Super Tour Finals – Prologue

This morning was the 3km prologue of ST Finals in Craftsbury, VT. The organizers here have done an astounding job of preparing this course despite record high temps in the 70s all last week. The weather is starting to turn now and it got just cold enough last night to firm the track up a bit. I felt pretty good this morning in my warm up and despite not being able to test skis myself, MWSC coaches Will Sweetser and Seth Hubbard did a great job on the boards and gave me confidence when they handed me my skis before the start. Nordic Ultratune’s m1d grind continues to fly in these conditions with my SC camber Madshus skate boards.

The ribbon of snow…it has been non-stop work for the course crew to keep snow on the ground. They’re laying down snow from a stockpile until early in the morning and then grooming around 3am.

The prologue is perhaps one of the toughest races to do. It’s long enough to where you need to have some semblance of pacing, but short enough that you have to go really hard the whole time. Basically I skied the first lap like a sprint then tried to do it again, and when the bottom started to fall out about 500m from the finish, tried to hold on as best I could. I ended up 8th, 21sec out of 1st. Not a bad start to the week and it gives me a great start position for tomorrow’s 15km classic mass start. Former MOD athletes and Methow natives Sadie and Erik Bjornsen both racked up some great finishes in their first races on domestic soil in a few months – Sadie was 3rd and Erik tied for 3rd with USST member Noah Hoffman. Good to see the Methow packing the top ranks in the nation!