JO Relay

The Junior Olympics wrapped up on Saturday with the relay race and then the dance - or the "stanky grind fest" as Boobar liked to call it. For the relay, since we had 12 J2 skiers, we had two teams of three for each gender. For the girls, Heather, Maddy, and Corey made up one team, and Hannah, Heidi, and Cate were the other team. The boys were Paddy, Eli, and Jack, and Tyler, Hamish, and Devlin. Those are four pretty stacked teams!
Modeling my sweet NE J2z hat. And the sexy coach's bib.

The boys went first, and Paddy led them off well, getting a lead within the first kilometer. They went into the woods and it seemed like just two minutes later they were coming up the hill in the field. Paddy was still in first, by about 10 seconds or so, and Tyler was about 15 seconds back, sitting comfortably in a pack of six or seven other guys. Paddy tagged off to Eli and Tyler tagged to Hamish, and the boys went zipping off onto course. I ran back to the hill in the field to watch, and Eli came up still ahead of a hard-charging intermountain team, awesome work for a little guy. Hamish had picked off three teams, and was now skiing in 5th, so when he tagged off to Devlin they were still in a clump. Jack held the lead for the first team, and Devlin almost closed to the Alaskan team in 4th place - he said it was definitely his best race of the week. The first team won, and our second team was also on the JO podium in 5th!

Paddy leading the field after ~1km, heading under the bridge.

Hamish in the tag zone.

Jack chasing the gold medal!

The girls raced next, and Heather and Hannah were leading out the two teams. They both got off to a clean start, and slotted in behind other skiers to conserve energy. By the time they came up the hill in the field, Heather was skiing in second just behind the first place team, and Hannah wasn't far behind, in a pack of fast skiers. Heather tagged to Maddy, and Hannah tagged to Heidi, and the second leg skiers went to work. Both skiers maintained their positions, and Maddy even pulled ahead into first place by the end of her leg, giving Corey a nice cushion going into the anchor leg. Heidi tagged to Cate in 6th place, but in a group from 5th through 9th.

The J2 girls' start.

Here they come! Under the bridge.

Corey raced hard, and kept her lead over the intermountain team, for first place. Cate had a rough break, and got caught behind a midwestern girl who was snowplowing on a downhill - Cate tried to go around on the inside, but she got tangled up and fell, and couldn't make up the distance back to 5th place. She still brought home the second team in 8th place, a darn fine showing!

Hannah modeling her oh-so-fine "NE J2z" hat.

NE J2 girls after the relay.

We all stuck around to watch the older kids' races, and with the weather as sunny as it was, the boys were soon taking off their shirts and hucking snowballs (I don't know why that sequence of events, it looked painful when they got nailed with ice balls, but those are 17yo boys for you...). A four-region snowball fight broke out on the hillside during the J1/OJ girls' race, with team Alaska charging the Midwest and Far West divisions in a sneak attack - it was some good spectating. New Englanders were involved, but luckily they stopped throwing snowballs when the racers came through.

Our J1 boys had an ok race - their second-leg skier, Austin Cobb, lost a ski at 1km, which certainly slowed things down for him as he had to retrieve that, but the OJ boys who had been near him showed great teamwork and waited for him to get his ski, then worked as hard as they could to pull him back up to the pack. In what was probably the most exciting race of the day, Sam Tarling went from 4 seconds behind the Alaskan OJ team (currently in the lead) to 6 seconds ahead, in an amazing display of sheer guts. Cheering Sam skiing up the last hill, with ~0.5km left, he was trailing the Alaskan, and going flat out. As a coach, you can usually tell when a skier is just totally filled with lactic acid, and watching Sam, it was fairly obvious that he just couldn't go any faster. Somehow, he pushed through to a totally different level, and DROPPED that Alaskan skier (who is no slouch - David Norris was top 5 at senior nationals) like a bad habit. That was the sort of performance that gives you shivers to watch.

I should also mention that New England OJ boys took four of five podium spots. We call that domination. Wow.

The older girls were the last race to go off, and after some tight racing, the J1s took 2nd and 5th, and the OJs took 3rd and 4th.

The J2z hanging on top of the van waiting for everyone to be ready to leave.

NE J2s after the flower ceremonies.

We stopped at a Chinese buffet for lunch on our way home sunday, and Chris found crab legs. He took a while to figure out how to eat them though...

