It’s not that I don’t know how to cook.

I’m just not very good at it.

And it’s just a lot of work.

First, there is the preparation. This goes beyond just coming up with an idea, which in itself is very difficult.

Once you find the right recipe, then it’s time to shop for groceries.

Unless it contains Mountain Dew or Doritos, I probably don’t have the ingredients on hand.

So a trip to the local market is in order.

With the ingredients and recipe ready to go, then it’s time to actually combine these into what I hope is a success.

I have tried a few things recently, but it seems to be hit and miss.

My first few tries weren’t great, but recently, I’ve had better luck.

I have to first thank my mother for that. She provided me with a very simple casserole recipe. It was pretty delicious. Cooking for one is tough — I ate it for days.

More recently, I acquired a Crockpot (thanks Julie’s mom!) and with recipe in hand (thanks Beth!), I attempted cheesy hash brown potatoes.

Again, I would consider this a success. Although, next time, I don’t think I need a full two pounds of potatoes. I was eating it for days.

Thanks to a George Foreman grill and a box of Stove Top stuffing, I’ve been doing pretty well.

I am on a hot streak. But I don’t want to push my luck.

My biggest problem isn’t my lack of ambition. It’s my lack of time.

With my work schedule, I don’t often see the a.m., leaving opportunities for both breakfast and lunch out of the question.

That leaves me with one evening meal.

Covering numerous sporting events throughout southwest Minnesota, I often don’t have the time it takes to shop AND cook in the same break. That requires me to think (and shop) ahead.

Even if I do have the ingredients, I don’t have the time to let something cook for hours.

So while I won’t be cooking a full turkey anytime soon, I am still hoping to explore more recipes with my Crockpot and other quick ideas.

This is where I need help. My mother has already mailed me a few recipes, I have acquired a new recipe book (thanks Joyce!), and both Beth and Justine are actively trying to come up with simple foods for me to combine into a full meal.

And hey, if anyone knows a good recipe with Mountain Dew and Doritos, I’ll be set.

For anyone who hasn’t been following my previous posts on the subject, I entered this past Sunday’s City of Lakes Loppet cross-country ski race, a 33 km trek through trails and over lakes in the western part of Minneapolis.

Before the race, I had only had one brief lesson on proper cross-country skiing technique. The lesson took place 11 months before the race, and I only bought my own set of skis and began training a week before the race. Not the best preparation.

I’m also not the kind of person that makes a habit of pursuing endurance sports. When I have free time and there’s no snow around, my first choice of activity is to play golf – not exactly an endurance sport. Though I at least walk the course rather than use a golf cart.

Luckily, the place that I had my lesson was at Theodore Wirth Park, right on the precise spot where the starting line was for Sunday’s race. Not much consolation, but it raised my spirits as I stood at the starting line along with 200 others in the sixth wave of the 33 km freestyle race (I had originally thought it was 35 km – probably a good thing I didn’t have to go the extra 2 km).

My spirits fell very shortly after.

The first 8 km of the race wound all the way through Theodore Wirth Park, by far the hilliest part of the course.

The downhill portions were great. Walking up the slopes to prepare for the downhills was not.

During my lesson, I really hadn’t touched on the proper technique to walk up a hill in skis. The first couple of times were manageable using my poor technique, but the fifth, sixth and seventh times… and so on… turned into a complete struggle. I drained half of my bottle of Gatorade after only a few hills, and saw almost the entire seventh (and final) wave of racers go past me despite my five-minute head start.

I was already preparing the excuses I would type in this blog post as to why I could only make it through the first few kilometers of the race.

Luckily, about 6 km in I reunited with my cousin, Jordan Meyer, who skis for the Southwest High School team in Minneapolis. He had been a saint by agreeing to slow down to my pace to give me someone to ski beside as I attempted the race.

We successfully made it to the 8km mark, where we found the first of four aid stations on the course. We were given cups of water, energy drink and oreo cookies, which the woman handing them out had labeled “the original Nordic gel.” I’ve eaten plenty of oreos, but let me tell you, I’ve never had an oreo that tasted so good!

