Aspen with pictures
· Feb 13, 05:53 PM
I’ve been in Aspen for about a week now, and it has been great. We’ve been treated to some sunny days, some fresh snow and have been enjoying some great host housing (thanks Ruthie and Al!). I took a few pictures on Thursday when we previewed the course for today’s Owl Creek Chase, but once the snow started on Friday I put the camera away.
Yesterday was as hard a 10k classic as you can find (I think it’s more about the 8100’ of altitude, not the 130m of climbing per lap), but I had a good day out there. I did some intervals on the race course on Wednesday (3×5km) and thought I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to race it. I started out pretty conservative on the first lap and tried to ski fast without building lactate. I did a pretty good job of it, but when it came time to punch the main climb on the second lap (with about 3km to go), I didn’t quite have it. My legs were pretty fried by the last rolling kilometer (the must be one of the first races on record where my arms held up better than my legs), and I had to stride a false flat with 150m to go, but despite that I found some time in the last km and picked up my first SuperTour win since (gulp) 2006. So all in all I was quite pleased with yesterday.
I went into today’s race thinking I would cruise with the leaders and try to finish (the last 5km was a lap of yesterday’s race course) hard. It didn’t quite pan out. Glenn pushed the pace from about a km in, and put me into a bad place early. I dug pretty hard to hang on, and could not handle the effort. I spent from 4 to 10km pretty much in survival mode. Considering that most of those 6km were climbing to the high point of the course, it wasn’t a good place to be in survival mode. By the time I recovered after some long descents, I was able to hold even with most of the gaps that had opened up, but I wasn’t closing them down. I found a little life for the finish (I won the race for 7th after fighting hard with Michael Brothers for the last 5km), but I didn’t have enough to close down the guys who were dangling there and asking to be caught.
All in all it’s been a good weekend and a good trip. It’s great to be back on the road again, and the last three races have been solid. Yesterday was a much needed boost after the first half of this year, and today was fine – just not what I was looking for. Hat’s off to Tad and Glenn for some impressive skiing today. Things are starting to fall into place…
Commenting is closed for this article.