US Nationals

I flew into Houghton, Michigan from Anchorage where I met up with the team on Friday. We are here racing at the US Senior National Championship, which is the biggest and one of the most important races on the domestic circuit. On the line here are senior national titles, as opposed to college nationals or junior nationals which a lot of people are more familiar with. This is the only time that all of the best professional racers in the country as well as some of the top college racers will be competing together.

We are staying at a cool little vacation rental a ways out of town. It is right on the beach of Lake Superior and has a sauna.

The view from our porch

Friday and Saturday were just training days, giving us that time to prepare for the races yesterday and today. During this time we ski pretty slow, and we ski the courses so we know exactly what to expect before the day of the race. We also like to throw in some quick pick-ups, which is when you ski really hard for 10 seconds or so. This gets your body working a little bit so that the warm up is easier the next day and you can hit the ground running when the gun goes off.

In December the race organizers were worried they would have to take drastic measures to keep the race in Houghton. Houghton is known for its heavy snowfall so it is normally a safe venue for ski races, but this year had very little snow until recently. In the last couple weeks the town got several feet of snow, and the trails are in great shape. Temperatures for the week are forecasted to stay in the 20s, so it should be great conditions for racing.

On the schedule for Sunday was a classic interval start, 15km for the men and 10km for the women. Both races were on a two lap course, which is nice because these big races often happen on really short loops so the athletes ski lots of laps. I think it allows for better racing when there are fewer laps, so I appreciated the longer course.

Unfortunately our schedule last year ended up with us lacking a lot of USSA scored races, so as a team we all have pretty bad points right now. In every race that USSA sanctions all the athletes in the race are scored. Points are determined by how far back you are from the winner plus a value based on strength of field. An average of an athletes points from their best scored races yields their current points. When you don’t have a lot of scored races in the last year your points tend to be bad. The idea behind USSA points is that it is a way to rank all the skiers in the country against each other, so that at races like US Nationals there have some basis for seeding. It’s not a perfect system but it works pretty well. But because our points at the UW team are bad we end up getting seeded lower than we ought to be, so for the individual start on Sunday we all were seeded in the back. The top guys went out towards the front.

My race on Sunday went alright. While I was in the start pen I was seeing the higher seeded guys going around on their laps and they were going pretty slow. They looked tired. Seeing that I planned to take the first lap pretty slow so I could be feeling good for the second lap. When I went out I had this in mind. But I changed my plan pretty quick when a guy I used to race with in high school (he was the state champion three years in a row) caught up to me. He was on his second lap and I figured I would be skiing really well if I kept up with him. He was with a skier from the University of Vermont, a really strong school. The course starts off with a kilometer and a half of flat and a big downhill, then the longest climb of the day. I lost connection on the down because I had sticky skis, but this meant that on the climb I went right by the group. I was feeling it right then and I knew there was I big down after so I hammered up the climb, and I was able to drop the group. They caught back up on the downhill. Throughout most of the lap over the undulating terrain I skied with this group, but I kept losing them on the downhills. They were getting really icy so I was taking them a little conservatively, so I probably would have benefited from taking the downhills more aggressively. The group dropped me towards the end of my first lap.

Day 1. Photo from xmatic.com

The skier who started 15 seconds behind me caught up to me early in the first lap, and we skied together for a bit. At one point he pulled a little ahead of me. On the second lap though I left him behind and ended up skiing a lot of it by myself. I was able to pass a couple guys who started in front of me, so I knew I was doing ok. The second half of the lap is definitely harder than the first, despite the large climb featured early on. The latter half has these steep rolling hills for a lot of it, then finishes with some more gradual but still long and difficult climbs.  The start/finish area is the highest part of the course. I was suffering pretty hard at a couple k to go but I was able to raise my pace a little bit for the last k and I think I finished pretty strong.

For the team, it wasn’t our greatest showing. I came in 133^rd in the field of 195, and Ben was .4 seconds behind in 134^th. Mason was 168, Taylor 184, and Sam, who missed his asthma medication before the race, was 188. It wasn’t a terrible race for us by any means but I’m sure we can do better.

Taylor and Mason in the 15k. Photo from xmatic.com

Today we had the skate sprint. It isn’t always fun when you travel hundreds of miles, prepare days in advance, and warm up hours prior just to race for four minutes and go home. But that’s what happened today. When the men’s field is 200 strong and only 30 qualify for the heats it’s pretty difficult.

The course today was a full 1.5km, which is about as long as sprints get. It also featured two decent climbs, a little rolling terrain, and an uphill finish. This was a tough sprint course. There was some soft loose snow on top of a hard and icy track. The temperature was in the low twenties.

There isn’t a whole lot to write about for a sprint qualifier. We start at 15 second intervals and in a race this short you don’t often catch the guy in front of you even if you are going way faster. A common sentiment among the team was tired legs today, and I was certainly feeling that, especially on the hills. But the hardest part about the course wasn’t the hills, it’s the length. We have kind of grown accustomed to sprint courses in the 1.1-1.3 range, and I really felt the additional distance today. I definitely faded at the end, and I think I did a poor job planning my race before I skied. Tactics are super important in sprinting, and in my warmup when I skied the course I didn’t put enough thought into which lines I would take and how I would hit each hill. I think I could have had a bit of a faster time had I been more attentive.

That being said I raced okay this morning. I finished in 128^th, a slight improvement over yesterday which is surprising because I am a stronger distance skier. However, my sprinting has been improving so I am happy with my current trajectory and hope to be competitive in the sprint come USCSA Nationals in March. The team has seen better results than today, with Ben at 152, Mason at 166, Taylor at 167, and Sam at 175, but it is early and we don’t have many races under our belts this year.

Me in the sprint qualifer. Photo from Sierra

Ben and I hung around to watch the heats. It’s a lot of fun for us and it’s a great opportunity to pick up some tactical knowledge. Reese Hanneman of APU dominated all day and in the men’s final he beat Dakota Blackhorse-Von Jess of the Bend Endurance Academy by a bootlength on the line. In the women’s race Jennie Bender won all of her heats and won the final by an easy margin. These guys are fighting not only for national titles  but also for world cup starts and potentially the US Ski Team, so there is a lot at stake for them.

Our next race is on Thursday, which is a mass start skate, 30km for the men and 20km for the women. All of us are really looking forward to that one, and are hoping to improve on our results from this week. Following that, we race a classic sprint on Saturday and then will be driving back to Laramie.

Results from both days can be found here.