Preseason Has Ended

There's a lot of anticipation, nervousness and trepidation going into any new competition season. Especially in cross-country skiing where "...the skier is made during the summer..." and you try to formulate the right plan in the spring for a summer's worth of the right proportions of hard training, easy training, recovery, and all the other elements that you hope will produce a couple months' worth of really high-end performances. But you never really know how it worked out until you look back at it at the end of the season, in hindsight. 

At Kincaid Park. Before our three big snowstorms last week.

It's in November and December, though, that you start getting clues about different scenarios that might play out in the coming season in regards to your racing fitness and your potential for winning ski races. It's natural, even as the early-season results start to come in, to speculate about the meaning of those results, whether they're good, bad, or mediocre: "I'm skiing pretty slow and feeling heavy, but does that mean my summer training sucked, or does it just mean that it's going to take me six or eight races to get going, and then I'm going to be on fire?" Or, "I won the race, but does that mean my summer training made me a lot faster skier than I was last year, or am I going to be a 'Christmas Star' this year?  Or worse, a Thanksgiving Turkey? Or even worse, a Halloween Pumpkin!"

At the time of this writing, each of our athletes is in their own unique situation in regards to the results they've achieved in our early-season races of the past month, and each has their own mix of confidence and nervousness about what message their pre-season results might be telling them about the racing season to come. In my conversations with our skiers, the only through-line that connects all of them is the sense that the results thus far are less meaningful in and of themselves than for their use as predictors of what's going to happen between January and early March.

But now the pre-season has ended. We finished final exams last week and we raced the Besh Cup this past weekend at Kincaid Park. We've had some really extraordinary results lately. And we've also had some less-than-optimal showings. We can analyze these results and speculate about what they mean for the coming season. But the real racing season starts in a couple of weeks, at our first NCAA college races, in Michigan. It won't be long now before we can end the speculation about what our pre-season results are saying. We'll soon be able to get down to business with the real thing. Our flight south departs Anchorage Int'l on December 30.

Thanks to Freshman Carmen, who came out to the Besh Cup to cheer for Matt, Astrid, Tuva, Pacale, and the rest of us! This is Carmen's photo.