We hit a relatively flat stretch before reaching the next aid station 16 km in, and by that point I was cruising along and figured I had another 17 km in me – as long as the course remained flat.

Which it didn’t. The next 6km were as hilly – if not more so – than the opening stretch, and by now the uphill climbs were harder than ever. I survived the stretch, but Jordan and I made the next aid station right at the cut-off time with still 10 km to go. We were given one hour to reach the next aid station or be disqualified.

I had to step it up a level. My technique was so poor and my energy so drained that I moved at a painfully slow pace, but I never stopped moving.

We reached the next aid station only 45 minutes later, just 4 km from the finish line. The remainder of the race was a flat stretch over Lake of the Isles, followed by an annoying uphill gradient towards the finish line on ridiculously mushy snow that had been placed on top of a pavement in Uptown.

The loudspeakers announced my presence as I finished, and someone was waiting to hang a medal around my neck. My time and placing didn’t matter to me – just crossing that finish line made it all worth the trouble.

Next year I’m planning on perhaps a little more training on my skis before I decide whether I have another race in me. My original plan had been to race the 54 km American Birkebeiner – maybe next year that won’t be too much.

I’ve heard it’s a pretty hilly race though. I’m going to have to figure out this whole going uphill on skis thing if I’m going to stand any chance of completing the Birke.

It is Saturday night – the last night of sleep for the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers before they compete in Super Bowl XLV.

For me, it’s the night before my 35 km cross-country ski race.

My preparation for the race didn’t exactly go too well. I got my equipment ready only a week before the race, and the day afterward the big snow storm struck terror into the hearts of everyone from Texas to Maine and all spaces in between. Luckily Minnesota missed the worst of the storm, but the week saw about a foot of snow and powerful, frigid winds that blew the snow all over the place and created unbearable wind chills.

My first attempt at training took place Tuesday morning at Hiawatha Golf Course in Minneapolis.

I paid an $8 fee the night before to use the ski trails at the course, only to discover once I got there that no such trails existed. Monday’s snow had destroyed all traces of them, and they had yet to be re-groomed. A man arrived at the parking lot just as I was setting out and gave me the warning, but as an inexperienced skiier I knew nothing about how my skis would fare in deep snow.

The first problem was getting my skis on in the first place.

I put on my never-before-worn ski boots at my car and trudged to what I thought was an appropriate spot to put on my skis. I was then baffled for about 15 minutes as to exactly how I was supposed to pull off this feat.

After many failed attempts, some that saw me topple like a tree that has just but felled by an axe, I took one of my boots off and stood in the snow in my bare sock and worked out how to operate the mechanism. I secured the boot to my ski, then put my boot back on. The second boot-ski combo was achieved without a hitch.

I started following the path that the skiier I had met in the parking lot had cut through the snow, but was having no luck manufacturing a gliding motion as I went. I stubbornly shuffled on my skis to the end of the driving range, then decided it wasn’t worth any further effort.

I took off my skis, but now had to trudge back to my car through waist deep, untouched snow. I was so parched and exhausted by the end that it felt like I’d already skiied a 35 km race (not a good premonition for tomorrow, I’m thinking).

On Wednesday, Daily Globe photographer Brian Korthals showed me where the snowmobilers frequent on the south side of Worthington, down towards Lake Ocheda. The problem again was that the trails were ungroomed.

On to Thursday. I parked by Lake Okabena and walked down the boat launch at Centennial Park. The surface of the lake was like the Sahara desert – waves of snow dunes as far as the eye could see. It was a total no-go.

That was all the ambition I had in me. A week’s worth of training, and no actual skiing. It will make tomorrow very interesting.

Rather than treat tomorrow as a proper race, I’m approaching it just glad that I’ll be able to ski on 35 km of properly groomed trails. Hopefully the day serves as one giant ski lesson, and I actually refine something resembling proper technique by the end of it.

