season. During that first pandemic winter, the routine and endorphin-generating vigor of skating at the outdoor rink were critical in lifting our family’s spirits, giving us purpose and a place to see friends. I wanted our late-January trip to be a supersize infusion of that joy, an emotion that was in short supply during months of anxiety and virtual school.

Lake Morey seemed to offer freedom from worry. All over the country, if winter is biting enough, ponds, rivers and lakes will freeze and become skateable for a time. But Mother Nature’s sheets are uneven and unpredictable. At the lake, the ice is evaluated daily and maintained by a fleet of plows and motorized brushes to streamline it and make skating possible.

The fleeting season when the trail is open for ice skating makes those days more magical. It usually opens by Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January and closes near the end of February, although it has opened as early as New Year’s Day. Like any outdoor venue, it is subject to the vicissitudes of nature: Earlier this month, the trail was temporarily closed to skaters after a pair of storms left slush and standing water on the lake. This year, the unusual weather patterns have meant the resort has been unable to open the four-mile perimeter trail, but it has opened a half-mile loop and cleared “rinks” on the southeast part of the lake next to the hotel.

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When we looked out at the lake from our hotel room on our first morning at the resort, crews were already brushing snow from the ice, and skaters were moving on cleared stretches and on the shorter loop.

As much as I had loved having the 547-acre lake mostly to ourselves the evening before, I delighted in the morning energy. There were college-age hockey players ribbing each other, a small child living his best hygge life while nestled on a sheepskin on a sled towed by an adult skater, people propelling scooters made with two skis, dogs galloping alongside skaters, three generations of a family meeting friends, and preschoolers on an outdoor playdate. Practiced Nordic skaters zipped around the loop, bent forward with hands clasped behind their backs.

My daughter told me to look where I was going instead of down, but I was fascinated by the navy-gray lake’s texture. The ice was etched by blades and naturally occurring cracks; it looked to me as if we were skimming across pavement instead of a freshwater bowl averaging 24 feet deep. She briefly tested the Nordic skates, too, but quickly switched to experiment with hockey skates.

By the afternoon, as more clouds set in, I was starting to get the hang of the Nordic skates and had settled into a rhythm, lifting my feet off the ice and hearing the metallic thwunk as the skate blade extended. I was concentrating on sustaining my pace when my daughter pointed out a hot-air balloon sailing above the lake. The yellow-and-red color-blocked canopy, powered by hot air, seemed incongruous in the white winter landscape. “It’s going to land on the lake,” she predicted, and she was right. Next, two seaplanes — one red, one yellow — swooped over us, touching down with their skis on the lake’s northern tip, as skaters paused and pointed.

After a day of skating, we wanted to take advantage of all the gear at hand and try a sport we had never attempted. We chose the cross-country skis, and the woman outfitting us directed us to the lake. It was a Monday morning, and we were the only people on it.

On skis, we sought the thick stack of snow untouched by plows or human tracks and headed north, paralleling the shoreline and what seemed an early pass at plowing the longer perimeter trail.

Farther north on the lake than we had found passable with skates, I tried to internalize the views my dad must have seen when he trained here in the late-aughts for a long-distance Nordic skating race in Stockholm. His passion for skating had skipped a generation, to the granddaughter who was 2 when he died. A pond hockey player as a boy and a longtime outdoorsman, he pursued Nordic skating when the Vermonter who initiated the Lake Morey trail began raising the sport’s profile stateside. My dad and my daughter never skated together, and he never saw her camel spins and toe loops. But their shared yearning to skate in nature drew us here, and the landscape connected us to his experience, the same exhilaration of being able to flow across the stilled water.

Hills of hemlock and white pine sloping eastward toward Morey Mountain cast triangles of shade on our course with points far beyond us; the only way to eyeball our progress was to keep shuffling and skidding toward their tips when we would emerge into the sun.

When we did, the crystallized crust on the snow sparkled dizzyingly. I could hardly hear my panting over the crackle of skis and poles. We glimpsed ice fishers walking in the distance, but otherwise, we were alone with the brilliant cover above, the pristine, glittering frost below.

