First Carnival!

Well, it’s been a long time since the first blog post where I introduced myself. Hard to believe that it was only several months ago. Since then, we have been through the trials of testing week, the horrors of 6:30 AM practice, and the huge volume of Thanksgiving camp. Now, although these were all hard, they don’t fully capture the hardest part of being a collegiate ski racer. See, the hardest part of being a ski racer is not the time trials or races that we write about, but simply finding the motivation to get out the door every day and have the consistency to put in the hours. It was all the workouts that we didn’t write about that got us to today.

And what was today?! THE FIRST CARNIVAL! That’s right, we all made it through the trials of training to arrive at the doorstep of the fast and fun (albeit a little crazy) 6 weeks that we call carnival season. SLU had the honor of hosting the first carnival. We opened with a classic sprint today and will follow that up with a skate 5/10K tomorrow. Some of us will stick around for a Mid-A JNQ classic 10k on Sunday. It’s been a lot of racing for some of us in the past few weeks, but the excitement of racing our first college carnivals on our home course with plenty of cheering friends and parents has gotten us through. In fact, I would say we haven’t just made it through, but excelled and had a blast.

We had a strong showing today in the classic sprint, though many are feeling as if their best effort will come tomorrow in the skate distance race. So, stay tuned. For now though, here is a recap of the great stuff that was happening on course at Mt. Van Hoevenberg today.

The course at Van Ho was the real surprise today. We arrived early to ski and found out that we did not have to go up quite so much of Main St. (the big climb) as we thought. This meant that there were lots of hard decisions about to double pole on skate skis or stride on classic. In the end all our guys (and most that I saw on course) decided to double pole, and the women were a mixed bag. Fortunately for the women, both striding and double poling seemed to be competitive choices.

Once we all figured out what skis we were using and the coaches finished their amazing waxing, balancing having to prep both skate and classic skis, we got to racing! The women went first and everyone seemed to have a great time in the sunshine, though as always there were mixed reactions in terms of results. Having fun (and looking pro with Saints face tattoos) is what matters though, and I think that mission was accomplished! The boys followed it up with some strong double poling and good fun (minus the face tats, though they looked pro as well).

Lucy ‘20 made her first college sprint heats and was very excited to get the chance to race some speedy girls. She went off in the first quarterfinal to finish 4th. Although she didn’t quite have the speed and strength to move on (Fun fact-double poling with your arms actually hurts your quads), she had a great time and was excited to get the chance to race such accomplished skiers.

We all stuck around to soak up the sun, eat some great food made by our wonderful parents, and cheer for friends on other teams. We ended the day with a full team photo that is sure to make it’s way to the blog at some point. Many thought that it was the hardest and most painful part of the day to stare into the sun and not squint… It’s tougher than it sounds.

Thank you all for your continued support; we wouldn’t have made it to the start line without you. Stick around for more news of tomorrow’s race and all the carnivals yet to come!

-Lucy '20

(All photos seen in this blog taken by Dana)

Women’s Results

Men’s Results

MSA/ EC #2!

We've been up to a lot lately and it's been a whirlwind of fun and surprises! We had a nice long break and were at Gore Mtn, MSA, and Quarry Road in Waterville!

Winter break was winding down and Jackie, Lucy, Dani, Waters, Matt, and Kate all went to Gore Mtn to race in two NYSSRA JNQ races. They all did really well!

Day 1: Results

Day 2: Results 

L-R: Jackie'20, Lucy'20, and Matt'19 with medals and prizes

YAY, Good Job! Kate, Waters and Dani in the back, photo bomb the picture

The rest of us were making our way to Mont- Sainte- Anne in Quebec, Canada, where we would all end up that evening of Sunday the 8th. 

(I do have to mention that we had to say goodbye to Ruben Castren for the spring semester because he is abroad right now in Kenya.  He would've had a hell of a season, but we wish him the greatest adventure out there and hopefully he'll send us a blog post sometime during the season!)

The girls team and the coaches were lodging in the base in temporary housing for the first night because there weren't enough houses available yet due to some kind of big event. I was so excited because I got to reunite with India Harvey, back from Prague! I had been waiting for so long to see her! It's nice having her finally back with the team and I think she thinks so too.

We all went over to the guys house and made spaghetti and meatballs.  On Monday, we endured the negative degree weather and went skiing in the morning.  MSA has beautiful snow, and lots of it! It was amazing! It was cold, squeaky snow and a little slow but that didn't stop us. We ended up going back to the guys house for lunch and hanging around until about 3:30 to move into our other houses next door.  It took them awhile to clean because the people before us were partying it up and had done some damage. 

