I’m up here in the northern section of Maine, known commonly as the County. Yesterday’s pursuit race was held in rock hard, ice conditions which made the twisty, Morton-designed trails all the more fun. The women’s 15k was two 7.5km loops and this being my first pursuit, I had a little trouble figuring out the logistics. Fortunately, Zach Caldwell’s been nice enough to wax my skis for me so I didn’t have to deal with the hassle of waxing both skate and classic skis. (more…)

Check out JD’s awesome interview on Fasterskier.com

http://www.fasterskier.com/news4201.html

Okay I just read Brayton’s blog and saw that an update was coming soon from me so I guessed that I’d better get started. Mont St. Anne was about as foreign an experience as I’ve had. The beginning of the week was rough – I didn’t know that ‘bouclee’ meant lap and ‘arriviste’ meant finish so I didn’t quite follow the directions that the course signs were giving. By Sunday though I was pretty well oriented and fluent in my race-course French so things looked better. For the 30k, sunshine and fast spring conditions put me in a pretty good mood. Starting in the third row helped tame my usual spasoid start habits and I worked my way slowly up though the melee of skis and poles. The first 2 laps (out of 3) were under control and made me nervous because the pack wasn’t breaking up. I am NOT a good pack skier…I tend to be pretty messy and step on pole baskets and cause accidents. I’ve got a bad habit of being indecisive about attacking, sometimes I just pull out of the train and ski up a few people and then decide to pull back in. So I figured instead of annoying everyone with this again, I attacked at the beginning of the third lap and felt pretty good. Dasha caught me at one of the downhills but I tried again on the next climb and managed to avoid a sprint. Thanks to Chris Mallory from SVSEF for getting me so many feeds that I felt a little waterlogged mid-race and powered me to the finish, and apologies to the XC.com guy giving feeds that I almost ran over (he did the fanciest bit of footwork I’ve ever seen to hop over my moving skis and in between another skier and me).

Evelyn skied away from Tasha Bechterman and Dasha Gaiazova on the last lap of today’s 30k skate at Mt. Ste-Anne. On top of the podium again, her write-up will be coming soon. Looking for more next week at US distance nationals in Presque Isle.

It is now 5:00 am on Tuesday.  I’ve been awake since 4:30.  (more…)

Wow….

We tried to race the Birke yesterday… but the weather stopped us from finishing. For the first time in 70 years the Birkebeiner was cancelled due to high winds.

I won’t lie I am still a little bitter about it all. We made it to about 16km before the decision was made. It was really difficult for me because I was skiing really well. I think that I was in 13th place and feeling good when the decision was made. I was slightly off the lead pack with two others and we were slowly working our way back. We had also been climbing for 15km, and I was really looking forward to the downhill on the other side.

Instead we were stoped and told to ski back to the start. It lead to the craziest downhill I have ever seen. 5000 people dong a 15km downhill starting at the same time. It was insane!!! I fell and broke a pole (first time I have ever broken a Star). Then as I stood up I was hit by another skier. The second hit was by far the worst. My my back, neck, and butt are super sore right now from hitting the snow so hard.

It was a long day for not much racing. I hope that we can do it again someday when we can finish the race.

I will try to write more about it later.

It is Thursday night around 8pm and we just finished waxing for the Birkebeiner on Saturday. We leave tomorrow morning at 9am and apparently we won’t have time or a good place to wax. So we are doing it well in advance. But conditions are looking really good and easy to glide wax for. It is predicted to be warm in the days (around +2C) and cold at night (-7C), so it should be icy and fast. We put on LF6, BDHF8, then FC8 (or similar) and a chola binder. Day of race we will probably put on violet klister.

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Not the cleanest snow and it’s melting fast but hard to complain when it’s sunny and warm and we’re skiing at the most famous venue in the world.

The music is still in English over here, but it’s not exactly the same. In case you were wondering, every song ever – even AC-DC – can be remixed. Some of the highlights, courtesy of YouTube. No promises or assurances on picture content/quality, but this is the only way I can figure out to get you the music (short of posting the mp3s on our site, which is definitely not legal). Days off are great.
Straight out of the stadium in Obertilliach

All over the ringtones

Our neighbors in Hovden at 2AM, the stadium there and HitRadio all over Central Europe (PG rating for language, beware! But still less offensive than most rap lyrics on the radio today.)
VIVA, which is basically German for “MTV”

Is this ad in the US? The best we’ve seen