This January Zeba Crook will finally take part in the event named after a mentor from his teenage years, the Reino Keski-Salmi Loppet.
This will be the 41st year for the annual event, taking place at Larch Hills on Saturday, July 18. Crook spent much of his teenage years there skiing with the Larch Hills Nordic Ski Club.
"I grew up in Salmon Arm, and as a teen I trained at the Larch Hills Ski Club and represented B.C. at the National Junior Championships (1983)鈥�," said Crook in an email to the Observer. "While I was a teen skier in Salmon Arm, so many families helped me: Pat Hutchin would come to Canoe to pick me, Stig Keskinen would take me up to Larch Hills sometimes, and Reino Keski-Salmi himself 鈥� he would take me for swims and bike rides as we were both training for the summer triathlon we used to have. He won over all, and I won the Junior Boys."
Keski-Salmi was a founding member of the club and an international cross-country ski champion. He died in a helicopter crash in 1985, while working with a forest fire-fighting crew. In 1987, the former two-year-old Larch Hills Marathon was renamed in his honour.
"He was a real mentor of young athletes鈥�," said Crook in an interview. "He really did help me in practical ways as well as inspirational ways, formative ways."
Crook would give up skiing for running, which he continued after leaving Salmon Arm for university. He now has teenage kids of his own in Ottawa, where he's a professor at Carleton University. After several decades away from cross-country skiing, he's now back into it, both skiing and coaching.
"There鈥檚 a cross-country ski club in Ottawa, a really big one, and I sent my kids there and was coaching there and this woman comes up to me at practice one morning and says, 'Are you the Zeba Crook from Salmon Arm?'," shared Crook. "I said I am. She identified herself as the little girl who used to sit in the back of the car when her dad would drive me up to practice at Larch Hills. Her dad is Pat Hutchins, a now retired teacher and president of the club in its early days.
"I was a teenager so I barely remembered that, but I remembered so many people helping me, driving me up to Larch Hills because my family couldn鈥檛. So here I was, coaching the granddaughter, on the other side of the country, of one of the people who used to drive me up to Larch Hills鈥hat鈥檚 kind of how small the cross-country skiing community is in the country, how tightly knit we all are."
Crook said about five years ago there was an exchange for 13-year-old skiers with the Ottawa and Salmon Arm clubs, which gave Crook and opportunity to bring one of his kids to Salmon Arm to ski the trails he trained on.
"I got to see the new chalet and ski the trails 鈥� it was December so not loppet time," said Crook. "It was an amazing thing, because of how much was familiar and how much was unfamiliar 鈥� that weird mix that I鈥檝e been here before but it鈥檚 all new."
Crook will be on sabbatical in January, and will be returning to Salmon Arm to compete in his first Reino Keski-Salmi Loppet. He said it will be a very meaningful experience for him, an opportunity to pay tribute to an athlete who showed kids from Salmon Arm what they could accomplish.
"He as one of Canada鈥檚 top cross-country skiers 鈥� he won Canadian championships twice and he put some good results in Europe. He was one of the first Canadian cross-country skiers to do that鈥�," said Crook. "It kind of showed kids from Salmon Arm that was an option."
This year's Reino Keski-Salmi Loppet offers a new 32-kilometre single-lap course, along with 17-,10-,5-,2- and 1-km courses. Registration is open until noon on Wednesday, Jan. 15. For more information, visist skilarchhills.ca.
