Rocky Mountain Racing

Day after day, just the same.  Cold temperatures, easy waxing, consistent track conditions from first skier to last, and sunshine - lots of it.  We've got race two of three behind us now, with one more national championship race coming up tomorrow - 20km for women, 30km for men, 5km for junior women and 10km for junior men - all classic mass start.  The skiers went for an easy hour of skiing today to loosen up from yesterday and prepare for tomorrow, while the coaches did a little more ski testing for both glide and kick.  We've had good skis all week so far, but the waxing is easy enough that our own waxing decisions have probably been pretty similar or identical to the other wax technicians out there this week.

Yesterday, we were a little (a lot) more in our element than we were in the sprint race on Wednesday, and our results showed it.  Marine was thirteenth overall and she was the second RMISA college woman, while Lukas was 24th overall and the fifth best RMISA college skier.  We've been at altitude for about five days.  This is the toughest period of adaptation to altitude, in my opinion, and some of our skiers felt pretty heavy in the legs.  Not a surprise.  But we also had some really encouraging results, and we're feeling optimistic about the coming college racing season.  You can find results at www.summittiming.com

Erik Bjornsen stopped by this afternoon to join some of our team for an easy 40-minute run.  Erik was a member of the UAA Ski Team in 2011 before moving on to the US Ski Team, and he won yesterday's race - his first ever national championship victory.

In case you were wondering, dinners here are amazing.  Every night, a different athlete head chef and his/her sous-chefs create the best food I've eaten in a long time.  Every afternoon I wonder what kind of epicurean delight awaits at the evening's dinner table.  It's going to make me miss this team next week when they continue their journey around the rocky mountains for more racing and I'm back home in Alaska with my peanut butter sandwiches.

After a sunny, restful day today, we'll get the skis prepared tonight and we'll be ready for another go tomorrow. These mass-start races are exciting and I'm looking forward to screaming my lungs out at our skiers from the sidelines - while getting a suntan.

Team stretching the night before each race.

Outdoor ski waxing at our house.

Marine in action

Lucky

Karina and Marine

Training on tomorrow's race course. That's the ski stadium in the background, and Heber Valley.

All of us

Come Together...

For the past 24 hours, my job as "assistant to the assistant coach" has largely been comprised of airport taxi-driving duties.  I drove down to the city last night to pick up Cara and again this afternoon to pick up Karina.  Cara had an uneventful trip down from her home in Smithers, British Columbia, but Karina's trip didn't go so well.  Karina was actually supposed to show up here last night, but the fine folks at the US Customs and Immigration desk in Chicago had different ideas.  After more than three hours of dealing with their understaffed staff and then dealing with underinformed airline staff, she missed her connecting flight to Utah, had to stay overnight in Chicago and ended up stretching her 18 hour trip to 34 hours. But they're both here now and we're finally a complete team!

At least Karina's trip went better than that of Reini Neuhauser, an alpine skier who skied for us a few years back.  Reini flew back to Alaska from Austria a few years ago, was stopped by US Customs, interrogated overnight (with the bright lights, good cop/bad cop routine, the threats, and all that other crazy stuff you see on TV), then thrown in jail for a couple days and finally was told to buy himself a plane ticket back home to Austria and try again. (By the way, Reini had done nothing wrong.)  Alaska's congressional delegation got involved with an investigation into the incident, and I guess everything worked out, because Reini came back, got married, lives in Fairbanks and owns a fishing guide company. So at least Karina can be happy that she didn't end up like Reini!

Tomorrow we ski our first "college-style" race here in Utah.  It's a 10k for the women, who ski at 10AM, and then a 15k for the men at noon.  You can probably get start lists and results, etc at http://summittiming.com/races/race_results.php

Ready, Set, Sprint!

Day 1 of US Nationals is in the books.  The top 30 men and top 30 women advanced out of the qualification round to the heats, and today we had one qualifier:  Pati Sprecher.  Pati qualified eleventh and skied a smart, strong quarterfinal round - the first quarterfinal of the day - coming off the big downhill and into the final 200 meters on Sadie Bjornsen's heels in second place. But the field really came together dramatically as they transitioned around a turn and into the finish straightaway, and Pati got edged out of second and into third.  The top two advanced from each quarterfinal to the semis, along with two "lucky losers".  So we had to wait through all the quarterfinal rounds to see if Pati would advance to the semis, but it was not to be. 

Tomorrow is a rest day, and then we have individual-start skate races on Friday. Stay tuned. 

Now look at these pictures:

 

Maya

Sarah

Marine

 

My favorite picture of the day for SO many reasons:  Coach Andrew and Lucky

 

Lunch Break: Andrew, Tor, Galen, Davis

 

Camp UAA

Andrew making his way to the high point of the course to cheer for Pati in the quarterfinal

Pati's cheerleaders: Tor, Viktor, Davis, Lucky, and Erin from APU

Pati is #11

Men's Final

 

Adam, Andrew, Tor

 

Little House on the Prairie

Today was spent preparing for tomorrow's sprint race.  The coaches spent several hours testing skis while the athletes tested their own skis and got comfortable with the sprint course.  It's a pretty straightforward course - the first half is uphill and the second half is downhill.  Sprint racing is not part of the NCAA race format; there are no sprint races at our NCAA national championships or at any other college races.  So our athletes have nothing to lose tomorrow.  They can just go out there and blast away and see what happens.  But it will be a valuable day for us nonetheless.  Even though the altitude is not that high, it is close to the FIS altitude limit and three minutes of hard skiing at this altitude will give our skiers with less altitude experience a little taste of thinner air.  And after a short holiday break and long travel logistics, it will provide a hard effort which can reintroduce the body to ski racing again.  I got a little too busy to bring the camera to the Soldier Hollow today, but here are a few more pictures of our (big) little house on the Utah prairie.

