Sovereign Lakes - December Racing
· Dec 15, 09:16 PM
When I think about it this way, I’m going to have three meaningful race starts in all of December. They all came in a 7 day period on the same set of trails. That’s maybe not the best preparation for US Nationals, but there aren’t a lot of other options for high level competition in North America right now. I suppose I could go to Canmore for the Alberta Cups on Wednesday (a lot of the fast Canadians live there, so there might be some good racing), but I went home, just like every other American. Time to prepare for Nationals without any other racing getting in the way. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s talk about Silver Star and the races at Sovereign Lakes.
First, to clear up any confusion. Sovereign Lakes and Silver Star have a linked trail system, but are separate resorts. Silver Star has all the pastel colored houses, the snowy main street, the coffee shops, etc. Sovereign has a Lodge and some pretty tough World Cup trails. After last week, let’s just say I know the WC 7.5 (and the contained 5 and 4 km loops) quite well. I raced a 15k skate last Sunday, a 20k mass start skate on Thursday and a 15k classic Saturday night. They were all variations of the same course. I know the first two climbs very, very well right now.
The whole trip (including West Yellowstone) was pretty frustrating on the health/training front. I picked up a nasty head cold about Day 3 in West and didn’t really kick it for about 2.5 weeks. A lot of that was probably due to putting in a couple race starts when I thought it was on the way out, only to have it rear back up for another couple of days. Frustrating for sure, and I never really got any real training in, as I spent most of the not racing time trying to ski just enough to clear my body out without getting tired. Ah well, I’m much healthier now, so I have a few weeks of good training to look forward to.
The 15 was a decent race for me. I finished two minutes out, but skied the last 4k behind Southam after he caught me from a minute down. It was really good for my confidence to catch that ride and hang on to the end, and it reminded me that going fast hurts. Really hurts. It’s easy to race easy, but it doesn’t look so good on the results sheet. It was nice for me to see that I could ski pretty fast, even if I couldn’t really make the speed on my own. I spent the first 11k of the race knowing that I wasn’t going quite fast enough most everywhere, but I wasn’t quite able to figure out what to do to fix it. The answer was following James, it was just too bad I had to give away so much time to be able to do it.
The mass start was by far my best race of the week. I’d go so far as to say it was my best race since probably the skate race at US Nationals last winter. I was never a threat to do anything at the front, but I just hung around at the back of the lead pack as long as I could. I finally got popped off after 12.5k, but was able to ski with and then away from a group of four by following Kuzzy. This was pretty much the same deal as Sunday. I was capable of going pretty fast, but couldn’t set the pace. I had to follow others. The race gears are not there yet. After I finished I was pretty pleased though. If that’s a performance that’s reflective of my fitness without being too sharp (coming off sickness without a true top end) then there’s reason for hope for Anchorage. In fact, I was hopeful for Saturday.
But, Saturday didn’t really go my way. In fact, about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It was freezing cold, so the race organizers moved the start up from 7 to 5 PM so they wouldn’t have to cancel. Even so, there was a lot of concern that temperatures would drop too fast and we wouldn’t be able to race. I’ll keep this short and just summarize what I didn’t do right. I got too caught up in the possibility of not racing and didn’t really get a warm up in. I missed my start (first time ever, probably lost 20 seconds cause of that). I skied all sorts of frantic for the first lap (trying to make up for lost time no doubt). And then it was my first day of actually going hard on classic skis. It all added up to quite a poor showing, but I came away from it with a few things. First, I need to approach every race like it’s going to happen and be prepared for it. Second, I need to get some time going fast on classic skis so that I can be relaxed and quick. My inability to do this was pretty obvious in the falling apart track, where working harder didn’t make me go faster. I ended up skiing relaxed and slow for most of the race. Third, well, it’s pretty easy to fix the missed start problem. I just won’t let that happen again.
All told it was a good trip. I’m feeling much better and more optimistic about the rest of the winter now than I was following West. We have snow and skiing in Bend. Time for some hard training and getting ready for Nationals.
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