Craftsbury EC Sprint

Matt, Blaine, Morgan and I are currently holed-up in our Morrisville hotel room as we wait out a wild overnight ice storm that left the entire town (state?) without power until a few hours ago. The second race of the Craftsbury Eastern Cups, today's classic mass start, has been cancelled, so with time to kill I think this would be a good time to get in a recap of yesterday's action.

Our team highlights were having two athletes racing in the heats. Erin Perryman qualified an awesome 10th overall, and raced to 4th in her heat. She ended up 16th, tying her best EC result from last year in a far more competitive field and with far better points. As Erin continues to qualify more and more it's easy to see her comfort level increase in head-to-head heats. Won't be long till she is in the final round of one of these things fighting for a podium.

Erin just missed out on getting third in her heat and a potential Lucky-Loser spot in the Semis. Still a great start to the season for her!

Kyle also qualified for the Jr men's heats. For someone who admittedly is not much of a sprinter, this was a really good sign of a season of great training, especially in the strength and technique department. Kyle didn't get a fast enough start in his first heat, but tried to move up continually. He learned from that experience and, in his next heat, started out much faster and stayed near the front the whole time for 10th in the Jr race. 

Chumley had a solid qualifier and picked up some good points toward JN qualification, just 2 sec out of the Jr heats

Blaine also had a solid qualifier, narrowly missing out on the Jr heats by less than a second despite having a sickly fever a day prior and being a questionable for starting at all. 

In addition to the current team, I also got to be a wax tech for SLU alum, former teammate and friend Eric Wolcott (SLU class of 2010), who now skis for the professional CXC team. Eric won the men's qualification round by a whopping four seconds. He then easily won his quarter and semi-final heats. He took the lead in the final with 300 meters to go, but got a bit bogged down on the final climb and lost some ground to his competitors. Despite not taking the win in the heats, it was cool to help be a part of a really solid day for him. Though it was probably very overboard, I like to think my crazy amount of wax testing and early-mornings in the SLUHaul the past few days gave us a nice edge with fast boards. All the SLU skis seemed to be running quite fast!

SLU Alum Eric Wolcott easily taking the W in his quarterfinal heat (check out the huge new lodge building construction!)

We will reconvene at Craftsbury later today after we confirm that the roads are safe. From there the team will go it's separate ways for Winter Break before we meet up again in Lake Placid. Keep your fingers crossed that some more snow returns to the area!