At the very least, tomorrow will be a day that I can look back on when December 31st comes along when I need to prove to myself that I actually did some exciting things in 2011.

I’ll add another post to this blog after I finish tomorrow’s race.

Hopefully I actually do finish it.

Right now I’m having similar feelings to the ones I had before I jumped through a hole in the ice and into Lake Okabena.

Before jumping in, I very well knew that in a set amount of time, I would be submerged in an icy cold lake. I grew very anxious beforehand and worked myself up about it days in advance, despite the fact that the act itself would only take a few seconds.

The current issue on my mind isn’t quite the same, but I’m getting the same feelings.

On Sunday, I will strap cross-country skis onto my feet and navigate a snowy trail over a 35 km distance. This is very much a fact – I paid my $80 entry fee for the privilege, turning back would be foolish.

Yet knowing this reality and getting myself ready for it are two very different things.

To start off with, I have no way of knowing that I am actually capable of skiing 35 km – including up hills, and over frozen lakes. In my entire lifetime, I have traveled maybe 2 km on cross-country skis. Not a lot of a sample size to draw any great deductions from about my skiing ability.

At least I finally have skis.

I went to Finn Sisu in St. Paul, a specialty cross-country ski – and sauna – store, where I was fitted with a pair of skis, boots and poles. Cost most of two weeks worth of pay for the entire package, though I did choose some of the spendier options in the process (you can buy quality equipment for less than half of what I paid).

I figured that a good Norwegian needs good equipment, and if my grandfather found out I wasn’t being a good Norwegian, he would no doubt feel compelled to reeducate me…

So there you have it. I got to the store and purchased my equipment, so now I should be ready to ski, right?

Not so fast. There is a critical step in the process that must first be observed.

Waxing.

And no – my leg hair is staying where it is. The wax is for my skis.

For anyone without any knowledge of cross-country skiing, your face may be displaying a bit of a puzzled look at this stage. But waxing is in fact an essential ritual for all cross-country skiiers – like myself.

I won’t embarrass myself by pretending that I know the science of it, but the basic idea is that you need to fill the pores on the base of your skis with wax to maximize your potential to glide across the snow. There is some sort of chemical reaction that takes place – I’ll see if I can provide more detail than that after I’ve been skiing a while longer (I haven’t yet even tried out my new skis). There are different types of waxes you use for different types of snow, and depending on if your doing “skate” or “classic” skiing.

Luckily, I have a cousin that worries about this sort of stuff for me.

My cousin – Jordan Meyer, a member of the Southwest High School ski team in Minneapolis – applied the base layer of oil and wax on my skis and then showed me how to apply further layers.

First,you mount a single ski with the bottom facing upward on a ski bench and clamp it in place.

Then, you choose the type of wax. We went with a blue wax (as opposed to purple, teal, or a number of other colors).

You then drip hot wax onto the base of the ski (melted using a special iron) and smooth out the wax with the iron, being careful not to burn the base of the ski (which would be a tragic ending to my heavy investment).

Then, after all that, you go ahead and scrape all of the wax off. The idea is that some wax will stay in the pores of the (very porous) base of your skis.

This is by far the longest part of the process. First, you use a rectangular piece of plastic to scrape off as much wax as you can. Then you use a copper-bristled brush to remove the harder to reach wax. Then a nylon-bristled brush. Then a softer brush, if you have one.

Then you do the same thing all over again for your second ski.

The result is a glossy surface on the base of your ski – ready to hit the snow. Skiiers – like myself – will have to apply new wax multiple times during the winter, especially if -like myself – they are participating in races.

So where do I stand now? I have skis that are ready to use, but haven’t yet used them. Yes, the race is in five days.

I have been having problems deciding where to attempt to ski around Worthington. The nearest designated cross-country trails I have found through an internet search appear to be in Spirit Lake, Iowa, though of course there is enough snow around that there are plenty of suitable areas to ski.

I just hope I don’t get hit by a snowmobile.

I will further update this blog as the day of the race draws nearer. Stay tuned.

Hopefully I’ve actually gotten on my skis before then.