JO classic race

With no mass start, it looked a little silly to have people firing off one at a time onto the mass start area, since its a huge, wide-open field, but all the J2s got special instructions to not win the race up that hill, so things went well. Corey started 15 seconds behind Heather, who started 15 seconds behind Maddy, but they all took that in stride, and Corey won, with Heather just after, Maddy in 4th, Hannah in 9th, Heidi in 12th, and Cate in 31st, just 15 seconds out of the top 20! Those girls are some tough fighters and good skiers, I was pumped to be able to get out on course and cheer for them.

The boys all started in a group also, and that was a really close race - the top 5 were within 8 seconds. Jack was 2nd, 0.6s back, Eli was 4th, Paddy was 5th, and Hamish was 13th, in his first distance race as a J2! Devlin and Tyler had some tough races, but they're rallying well for tomorrow's race. I got to watch the older kids' races also, and some of those OJ boys were just super impressive to watch. The girls skied really well too, with Izzy C in 3rd for J1 girls and Kaitlyn Miller winning the OJ girls. New England won the day again (this is becoming sort of common, eh?), and looking at the Alaska cup points, we got more points on the first day than Alaska (2nd place) has total. We're ON.

Today was a training day, and after skiing the course and scraping some race wax, we took the kids out for an adventure - my group went to Marden's to pick up a proper outfit for bowling, and then we headed to the bowling alley. Upon arrival, however, we discovered that we only had 30 minutes to bowl until they'd kick us out (Great Lakes had reserved the entire place at 3:30), and it reeked like sweat and cigarette smoke, so we just went back. Fail.

The kids are preparing for tomorrow, and I'm sucking down cough drops so I can keep yelling at the same volume when I cheer for them. Gonna be another beautiful day!

Maddy, Heather, and Corey lined up.

Maddy starting out - check out the LINE of spectators!



Hamish starting out.

Sabra testing wax.

Mass start changed

Today we were previewing the classic course, where Wednesday's mass start was supposed to be held. It had set up really nicely overnight, and was a really hard track - Awesome! I was skiing with the J2s, and we were kicking like mules on KR40, previewing the course and practicing the downhills. There are some hairy downhills but they're nothing you can't get down safely - some of the younger skiers preferred sliding some of the corners rather than step turning them, and thats just fine. Anyway, we were getting all psyched up for the mass start, practicing downhills in groups and throwing elbows and all the other intricacies of mass starts.

Apparently, some time after we'd finished our course tour, the Midwestern team's J1 girls went down the first hill, and one girl fell and the rest of the team ran into her and she tore her ACL, or did something of that magnitude to her knee. This sent the Intermountain coach into a frenzy, and he made enough noise that he managed to convince the technical delegate that the course was unsafe for a mass start. Which is ridiculous, because in an individual start, skiers will be going way more aggressively on those downhills, trying to eke out every second.

Needless to say, team New England is pretty pissed about that turn of events - we do really well in head-to-head races, and its not like we won't clean up tomorrow, but it just sucks that people are such whiners. Its a ski race, for god's sake - the downhills are SUPPOSED to be fast and technical. Gah.

Anyway, the kids are taking this in stride, and they're pumped to rock it tomorrow. So am I!

Beautiful klister skiing up here, you can keep your extra blue days, I'll take sunny klister days. Too bad my camera battery died and I didn't bring the charger or I'd have photos.

Sprint day

I want you to look at the following pictures:


OJ boys: 1. Alex Schulz (NE), 2. Skyler Davis (NE), 3. Chase Marston (NE).

J2 boys: 1. Cole Morgan (IM), 2. Eli Hoenig (NE), 3. ?, 4. Jack Hegman (NE)

J1 boys: 1. David Sinclair (NE), 2. Jackson Rich (NE), 3. Hans Halvorson (NE)

OJ girls: 1. Kaitlyn Miller (NE), 2. Alaska girl, 3. Midwestern girl.

J2 girls: 1. Corey Stock (NE), 2. Heather Mooney (NE), 3. Maddy Pfeifer (NE)

J1 girls: 1. Isabel Caldwell (NE), 2. Alaska girl, 3. Gage Fichter (NE)

We took 13 of 18 possible podium spots. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we had an awesome day. We gave a bunch of fast kids some awesome skis, and look what happened!

The Junior Olympics report, first two training days

We left Boston after only 15 minutes of packing the van, new record! We did have to take out the rear seats so that everyone's huge duffels could fit, I took one for the team and didn't bring enough clothes to wear clean ones all week... but at least I packed light. We were planning to stop in Bangor for dinner, we'd called in takeout, but when we got there, they'd forgotten to do the separate checks, so we were waiting for them to do that, and a guy walked up to us and asked what we were doing up there - I said we were heading to Presque Isle for the junior olympics in xc skiing, and he got super excited - apparently he is from Fort Kent, and he was super pumped that we were going up there to ski. So, he bought us dinner. I made the kids go up and shake his hand and thank him, and it turns out he is the mayor of Bangor - thanks Bangor!