The skiing all week was spectacular and awesome! It rained twice, but by the time we got to the venue, it was snowing.  We did a time trial on Wednesday, for those who didn't race that previous weekend. It was a hard 5k skate race; the snow was so slow, it wasn't easy to push forward.  Dana might have tried passing Emily and made her fall.. sorry. ETown even made the start surprising by having us do laps around the terrain park until he had decided which person was going to lead out of the start; the start was a mystery for awhile. Here are the results:

Men

Calvin 17:18

Dustin 18:04

Blaine 18:25

Ryan 20:34

Women 

Dana 21:24

Madi 21:56

Jordan 23:05

Emily 23:12 

India 27:30

It was a good race to 'shake out the cobwebs' from winter break to get back in racing mode! We stayed at MSA for a total of 6 days. 

Beautiful conditions at MSA

SO glorious!

Dani, Jordan and India practicing downhill corners

Team getting prepared to practice some herringbone and downhill turns! 

Downhill to the lodge at MSA

We had a lot of fun: bonding, getting back in the race mindset and doing a lot of skiing.  Alum Erin Perryman came back to help make meals for us hungry skiers and it was so wonderful! She made us lasagna, burritos, soups, salads, and spaghetti; it was so nice not having to do a ton of meal prep work, leaving us with ample free time to relax. We even did a yankee swap which was very funny and actually quite successful. These were some of the gifts:

Mini maple syrup

Chocolate

Honey spoons

Bubble bath soap in mini champagne bottles (Matt got these)

A mini sled

A snowball scoop

A piñata filled with candy (Dana got to hit it with a broom hanging from a ski pole inside the living room!)

Honey and spandex boxer shorts with hotdogs on them (look for Ryan sporting these)

Vanilla sandwich cookies

Princess Toiletry Set

Marshmallow pop and fake teeth

A McDonalds happy meal

Dustin's book (wrapped by one of the boys and picked by Dustin..funny that!)

We left Friday morning and journeyed to Quarry Road in Waterville, Maine. (My home state!) It was an uneventful ride despite the fact that Dana had to go pee soooo bad that we had to stop on the side of the road in Canada... 

We arrived at Quarry road around 2pm-ish and it was extremely windy.  We skate skied for about an hour and discovered the snow was very icy and the sprint course was going to be tricky. The captains took the transit to the Best Western in Augusta, where we settled into our rooms and headed out for dinner at the Olive Garden.

Saturday was a longg day. Girls woke up at 6:30am and we didn't get back to our hotel until 6pm. However, it was an exciting and astonishing day. We had one person qualify in each kind of heat. Lucy and Dustin qualified in opens and Matt and Dani qualified in the junior heats! They all put up a good fight, as the sun started to go down and the temperature started dropping. It was a frigid day; we often kept popping back in the van and then stepping again outside as our teammates got back on the line for their heats. We stayed for awards and then headed out on our way back to the hotel, for BIG G's for dinner, where we got massive sandwiches and fries.  We all slept really well that night.

Women Sprint Results

Men Sprint Results

The results were funky all weekend and were changing every second, which was frustrating for all of us. The results say Lucy ended up in 2nd, but she was still 3rd in the qualifier. However, the qualifier times were messed up which made the heats all messed up, so we will take the results with a grain of salt.

Waters and Kate in our new puffy jackets!

Unfortunately, Waters took a crash and went off into the woods, head first into a tree. We are thankful she is alright!  She made us all a little worried since she was taken to the medical tent and people were rushing up the hill to help her. She got a little shaken up and scratched, but other than that she is still alive! However, we learned today she has a concussion.

Waters snapchat photo after she fell during the skate sprint at Colby (notice scratches on chin, nose, fat lip) Way to stay tough, Waters!

Lucy Hoch. third in the Skate Sprint!!! WAHOO

The sun setting as heats were wrapping up

Sunday was much warmer and again quite sunny! The women's mass start 10k classic started at 11am and the men's mass start 15k started at 1pm.  The women's mass start was a little bit of a catastrophe as people started going down pretty quickly. I don't think there was one person on our team that didn't fall on both the men and women's sides of the team on Sunday.  It was yet again, very fast and icy snow on difficult downhill switchbacks. However, we still had a decent showing all around.

Women Results

Men Results

We hurried out of Maine and drove a grueling 8 hours home. We didn't get in to Canton until after 11pm and we unloaded the trailer right then and there. Unfortunately ETown was in the truck by himself and none of us knew he was feeling very sick. He realized he got food poisoning, making the trip feel just a little longer. Waters and I didn't get to bed until 12:30am; we were so tired we forgot what our room code was... Luckily, classes didn't start until today (Wednesday)- lots of time to rest back up! 

Waters cruising up the last hill in the 10k classic race

Ryan moving up in the 15k classic 

Men's start of the 15k classic

Dustin hammering to catch a pack to finish in 26th!

Also, check out flyingpointroad for more photos from Quarry Road!
Here's a quality photo of Dana from the site:

It was a successful week and weekend. We are looking forward to our first carnival in which we are hosting at Mt. Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid, NY this weekend Friday- Saturday! We hope to see you and all of your friends there!!  Some of us will be there Sunday for another NY JN qualifier race.

Thanks again for all of your support and taking the time to read all of this!

See you on the trails,

Dana and SLUSKI