A Little Tired
· Jan 29, 08:25 PM
So the weekend came and went without a whole lot of fanfare. 3rd and 5th looks nice, but I was definitely looking for more. After my hard intervals Monday and Wednesday’s sprint race I was pretty sure things were coming together for a very good weekend. I had designs on a couple of wins – well at least the skate race – and was ready to go. Thursday and Friday were easy and ski/wax testing (which was a little tough to do since temps were still down around 0 and it was warming up for the weekend). Then Saturday morning rolled around, and I wasn’t ready to go.
My legs were a bit tired going up and down stairs on Saturday morning pre-race, and that’s never a good sign. I felt decent warming up, but as soon as I hit the first climb on the race course I felt like I’d already done a lap; or maybe the sprint had been the night before. I wasn’t sure. Either way, I wasn’t skiing as fast or aggressive as I had on Monday. The hills were slogs and I wasn’t hitting the over-the-top sections hard. And those sections are key at Telemark because it’s so choppy and nothing is sustained.
I have no complaints with the effort I put out on Saturday, I just would have liked my body to feel a little fresher. I pretty much buried myself out there, and that’s really all you can do on race day. If the splits I got were accurate – and I got them from a couple different people, so I think they were – I gave away a lot of time in the last downhill k and a half. My skis didn’t feel the best, either; I definitely missed having Hallsey there to take care of my skis. It’s easy to forget how much it helps until it’s not there.
I was pretty optimistic for Sunday, I figured my skis had cost me a little on Saturday, and I like mass starts, so things were looking up. Historically I tend to be good on the second day of back to back races as well. I was not exactly energetic Sunday morning, but things felt okay. Then the race started. It was hard from the start for me. Not painfully hard, just too fast. I had no speed in me. When Marius, Zach and Brian pulled away at about 9k I had absolutely no response. It wasn’t terribly hard to ski with the 4-7 pack most of the time, but I just could not go faster. Every time I tried it didn’t work. I gave Watt a good battle for the finish, but came up on the losing end.
All in all it was a frustrating weekend. I was expecting better, and coming up short never feels good. I felt run down, and am trying to figure out what to do to make it right. The current plan is to keep racing, but not push training volume at all. Make it count, and that’s about it! Off to Sun Valley on Thursday.
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