We got to Presque Isle right around 10pm, got the kids into bed, and were up bright and early for the first training day on Saturday. Skate skiing at the venue, and it was a beautiful warm day - a good day to be outside! Sunday was more of the same, previewing the classic sprint course, with the opening ceremonies in the evening. The organizers outdid themselves, with a whole bunch of performances by dancers, singers, drummers, and a presentation about the history of Aroostook county, that finished with a short video from some of the USST members currently racing in Finland. The kids were super into it, and I think that was definitely one of the best opening ceremonies I've ever been at (for all sorts of competitions). Below are some sweet pictures of the last couple days - gorgeous spring skiing. Tomorrow is the first race, the classic sprint!

Pretty sweet spring skiing...

CSU skiers scraping race wax.


The arsenal of brushes.



Study hall!

Hamish dressing sharp for the opening ceremonies.

Opening ceremonies - girls in sparkles dancing on the stage, they were a big hit.

Drummers in the opening ceremonies.

On the road again...

I'm coaching at the Junior Olympics next week, originally as an "intern", but I've since been promoted to J2 coach, when someone couldn't come on the trip. I was all set to be an intern with an attitude, but now I get to sass the kids instead of the other coaches. CSU is sending seven, four of whom are J2s, so I'll get to coach my kids, always fun. Anyway, we're headed north today after their last class in school, along with Tony Ryerson from Harvard, who is still a junior too and qualified for JOs in New England. The van ride is gonna be AWESOME, eight hours but at least its almost all on highway, where the only thing you need to worry about is hitting a moose.

New England will probably clean up as a team, and I'm hoping the shining stars will be the CSU skiers. Go CSU!

Flaring off some fitness

I've managed to successfully avoid Tuesday night races all winter. They tend to be pretty soft, which isn't so good for my left shin/calf combo that might have compartment syndrome going on, so avoiding these races worked pretty well to keep the rest of my season going smoothly. Of course, missing out on the Tuesday night fights, which is where the real racing goes down every week, means I did not have the credentials to line up where I did, which was somewhere around the third row. I tried to tell myself it would be this soft and disgusting for everyone out there, and that I would actually have an advantage being light so I could float over the snow, but boy did it suck anyway.

Andy counted down to go time, and when we got moving, for some reason I was really taken aback by just how much snow (and goose poop) was flying into my face courtesy of the folks ahead of me. Ugh! I got gapped quickly, but then people slowed down on the flats, and I hopped into the tracks and double poled for a bit, until I realized I was getting gapped again, so I floundered around pretending I was skating when really what I was doing was drowning - should have had a snorkel!

By halfway through the first lap, I was trailing well behind the lead group and their followers, and Bob Burnham, Marc Jacobson, and Terry McNatt caught up to me. I hung in their draft to Mt. Weston, although there wasn't much to be said for drafting when we were all lurching around the mashed potatoes. Then Bob stumbled, and since I was in last, I skied up on him and then had to come to a stop and then he got going again and I was gapped. Damn. Luckily, this time I was chasing people who were my speed, as opposed to that front group, which is NOT my speed, so I caught back on by the corner thats in the dark. Bob and I had figured out that the tracks were waaaaay faster (and easier!) on the downhills, so we were zipping along merrily double poling where we could, but by the time we finished the second lap and started the third one, I was letting a few too many gaps open up - its so easy to lie to yourself and say "oh, I'll catch them on the next slight downhill, my skis are better" - this is never actually true. Once you start that talk, you're done.

My calves were blowing up pretty bad, so that the floundering around bit was getting increasingly painful. I was noticing that I was looking behind me far more often than I was looking ahead and trying to close the gap, and I knew that was it for this race. Bob and Terry reeled in one more skier, and I tried not to tip over, as we finally finished that hellfest. Even double poling wasn't efficient, because your poles would just sink and keep sinking into the muck. The goose poop was holding up better than the snow, for sure.

But, at least I did one race - that weekend stuff hardly counts, its way too easy compared to Tuesday night slushfests. Gotta do at least one of these a year, even if it leaves me dry heaving at the end with my legs on fire. Now I remember why I didn't do any of these yet!