Prospect Race Weekend- part one.

This past weekend I did my first and possibly only race weekend of the ski season at Prospect Mountain in VT. With no days on snow the previous week, very spotty snow prior, and a general lack of specific ski training all year, I knew it was going to be great...Actually...it wasn't that bad, all things considered.

Because of an Eastern Cup in the morning, the USCSA races were moved to 3pm, which I was a big fan of. Given that I usually train in the afternoons/evenings my body was probably more ready than it would be at, say, 9am. I'm never going to complain about the luxury of sleeping in. Additionally, the 3pm start meant that they had perfectly timed the beginning of a 15k classic race to coincide with the arrival of a heavy snow squall ...and the temperature was ~30F.

The night before I decided that I've had this eBay'd Swix HFBD 8 in my wax box for 3 years and haven't used it once...and it was finally warm enough to justify using such a glide wax. Using good wax - whether it helped or not - was pretty exciting. Even better was ironing fluoros in the unventilated basement...

The kick waxing was "easier" than expected, mostly due to my laziness and my ability to quickly settle the matter of kick versus glide. Spoiler alert: kick won. I went with Toko yellow, although I think Toko red would have been a more sensible choice. Why Toko over Swix? I'm not exactly sure, but for some reason I perceive using Toko to be like drinking a microbrew...it's often good stuff and it satisfies some desire to be esoteric/different. Although I guess I could have gone and used Rode or some other random wax to accomplish the same effect. I debated a little red over said yellow, but I knew I was going to be lazy and sloppy during the race, so I stuck with what what was sticking (altogether too much).

For once in my ski racing "career", I got a good course preview/warm-up in, skiing to the sound of Molly whining (haha) about how her kick wasn't working (on a Swix product, I might add). My kick was good, glide was ok (a bit draggy), and the tracks were temporarily decent, so I was pretty positive on the race. I was figuring a top 3 was a reasonable expectation.

Looking at the start list, I could see that Clarkson alum Chad Day started :30 seconds ahead and I had Matt Delaney following me by :30. In an ideal (read: unlikely) situation, Matt would eventually catch me and I would hang on for dear life as he dragged me up to Chad..or not. Since I had little expectation or chance of beating either of them, I hoped I could at least use them to pull me to a good time.

So yeah...the race.

Chad immediately skied out of sight and I never saw him until he was fully clothed and cheering me into the finish... Also, it seems Matt was having an off-day and most likely packed it in early. With each lap (3 in total) I could see the time gap slowly opening...generally not how this situation usually plays out. But maybe my lack of ski training had prepared me in some spectacular, unforeseen way? The only thing left to do during the race was actually count on pacing myself and skiing well. As usual with classic races, my striding was hurried and sloppy, and my transitions suffered mightily. As each double poling section ended, I entered my striding way too early and probably looked pretty dumb. I also may have looked dumb because I was wearing a cycling skinsuit with leg and arm warmers. But if you can't wear outrageous things, what's the point of racing anyway? After the first few kilometers I burned off my nerves, made the necessary adjustments, and began to ski like I guess I should. Translation: my lack of skiing caught up with me, and I was forced to slow down and relax.

I nailed some big positive splits...which may have been alright had my initial lap time been anything close to fast. I dug my hole and it just kept getting deeper. There was a fair amount of double poling, which my back was totally not prepared for...I know I definitely lost some time there. Also, despite the whole course being stride-able, save maybe one section, all the uphill tracks were destroyed as I came around after the first lap. Great. So the next couple laps were spent sliding through the powder in some hope that the former tracks would provide some kind of guidance.

I ended up 6th overall, I think, a few minutes off the winning pace and somewhat off my usual placing, relative to the skiers I knew. Not great, but what else could I have expected? Jim confirmed that training is all about specificity- something I never really thought about too much. It definitely put things in perspective though..it's not like I could run a sub-16:00 5k on cycling training, no matter how good I was feeling at the time. Sounds like a cop-out, but I think it really is true...and it makes me feel better about marginal results!

Naturally I followed the race with a 30 second cool down followed by some stylin' tele turns on the downhill slopes at Prospect. So yeah, that was cool.

Skate race report soon enough.