Bozeman/Silver Star

Hello readers, I’m now in Silver Star, Canada and it is AMAZING here. The trails are always corduroy and the sun is always shinning. This is the best skiing in North America, well besides the Methow of course. We arrived monday night, so this was our fourth day skiing. Today we did race prep which involves an easy ski warm up with a couple times around the sprint course at near race pace, then a little cool down. I felt pretty strong, still a little sore from strength a couple days ago but I have gotten use to that being on the APU team. Erik Flora, our coach pretty much believes if your not sore your not pushing yourself hard enough.

Last weekend we raced in Bozeman, Montana for the second Super Tour series this season. The first day we had a skate sprint and a skate 10 kilometer race. I started a little slow in the sprint and finished just outside the top ten. I was not super stoked about this result but I still had one more chance that day to put something together. I went out in the skate distance race really hard and ended up finishing 8th, 3 seconds from 6th which happens to be the last position that receives prize money. A pretty good race for myself but that is also some expensive 3 seconds. It’s amazing when you are out on a course for close to a half hour and it comes down to just seconds, I guess every second really does count. The second day was a classic 15 kilometer race this ended up being my race of the weekend. It was an interval start race, meaning that each racer starts on their own, in this case the gap between each skier was 30 seconds. I started right around the middle of the pack with Sylvan Ellefson, a podium finisher from the previous weekend starting 30 seconds behind me. Sylvan ended up catching me right around half way through the race and followed me for 3 or 4 kilometers before taking the lead. I then gave it everything to hold on to him for the last 4 kilometers.  We definitely had a good pace going the last half of the course because we ended up finishing the race in first and second position. Sylvan winning by thirty seconds and me beating the third place person by ten seconds.

Yesterday we had a long ski easy and had to stop a couple of times to shoot some pictures of us sailing over the bumps on the fast downhills. Fun stuff!