I used our weekend off from competition to get in some easy distance training and rest. In the past few years I have always trained really hard going into Nationals and subsequently found myself racing far below my potential, tired from over-reaching. This year i opted for the opposite approach in effort reverse the trend...
My travel out to Nationals was simple and Houghton greeted us with as much snow as we could possibly ask for. The conditions were excellent. My focus was solely on the distance events, as I was trying to qualify for the World Cup team at the end of the month.
The first race was the 10k Skate, which is typically a good one for me. I started out very hard, or at least so i thought. I felt great but when I received a split that I was in 12th place, I realized i needed to go much faster... Sea level, it always gets me that way. Every time I go down to sea level for the first time in a season I suffer the same fate... at the end of the day i finished in 12th. I was happy with the way I skied but disappointed that i was unable to move as fast as I needed to... Something to address for future seasons, that is for sure.
The classic race seemed like it should suit me very well, as it was a 15k. I thought the longer distance would enable me to keep up with the lowlanders more effectively... unfortunately the opposite was true. The nature of classic skiing, the faster more explosive movements pushed me further down the result list than I would ever consider 'acceptable'. I was never able to really access my speed and throw it down in the last portion of the race.
I am confident that if I had several more weeks at sea level, that I would easily come around and adjust to the speed necessary to find the podium. I've done it before, I'll do it again but I need to find a way to adjust faster so i do not find myself in the same position next year.
The one true positive to come out of Nationals was that i qualified myself to ski in the World Cup at the end of January, in Canmore, Alberta - Canada. This has been a big goal for me this year and I am happy to have achieved it. Canmore is a fairly high altitude venue so I am very anxious for the opportunity to race there.
For now I am home in Park City preparing for the World Cup. This weekend I had the opportunity to race in some collegiate races at the 2002 Olympic Venue, Soldier Hollow. The level of competition has risen significantly since my last year in college. There are some excellent racers there and I was psyched to go up against them. The classic race was very good, though my seed as a guest racer (start position - very important in an individual start) put me out of the gate first. This is typically not an issue unless it was snowing... It was snowing. I was the guy who got to blaze the trail for the rest of the racers. by the time the top seeded skiers started, the track had been skied in nearly 50 times. I lost a lot of time to say the least... In my later laps I passed several of the skiers who ended up beating me and absolutely smoked them. However, i had already lost so much time on my first laps that there was no way for me to catch up... At the end of the day I skied very well and was content with the finish.
The second day was a mass start 10k. Using these competitions for training, my coach and i decided that the best thing for me to do was to get to the front of the pack as quickly as possible and drop the hammer. So I did. I hammered as long and as hard as i could out in front but came up just short of dropping the top skiers. Our last time up the final climb they had a little more speed left than me and I just barely lost their tail. I finished a solid 5 seconds out. More importantly I was happy that I was able to ski at the front of the race, go as hard as I did as early as i did and still manage to recover throughout.
So as of now I have six days until I depart for Canada. We leave on the 19th. My first race, a 30k pursuit, will be on the 22nd and my second race, a 15k skate, will be on the 25th. I have no real expectations in terms of result or outcome for these races as i don't think that would be a productive way to go into an event of this caliber. What I really want to do is go up there, ski the best races that I can ski and come away with a better understanding of what I need to do to make the jump to scoring world cup points, which means a top 30 finish.
