The C2C race is an annual race up the 5 miles of pavement leading up the back of Whiteface mountain, ending at a very real castle at the summit. At least, the outside is castle-like...the inside features a gift shop, cafeteria and even an elevator to the very top summit of the mountain.
We've had increasing numbers of participants in this race every year, and increasingly better results each year as well.
The Subaru caravan rolled out at 5:30am and we were warming up aroung 7 at the toll house. 3 minutes into the warmup Will managed to scrape the bottom plastic of his rollerski off on a frost heave, leaving the honeycomb core exposed. Each time Will applied weight to that ski, the shaft would bottom-out on the pavement with a painful grinding noise.
Will at the finish with his broken ski. This photo gives away the suspense, but the end-result was that Will completed the entire race on the busted shaft!
Though I tried to re-attach the base as best I could with some athletic tape (a pretty important thing you learn quickly as a ski coach: always have tape on hand) it was a hopeless situation.
Which leads to the race itself.
Erin and Taren took off first with the women's group. Erin skied a large portion of the race with Julia Kern and Elizabeth Izzo, before dropping back a little at the end. I think large portions of the women's field ended up skiing alone because there were far fewer women in attendance this year for whatever reason. Thanks to the staggered start format, the guys team managed to finish all within a few minutes of both Erin and Taren.
The fog rolled in only once racers reached the top. Here's Erin in the last 100m
Kyle "Gramps" Curry took the lead for the SLU men off the line, with coach Terko in hot pursuit. Eventually (you had to know it would happen) the pace was a little much for me, and I backed off to regain some composure. If nothing else, this gave me a great view of what was going on with much of our men's team.
About halfway up the hill I heard a familiar noise scrape-scrape-scraping its way up behind me: Will was moving fast taking off time from the leaders! He worked his way right up to Kyle's group and they skied together much of the race. I was also passed by first-year Calvin Swomley, whose smooth technique was easy to pace behind. We ended up skiing much of the race right near each other.
In the end Will continued picking off racers until he ended up 18th, the best finish of any SLU skier in this event's 7-year history. Gramps and Swomley were close behind in 20th and 21st.
2 great performances: Calvin (top) and Will (bottom)
First-year Blaine Ayotte and sophomore Morgan Holland were also across the line shortly thereafter...a really good showing by the whole team at this tough event.
The crew at the summit
Thanks to Marge and NYSEF for putting together such a logistically-challenging event! Results at the NYSEF Blog
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