<a href="http://www.lakemoreyresort.com/">lakemoreyresort.com</a>

This lakeside resort in the Vermont Hills above the Connecticut River has maintained the skating loop on Lake Morey since 2011, taking over efforts started by volunteers in 2000. Ice conditions are updated on Facebook, Instagram and a phone line. Access to the lake is free to all; rentals of figure and hockey skates, cross-country skis, snowshoes and sleds are free for hotel guests. Hotel guests can rent Nordic skates free for two hours. For day visitors, figure and hockey skates rentals $17; Nordic skates, $30; helmets, $10; hockey sticks, $5; and kid skate trainers, $10. Kickspark scooters, $40 for a full day and $30 after 1 p.m. Classic room, two double beds with garden or golf-course view, from $179 per night. Hotel restaurant is open 5:30 to 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. Saturday and Sunday. Clubhouse Bar &amp; Restaurant is open 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, and 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday.

Potential travelers should take local and national public health directives regarding the pandemic into consideration before planning any trips. Travel health notice information can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s interactive map showing travel recommendations by <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/map-and-travel-notices.html">destination</a> and the CDC’s <a href="https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/noticescovid19">travel health notice webpage</a>.

Anne Kenderdine is a multiplatform editor for The Washington Post.

Anne Kenderdine

Skating on natural ice amid the elements at Lake Morey in Vermont

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Roger Bannister, barrier-busting miler who broke four-minute mark, dies at 88 - The Washington Post

Victoria Walker

Roger Bannister dies at 88

Propelled by an ever-lengthening stride and extraordinary willpower, lanky British medical student Roger Bannister became the first person to run a mile in less than four minutes. He pitched over the finish line at the University of Oxford’s Iffley Road track on a dank, blustery day — May 6, 1954 — and electrified England during its post-World War II doldrums.

Dr. Bannister, who died March 3 at age 88, became a national hero at a time when mavericks around the world were overcoming the long-perceived physical boundaries of man and nature.

American pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, and New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary and 
Sherpa Tenzing Norgay conquered Mount Everest in 1953. Then came Dr. Bannister, with his astonishing 3-minute 59.4-second run.

His milestone resonated with millions of people for its seeming simplicity: four laps, four minutes, the universal endeavor of running made into a sublime feat.

“It was amateurism’s last hurrah,” Christopher Chataway, one of Dr. Bannister’s training partners and pacesetters, told The Washington Post in 2004. Chataway died in 2014. “Roger and our group were the last generation who were lucky enough just to be at the top of the sport while having it only as a recreation.”

Dr. Bannister was racing against time in more ways than one: He knew that American Wes Santee and Australian John Landy also had made the four-minute mile their goal and wanted to beat him into the history books. “It all came down to whoever had the first chance in tolerable weather,” Dr. Bannister recalled to the New Yorker decades later.

Landy surpassed Dr. Bannister’s world record less than seven weeks later, clocking 3:58.0 in Turku, Finland, on June 21.

At the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver on Aug. 7, 1954, Dr. Bannister and Landy raced each other for the first time, in a pack with six others.

The oddsmakers picked Landy’s endurance to win over Dr. Bannister’s smoldering kick. Dr. Bannister closed a risky gap to finish five yards ahead of Landy with a time of 3:58.8 to Landy’s 3:59.6.

Amid the international frenzy about the mile title, Dr. Bannister completed his medical studies in June 1954 at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London.

Two months later, he claimed the European title in the 1,500 meters in Bern, Switzerland. He ended competitive racing at age 25, having never earned prize money, to focus on his career as a neurologist.

All but a few months of his training coincided with the 14 years of food rationing in England during and after World War II. “All that training was done on a limited diet,” Dr. Bannister once said. “I cannot understand people who are nostalgic for the 1950s — they were very tough times.”

Roger Gilbert Bannister was born in Harrow, now a borough of London, on March 23, 1929, and he spent part of his childhood in Bath. His father was a government auditor.

His childhood and teen years found him sprinting up the steps of Beechen Cliff on his way to school in Bath, hiking 10 miles a day as a summertime tour guide and biking the 100-mile trip from Bath to London in a day to visit a friend as a 13-year-old.

“I just ran anywhere and everywhere — never because it was an end in itself, but because it was easier for me to run than to walk,” he told authors Cordner Nelson and Roberto Quercetani for their book “The Milers.”


He entered Oxford’s Exeter College, and his diligence in shoveling snow off the Iffley Road track scored him a spot as a third-string miler in the meet with rival Cambridge, held on the day before his 18th birthday.

