We knew it was going to be a tough classic waxing when we read the forecast for 30's and tons of snow. Sounded like hairy's to us so we made sure we had all the right stuff and the few waxless skis that we had in the garage and headed out.
It turned out more interesting than we imagined. Hairy's we can handle but the wind was blowing so hard that we needed hairy's in one place, hard wax in another and klister in another, not the best fun for waxing. We thought we had it nailed right before the men's race when they re-groomed the course and our men went out first. The wax was rocking and we were stoked. Almost immediately after the start the wind came up and blew fresh snow into the tracks, then the sun came out, then it went away and the pellet snow started. The skis worked alright for about 3/4 of the first lap but then were really sticky. There was no "wax of the day" some teams had no kick, some had too much and some had both! We had too much, we looked like gods going up the hills but couldn't get going down the hills. Although the skis were not near as bad as poor Melissa had at Nationals in 2007!
Despite these rough skis the men did fine, not far off where they started in the classic race last year and Willie actually had his best classic % points ever so it was kinda a wash. The men who did well in the race were using "Zeros", skis specifically designed for temperatures right around zero degrees. This might be one of the first times we've actually been beaten by our club status, we just don't have 6 pairs of Zeros to throw on our athletes!
We did have enough waxless skis for all the women except Marie (she is just too light to kick any of the skis we had) so we put them all on completely new, too long, too stiff skis for their race. On the whole it went pretty well. Gwynn couldn't kick her's very well, Morgan crashed a bunch of times with the long skis and Marie was icing but we felt the damage had been minimized, at least they got around the course and weren't miserable!
Saturday had better potential, although there had been a ton of snow, the course was groomed perfectly and it was pretty cold. The women had a 15km mass start skate and despite their fear of being lapped, not completely unfounded since there were 2 US Olympic Team Women in the race, they did great! Gwynn and Gracey just kept pulling up and catching people, Marie held on amazingly well, Shanna finished her second 15km ever on the killer trails of Soldier Hollow and Morgan not only finished the race, she wasn't even in incredible pain! It was a solid showing for the first big race of the year.
The men didn't have it so easy. Fitz & Eliah didn't start due to illness. Less than 1 lap into the 4 lap/20km race Willie looked like he might keel over any minute so we pulled him out of the race. This left just Zhenya, John and Dan for our men. Zhenya and John spent 3 laps working together and picking off racers and Dan was struggling but hanging on, we had hopes of having a full men's team finish but it was not to be. At the end of the 3rd lap Zhenya stepped out of the race and left John to finish on his own. John did a great job catching a CU guy 30 seconds in front of him and finishing strong despite the tough trail and the mental hit when Zhenya quit. Dan also finished the race, looking tired but tough. Kinda a rough weekend when the team starts with 6 men and you can only get 2 to finish! Hopefully everyone will be well next weekend!
For the wax report. When we arrived for the women's race we realized that it was colder than predicted so we tested Fast Wax Tan and Fast Wax LF-Blue and the LF-Blue was running great so we put it on the front of their skis, they had Fast Wax LF-Red already on the skis. The women's skis seemed to be just fine and they skied really well.
We had the men wax one pair of skis with LF-Red and one pair with Swix HF-8 so they could find out which was faster on the day. They all test and chose different things. While standing up at the top of the hill, where the coaches were feeding, we rapidly discovered that it sure wasn't a wax race out there. Meaning that the wax seemed to make very little difference since teams that had men in the top 10 had on a wide range of wax from no-fluor to low-fluoro to high-fluoro to pure fluoro. The difference in the waxes was negligible, although the team with pure fluoro seemed to struggle a bit. The team that had the winning skier had on basically the exact low fluor wax that we had on one pair of skis and the team with 3 in the top 10 had on the same high-fluor wax that was on our second pair! It seemed to truly be across the board and not really matter in the long run!
It was a tough weekend of racing and we're extremely proud of the effort put out in tough conditions and tough races. We're now preparing for our first-ever trip to Grand Mesa for the Mesa State Invitational. Should be a blast!
