The scene around the Engadin start made every other race I’ve ever been to seem poorly attended. As we drove by the starting pen (it’s on a lake, so we could see it from the road above) an hour and a half before the start there were already 4-5 rows of skis lined up in the Elite A and Elite B waves. We had a parking pass, but weren’t quite sure in which lot it entitled us to park, so we ended up at least half a k from the staging area in a public lot. I’d been warned that it was a long walk from bag drop to the start, and I wasn’t too thrilled with the prospect of warming up, taking off all my warmups and then freezing for half an hour before the gun went off. So Marshall and I came up with a better plan. We would jog our skis down to the start, jog back, drop our clothes bags in the truck and then jog back down. Seemed like it would work pretty. With 35 minutes to go we took off down towards the start. We happened to run in to Kevin Hochtl and told him what we were doing. He said “that’s a great idea if you want to miss your start. Take your clothes off, put them in the bag, then go to the start.” So we did, except it was not as simple as it sounds.
