Saturday morning kicked off the ski racing season with the Hoigaards/Breadsmith relays. I have raced this with Dave Anderson several times in the past, but was racing with Nate this year. The format is 6x1.5km skate technique, so each person races 3 times. I was our scramble leg since Nate has a stronger finish than me and typically the stronger racer goes second since that is where a close race is won. The first racer just has to keep the team in contention. Unfortunately I couldn't even do that. Not through any fault of my own really. I'm not a strong enough skier to keep up with Matt Liebsch, that is why he is racing to earn a spot on the US Olympic team and I'm racing to hold on to an elite wave spot at the Birkie. I paced much better than I have in relays past, but was still flooding with lactic acid by the end of my last leg. Nate and I held our own well and finished 3rd behind Matt Liebsch/Doug Debold and a St. Olaf team.
The race was only the beginning however. After a short cooldown the Vakava skiers got together for some video technique work and a couple hours of easy skiing. By the end of the day I ended up with somewhere around 4 hours on skis, not too bad. My skate technique is coming along, but so much of skating is so ingrained for me that I fall back into bad habits easily. Here is a video of me during the race, I haven't attached video before, so hopefully it works.
I got home just long enough to shower and play a little bit of Mass Effect. I really didn't play video games all summer, but something about wintertime makes me crave a bit of time curled up in front of a computer screen every day. I headed back up to the cities for Emily's family tree decorating party. This is a pretty spectacular event with a huge tree that is decorated by people climbing ladders with hangars full of ornaments and secured by climbing harnesses with belays and all. Then once the tree is decorated the tinsel is shot onto the tree by a couple cannons made from modified leaf blowers.
After the tree decorating party I went out with my friend Krystal to meet her former roommate Elizabeth (also Emily's former roommate, but that's another story altogether) and friends for some dancing. The place we chose to go to has a reputation for being pretty hopping, but when we got there it was dead. After waiting around for about a half hour and drinking a strange martini with maple syrup and bitters in it, our group decided to take on the challenge and get the dancing started. After a few songs others started to join in and by the time we left things were in full swing. We stayed up and talked for a while after the dancing, so it was 1:30 by the time I got to sleep.
The next morning I dropped Krystal off at the Zen center for their morning service, or whatever it's called, and headed up to French park to meet Jeff, Erik, and Elspeth for some classic skiing. It was a cold morning, so the skis were kicking well, but the going was slow and we were all dragging a bit it seemed. Jeffy had been out even later than I was. We got a bit over 1.5 hours in and then I headed out across the metro to Battle Creek to meet the Vakava crew for some classic cruise intervals and video work. I made it through the first interval well, but the second one I ran out of energy about halfway through and had to dial back. The video session went well, my classic technique is improving greatly after a summer of work and I feel much more confident in my kick, and marginally more confident in my double pole. I am excited for race season to see just how this training translates into an actual race situation.
I got home deep in calorie and heat deficit, so the evening was pretty low key, reading, making supper, and early to bed to get ready for another week. Total time on skis for the weekend was over 8 hours, so I'm planning to keep this week low key. My work is shut down for the two weeks around Christmas/New Years as well, so I fully intend to have a couple big ski weeks with the extra time off.
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