Lahti, Finland – The Olympics have come and gone, but there is still plenty of racing to be done. The World Cup did not miss a beat, restarting less than a week after the Olympic 50k with a 15/30km pursuit as part of the annual Lahti Ski Games. The fields were competitive, but lacked many of the top skiers who are taking some time to recover after the Games. In the women’s event, the “Queen...
!--StartFragment-- p class="MsoNormal"Different time, different format. That is how I would describe last night’s team sprint. For some reason the French decided it would be interesting to see who could sprint the fastest during the time of day that...
It’s March, the snow is melting off the Birkie Trail, the Super Tour has headed off to, well, wherever the Super Tour heads off to these days, and the weather is turning warmer in California. Hang ‘em up? No way, not with the premier racing event of the season looming at the end of March — the CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH at Royal Gorge Cross Country ski area, March 28th, 2010. The California Gold Rush is...
pThe first race I did this season was the 20k Elk River race in late December. There had been a couple earlier races I could have done but didn’t feel mentally ready to do one. The season can get really long and I thought it was better to pace myself. I figured I needed to race at least once before TC Champs and the Elk River race was the last one before it. 20k is a bit longer than I would’ve like for a first race but the timing was right. My only thought for the race was to just get one under my belt and see how it felt. I purposely didn’t think about who else was there or what place I might get or anything like that. I just wanted to ski my race, so that’s what I did. This is not the same as ignoring other racers. You still need to pay attention to what they are doing and how you might strategize things, but if they are going to fast for you, let them go. If they are going to slow for you, drop them. If they are going a nice pace, work with them and see if you can use the pack to ski faster. So that’s lesson #1: pay attention to others and strategize, but ski your own race. You can’t control how others ski and you shouldn’t let them control you./p pThe second race was the TC Champs 15k classic at Battle Creek. I planned to ski my own race again, and I did, but I was a little excited and went out too fast. I was leading for the first 1k when I tripped myself up around a corner and went down on my butt. Many people went by and I dropped way back. Then I settled down and found my pace. I was able to catch a couple people on my second lap but could’ve done better if I’d been smarter at the start. So that was lesson #2: keep yourself under control at the start, it’s better to finish strong than to suffer much of the race after starting too hard./p pThe third race was the TC Champs 10k skate at Theo Wirth for the pursuit start. I was only a few seconds behind Kim Rudd and Kathleen DeWahl was right behind me. It didn’t take us long to catch Kim and the three of us skied the entire race together, which was great. I felt good and it was fun to have a nice group. Kim and Kathleen dropped me at the very end but I still had a very nice race. The three of us had the fastest times of the day and I’m sure it’s because we were pushing each other. So that was lesson #3: find a nice group to ski with if you can since you tend to ski faster in a group./p pStay tuned; more lessons coming soon!/p div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1572647974447867713-2268510936973111587?l=vakavaraceteam.blogspot.com' alt='' //div
I have a lot of respect for the word “Epic.” It’s not a word I will throw around lightly. While today was certainly not epic, it was a big day and a great way to kick off my training for the US National Championship 50km skate in Fort Kent, Maine at the end of this [...]
a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/S5MBec5r54I/AAAAAAAACho/jYoX5Ow_3Oo/s1600-h/IMG_3179.JPG"img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer;...
Today was the World Cup resume for the final two weeks of the season. The women’s side saw Bjørgen win handily and continue to show why she is the top female skier in the world right now while France’s Maurice Manificat won his first ever World Cup race. The intermediate sprints enabled Bauer to close his gap on [...]
a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_T8lplfcx_Ro/S5IjYx8eTzI/AAAAAAAAAcc/2Ka7qMNmjuU/s1600-h/nano-tip.JPG" target="_blank"img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: point...
img src="http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kyv6aosRhW1qzt3xbo1_500.jpg"/br/br/pPresque Isle and Truckee are ivirtually/i identical./p
a href="http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/138291.html"This theme song thing is getting out of hand. (click)/a
piAs Junior Nationals Approach, it’s time to look back at the “Rules for Junior Nationals” from the (sadly) retired Fake Fasterskier. bEmail single rules for this year’s Presque Isle incarnation to johnnyklister@gmail.com/b/i/p pspan class="status-body"span class="entry-content"5. When your kid blames the alt., or the kick, or the soft snow, or their dry-hump bruises for why they skied like an ass-hat, refer to 4./span span class="meta entry-meta" data="{}"a href="http://twitter.com/FakeFasterSkier/status/1284395714"span class="published timestamp" data="{time:'Thu Mar 05 18:02:24 +0000 2009'}" /span/aspan/span/span/spana id="status_star_1284382692" title="favorite this tweet" /aspan class="status-body"span class="entry-content"/span/span/p pspan class="status-body"span class="entry-content"4. These are the most important races of your kids life. If they suck, they should just pack it in. They’ll never be a skiing success a title="#fail" href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23fail"#fail/a/span span class="meta entry-meta" data="{}"a href="http://twitter.com/FakeFasterSkier/status/1284382692"span class="published timestamp" data="{time:'Thu Mar 05 17:59:35 +0000 2009'}"/span/aspan/span/span/spanspan class="actions"/span/p pspan class="actions"/spanspan class="entry-content"3. Some kid, from a state you didn’t even know had snow, is going to stomp on the hopes of your darling little Alaska Winter Star./span a href="http://twitter.com/FakeFasterSkier/status/1284373580" span class="published timestamp" data="{time:'Thu Mar 05 17:57:32 +0000 2009'}"11:57 AM Mar 5th, 2009/span /a via webspan class="entry-content"/span/p pspan class="entry-content"2a. You know that $ you gave your kid to buy an ugly-ass JO’s sweatshirt? Yeah. The Stratton kids are gonna fµ¢k¡πg take it. (See previous.)/span a href="http://twitter.com/FakeFasterSkier/status/1284370790" span class="published timestamp" data="{time:'Thu Mar 05 17:56:55 +0000 2009'}"11:56 AM Mar 5th, 200/span/aspan class="entry-content"/span/p pspan class="entry-content"2. The amount of time your kid spends learning to gamble will exceed the amount of time they actually spend skiing./span a href="http://twitter.com/FakeFasterSkier/status/1284366538" span class="published timestamp" data="{time:'Thu Mar 05 17:55:56 +0000 2009'}"11:55 AM Mar 5th, 2009/span /a via webspan class="status-body"span class="entry-content"/span/span/p pspan class="status-body"span class="entry-content"1. At the banquet, your precious J2 is going to learn all about the term “dry humping”. a title="#lost" href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23lost"#lost/a-innocence/span/span/p
a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6220UQ20100303?type=sportsNews"Bad News (click here)/a
a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/27/AR2010022702381.html"Good News (click here)/a