Captain of the Dartmouth Ski Team in 1959, Richard Taylor went on to win the National 30km Championship in 1960. He continued training with the US Biathlon Unit in the US Army, placing 11th in the World Biathlon Championships in Umea, Sweden and 6th in a World Cup in Kuopio, Finland in 1961. He went on to captain the US Olympic Nordic Ski Team at Innsbruck, Austria in 1964. Between the years 1975-1989 he served in many national and international positions with the US Nordic Ski Team coaching staff. He worked full-time with the USST from 1983-87, at which time he joined the faculty at Gould Academy in Bethel, Maine to concentrate his efforts on the teenage development years. Throughout that entire time he has written extensively on Nordic training and technique.

Articles

• Click on the Archives link to view a comprehensive list of articles available as .pdf downloads

The Absence of Strangers - Richard Taylor 

(Goose River Press, 2017) 

I: The Grammar of Absence
II. Signs of Affection
III. A Fellowship of Strangers

These poems go looking for the stranger in ourselves, the one with whom we would like to dance gracefully over the earth, then follow inside to our interior selves. There we ponder life’s solitudes, its various rejections, exult in our successes, as fleeting as they are. But there too imagination sparks our love for the puzzling beauty in ourselves and others. We discover as well that a true self is given boldly to that captivating world, and we cannot escape. So it is that our joys reveal themselves as both profound and tenuous, and without end. These poems report that oldest and latest news.

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• A reader’s response: Wes McNair, Maine Poet Laureate

  “I remembered at once your trademark style from earlier poems – the wit, the music, and the note of elegy – and I admired the range of your character studies, which took you clear out of your own tight skin, and on my trip, took me out of mine. Only the deepest empathy could have allowed you to inhabit selves as you do in this book – those absent ones, ‘overheard/ or glimpsed or dreamed.’ And then, the seasons and botany and birdlife of our climate – the geography of it, the rituals old and new, public and intimate, all delivered by a narrator not only familiar with this place, but with the variety of literary devices and classical lore….”  

No Pain, No Gain?

Click on the link for ordering information for the critically-acclaimed book by Richard Taylor:

• “As much for coaches and athletes, this book is also an effort directed at bringing aspiring parents up to speed with important concepts in exercise physiology and their relationship to Nordic development......This well-done manual is the work of an Olympian, a lifelong scholar-athlete, and, most of all, a keen observer of nuance in adolescent physical development.” ~Jeffrey Leonards, Ph.D., psychologist
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