In the back straight of the final lap, he once recalled, “I had suddenly tapped that hidden source of energy I always suspected I possessed.” He won in 4:30.8.

He completed his undergraduate degree in 1950, and by 1951, he held the British national title in the mile and was readying for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. He was favored to win the gold for Britain in the 1,500. Instead, he placed fourth, and his crushing disappointment motivated him to pursue the four-minute mile and break Swedish runner Gunder Hägg’s record of 4:01.4, which had stood since 1945.

As an amateur competitor focused on his studies, Dr. Bannister trained about 25 miles a week, much less than today’s elite middle-distance runners, and for many years he was essentially self-coached. 


Determined to break the sub-four-minute mile, he began training in late 1953 with Austrian-born coach Franz Stampfl. Stampfl had Dr. Bannister, Chataway and their friend Christopher Brasher run 10 laps of 440 yards — a quarter mile — with a two-minute recovery between each.

From December 1953 to April 1954, the trio reduced their time for the quarter from 66 to 58.9 seconds. They were poised for the record attempt.

On the day of his four-minute mile in the Amateur Athletic Association vs. Oxford meet, Dr. Bannister saw patients at the hospital, used a laboratory grindstone there to sharpen his spikes and had ham salad for lunch with a running friend from his freshman year.

Discouraged by the wind and light rain, he wavered about postponing his attempt through the warmup and until minutes before the 6 p.m. race.

A lull in the wind finally convinced him. At 6-foot-1 and 158 pounds, Dr. Bannister was taller than the pacesetters he relied on. After a false start by Brasher, he was keyed up but fresh from five days of rest. His damp, thin hair flopping, he strode impatiently at Brasher’s heels and shouted, “Faster!”

When Chataway took over pacesetting shortly after the half-mile, Dr. Bannister, his arms carried high but his stride relaxed, fluidly accelerated with him. They whipped through the three-quarters-mile mark in 3:00.7, raising a clamor from the crowd, bundled in long dark overcoats in contrast to the runners’ light singlets and shorts.

Dr. Bannister left Chataway behind with 300 yards to go, unleashed his mystic reservoir of strength at the final turn and drove himself the last 50 yards as pain tightened its grip. Breasting the tape with his head tipped back and Adam’s apple protruding, he collapsed, unable to stand for at least two minutes.

In 1955, Dr. Bannister wed Moyra Jacobsson, a Swedish artist whose father, Per, became managing director of the International Monetary Fund. They had four children. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. 



The same year of his marriage, Dr. Bannister wrote a book, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/155821027X?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creativeASIN=155821027X&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;tag=thewaspos09-20" title="www.amazon.com">The Four Minute Mile</a>.” He went on to do BBC television commentaries for sports events and occasionally interviewed celebrities for BBC radio programs.

Dr. Bannister became a staff neurologist at National Hospital at Queens Square in 1963 and, the next year, joined the staff of St. Mary’s. He worked at both facilities for more than 20 years, teaching, seeing patients and conducting research on the understanding of degenerative disease and disorders of the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary functions such as heart rate and digestion. He contributed to medical journals and edited two textbooks and received the American Academy of Neurology’s first lifetime achievement award.


From 1985 to 1993, he was master, the equivalent of a president, of Oxford’s Pembroke College.

In 1974, he suffered a shattered ankle in a car accident and had to give up running. However, he remained active as a leader of sporting organizations. In the 1970s, he chaired the government-funded Sports Council of Great Britain, now called Sport England, and was the president of what is now the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education
, a cultural and social organization. He initiated the council’s “Sport for All” campaign and pressed for testing of anabolic steroid use. For his work on the council, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975.

Dr. Bannister’s family said he died in Oxford, England, but did not provide further details. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2011.

For the 2012 Olympic Games in London, Dr. Bannister carried the torch for a short distance near the Oxford track now named for him. His latest memoir, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JNYIVG4?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creativeASIN=B00JNYIVG4&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;tag=thewaspos09-20" title="www.amazon.com">Twin Tracks</a>,” was published in 2014.

More than 1,000 runners have since crossed the four-minute threshold: In 1999, Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj set the present world record of 3:43.13
. But Dr. Bannister is remembered for pushing the human body faster than many believed it could go, and countless athletes still aspire to his intense discipline.

“The real secret,” he once said, “is that I’ve worked hard.”

<email>anne.kenderdine@washpost.com</email>

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