Sunday, January 27, 2019

UNH Rundown - and Running from Winter Storm Harper


Last weekend was the UNH Carnival in Jackson, NH. The race venue has a reputation for being really, really windy, and the forecast promised wind chill in the single digits. Luckily for us, it wasn’t nearly that windy, and we even saw the sun a few times!

Friday was the classic 15/20k mass start, and the first college mass start for our freshmen. On the men’s side, Brian got his first classic top-30 with a 27th place finish, and Matt Y. and Nathaniel rounded out the scoring 3.

The women’s race was fortunate(?) enough to have APU skier Rosie Frankowski join us. For the entire first lap, I could only think one thing: This is going out a lot faster than I planned on… It turned out that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, but we got through it. Both Steph and Jordan had their best EISA finishes ever, with Steph getting her first top-50 and Jordan just behind her!

The next day, we had a skate sprint on tap. We knew we were under a time crunch – the goal is usually just to ski as fast as possible, but due to Winter Storm Harper rolling east, the goal Saturday was to ski as fast as possible, and then to get on the road as fast as possible. We had two people qualify for heats - Lucy qualified in 22nd, and Brian qualified in 25th. The rest of us packed up as best as we could, and then headed out to cheer. Lucy finished the day in 24th, and Brian ended up in 19th, his first top-20! Steph and Graham both finished 40th in the qualifier for their best finishes ever too!

It started snowing an hour or so into our drive back, but we made it back to SLU safely.

-Jackie

Sorry for the lack of photos! We were racing to get everything packed up, and the stadium is very cold - Lucy

No comments: