Gold Run NRL

Day 1:
10km Classic Race

The day started off pretty early. I woke up at 6am with the smell of Evelyn’s pancakes being cooked on the wood burning stove. If you have ever been on a trip where Dick and Evelyn Boggs were your hosts, you know that the food alone is well worth the trip! After eating a big breakfast, we quickly loaded up the vans and were on the road from Leadville at 7:20am.

It was a warm day already. We had waxed with FastWax blue, but after testing the conditions, we found that we were going to need to re-wax with red. The track conditions were extremely variable. The snow temp was right around 0*C. Parts of the course were really icy and glazed while others where wet and slushy. It made for interesting waxing. Luckily it wasn’t snowing or we would’ve had to gone with “Harrys” and I , thinking I wouldn’t need them in December, forgot to bring my RCS Zeros.

The first race of the year is always hard. Its really easy to set high expectations of how you think you should be performing. After several years of setting high expectations for myself, I’ve learned that it is best to treat these early season races as just “race training”. I’m not going out here to try to win or beat anyone to score for the team. I am simply just racing to strengthen my body and work back into “race shape”. So the only goals I set for myself in this race was to stay smooth, relaxed, and ski technically well.

The course was on a golf course. Golf courses mean lots of double pole! There is only one long gradual hill on the course. This is an easy course to go too hard on because you can see what everyone else is doing and its super flat. The one long hill isn’t very steep at all. If you were strong enough, you could double pole the entire thing. I though am not strong enough for that. So my main focus was to get a good knee drive and long glide.

The course was two 5km loops. The second lap here is always super rough. The long flat double sections seemed to get just a little steeper and much slower all while my arms got weaker and weaker. All I could do now is think “tempo tempo tempo!”

On the final long downhill, I got passed by two very fast skiers from the University of New Mexico. This was great because I was able to try and pace off of them for the last kilometer of the race. This was much harder than I had originally anticipated. I have always been thought of as a tempo skier but there tempos were much quicker than mine and they were much stronger! It was all that I could do to keep them in sight!

All in, this was a good race. I had accomplished my goals of skiing smooth and staying relaxed. I felt even better after seeing the results because I had beaten two CU and two DU skiers. This felt awesome knowing that those are two of the top teams in the nation!