MARQUETTE, Mich. -- Each year, from early fall to late spring, snow blankets this quiet college town of 20,000. It paints roads, clings to tree branches and sticks to shingles like melted marshmallow.
Houses butt against the southern shores of Lake Superior, and the wind, as it swirls off the icy waters of the world's largest freshwater lake, doesn't chill to the bone. It singes the skin in a way that makes the locals chuckle when they spot an outsider walking the streets, shivering, bundled tightly in wool hat, coat and gloves.
The cold is just a fact of life in the Upper Peninsula - or the U.P. as residents call it. It takes a certain conviction and charm to be a Yooper, to adapt and go about your business in the face of giant icicles and mammoth snow drifts. With an average of 141 inches per year, Marquette is the second-snowiest city in the continental United States (trailing only Blue Canyon, Calif.). A year ago, 14 inches fell in a single day.
Yet if you can beat the dawn out of bed and wipe the sleep from your eyes, you might be lucky enough to spot some of them. Wrestlers. Weightlifters. Speedskaters. Some are high school age, but most are college kids. Every morning, you can see them in the Superior Dome - an egged-shaped building that bills itself, without irony, as "the largest wooden dome in the world!" - lifting weights, pounding speed bags, jumping ropes or gliding across the ice.
Olympic aspirations, in this town, begin before sunrise.
They pretty much have to. The United States Olympic Education Center at Marquette's Northern Michigan University is home to the only program in the country where aspiring Olympic athletes can train and attend school at the same time. So as soon as the morning workouts are completed, it's off to class, right about the time plenty of Northern Michigan students are stumbling out of bed or shaking off a hangover.
The Beijing Olympics are six months away, and while that ticking clock has added a buzz to the athletes here, it's unlikely anyone training at Northern Michigan will be on the cover of a Wheaties box coming to a supermarket near you.
Those athletes, such as decorated swimmer Michael Phelps of Rodgers Forge, are training at the U.S. Olympic Committee's massive and well-financed Colorado Springs facility. If they're not in Colorado, they're bunkered down in Lake Placid, N.Y., using the latest technology to hone their skills in winter sports. When China dreams of knocking off the United States as the world's dominant athletic and economic superpower, it's the athletes in Colorado Springs and Lake Placid who provide the inspiration.
