Nationals

Last week our team got back together for US Nationals in Rumford, Maine. After Christmas break, when we were all in different places for the most part, it was really fun to all be back together again.

We all got up Monday morning, psyched for the first race, the skate sprint, but we realized just before we were about to drive over to the venue, that rain overnight had forced the organizers to postpone the race. The snow held through the day, and we got to race on Tuesday. Faced with a big empty day ahead of us though, the captains came up with an idea to have an Iron Chef competition between our suites. The “secret ingredient” was squash, and most of us spent the majority of the afternoon fabricating various squash concoctions. I’m proud to say that our suite won best desert, for our squash-carrot cupcakes with nutella-cream cheese frosting! There were lots of creative dishes, from squash hamburgers to some soup and some fancy squash smoothie (baby food) and pudding in a squash bowl. Nonetheless it was a good way to spend the afternoon, a very fun distraction from the pent up nerves I had accumulated!

Tuesday we raced the skate sprint, followed by an off day, and then the two distance races Thursday and Friday. We had solid team results every day, with Stella and Patrick qualifying for the open heats in the sprint, and Lusty winning the junior 10k classic race!

Coming off some of my best races at nationals last year, I came into this week with expectations that were perhaps a bit too high. I made it into the junior heats in the sprint, and after a tangle on one of the hills in the final, ended up second. Although the day didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped, I did get to race a full set of heats, practicing sprint tactics and quick thinking when a heat doesn’t go the way I imagined it.

The next race was a skate 10k, three laps around the 3.25k manmade loop. It was another solid race, nothing spectacular, but it was good practice in pacing. The classic 5k was my best race of the week, I ended up 6^th for juniors, but I went really hard and got to hurt a lot, so that was good! 

waiting to cheer for the classic sprint heats on Sunday...

 skate 10k, photo Herve Pelletier

 getting ready to go!

Brooke won the Junior heats on Sunday too!

Also on Saturday, I got to help out with the Fast and Female event at Gould. There were about 80 girls there and it was really fun to help fire them up about skiing!

Thanks to our coaches who worked tirelessly every day waxing and prepping skis, we had good skis for all of the races! And thanks to all the volunteers at Rumford for pulling together Rumford pulled good courses for racing, despite there being no real snow on the ground.

It was a really fun week overall, and especially for me it was a good learning experience. Being disappointed in my races the first couple days, it was good for me to look at those and use them as a starting point for the season, knowing that I have a lot to improve on!

Today we flew to Innsbruck for Youth Olympics! Update on that coming soon!