Our House

Our View

Our UAA Team Horses

Our Swimming Pool

Our Athletes

Holiday Road

The team is regrouped again after several weeks apart for the holidays.  We're all here in Utah now for US Nationals, except Karina and Cara who will join us in a couple days. Our accomodations for the week are an enormous house in Heber.  There's plenty of room for all of us, and plenty of extra bedrooms in case Coach Andrew spontaneously decides to recruit a bunch of additional athletes this week. Most of the team flew overnight from Alaska, arriving in Utah in early morning, and they report very good skiing here at Soldier Hollow.  The coaches, after dropping off the skiers, drove back down the hill to Salt Lake City to buy $1,400 of groceries at Costco and pick up a couple of team members on a later flight. Lasse directed his sous chefs in preparing a huge spaghetti dinner for the rest of us, while the coaches prepared the team's test ski fleet for tomorrow's testing session. Tonight is New Year's Eve, but considering that we spent all of last night on an airplane, we will be going to bed early tonight and catching up on sleep instead of going out carousing. Tomorrow is a day for ski testing and pre-race preparation, and then our first race is on Wednesday - a classic sprint race.

Western Utah

Dinner preparation in our kitchen

Viktor bought Lego cars for the team.  The skis were neglected while Lukas and Viktor focused on another kind of racing.

Sundance

Lasse, Lukas, Marine, Galen and Maya have already traveled to Utah a few days ahead of the team for a little extra preparation for the US Nationals next week.  Yesterday, they went to visit Robert Redford at his Sundance Resort. Apparently, Redford wasn't available to go skiing with them, so they went without him.  But they reported excellent skiing on some really nice ski trails.

Scattered to the four winds

 

The UAA Ski Team members are spread around the western / northern hemispheres this week, before gathering up again next week for the real start of the college racing season in Utah.

Karina went home to Norway for Christmas, while Marine went to France and Cara went to British Columbia.  Lukas, Lasse, and Patricia spent the holiday break training and racing in Anchorage, but the two L's have gone to Utah early for a few extra days of on-site race preparation for US Nationals next week. Davis, John, Galen, Sarah, Brandon and Maya were home in Alaska for the holidays.  Viktor's girlfriend Amelia came to visit from Sweden, and though Viktor is generally a happy guy, I haven't seen him smiling as much as last Saturday when Amelia was in town. Coaches Andrew and Tor spent the holidays with their families - one of the last chances they'll get this winter to spend a solid week of quality time with their families for a while, as the racing / travel season will be hectic from now until late March.

This weekend, the team gathers together again in Utah for the US national championships at Soldier Hollow.  We have skiers coming in from around the world, but by Sunday night we should all be under one roof again.

Last week, we had two fairly big races in Anchorage: races 1 and 2 of the Besh Cup series, which serves as qualifier races for junior skiers hoping to compete at the US junior national championships.  Results can be found here:  http://www.crosscountryalaska.org/2006/10/11/besh-cup-results-2/

Here are a couple pictures of Davis in the second Besh Cup race, in Chugiak:

And as for me, I decided to spend Christmas week in the southern California desert, riding my bike in the sunshine.  Tomorrow I'll travel back to Anchorage where I'll have just a few hours to drop off my bike, grab my ski bag, and fly back south to Utah where I'll meet the team for a week of racing at US Nationals.

Darkest Day of the Year

 

It only gets lighter starting now...

Tomorrow is the first race in the Besh Cup series - a classic sprint race. That's followed by a distance skate race on Sunday. It's going to be a cold weekend. We went out for training today on tomorrow's Kincaid Park sprint course, and it was not warm. Not one little bit.

Here are a few pictures from today's training and from a flight I took yesterday over Prince William Sound.

 

(None of the people in the foreground of this photo are members of the UAA Ski Team)

 

Mt. Marcus Baker in the background - highest mountain in the Chugach Range.



That's Eagle Glacier and the Eagle Glacier Nordic Ski Training Center in the foreground.  If you know where to look, you can see the bunkhouse in this picture.

 

The front range of the Chugach and the Anchorage hillside.

And one more thing:  here's a newspaper article about the new trail in Girdwood that we've been training on a lot lately: http://www.adn.com/2012/12/20/2731042/new-nordic-ski-trail-comes-to.html and here's a video about the same trail.  Check it out:  http://www.adn.com/2012/12/20/2731010/video-new-nordic-ski-trail-opens.html#storylink=botprev



Anchorage Cup Team Sprint

The UAA Ski Team raced in today's Anchorage Cup Team Sprint race.  The Anchorage Cup is the local ski club's citizen race series.  Racers in these events range all the way from skiers with Olympic and World Cup experience to skiers who have never been in a ski race before.  For us, it was a good training opportunity; most of our skiers raced in two separate events: a men's or women's team and a mixed team.  It gave them a chance to race two races with two 1.2-kilometer legs.  This made for four hard intervals in a race environment.  And no matter how hard you do intervals, there's nothing quite as hard as actually racing.  I think all three of us coaches found that out the hard way today!

Start of the Women's Team Sprint

Pati leading at the end of leg 1

Sarah

Happy Trails

It makes me happy when I'm driving out of the parking lot after going skiing at Kincaid Park and all the new snow that fell during the workout poofs up over the hood of my car and onto my windshield.

The UAA Ski Team was a happy ski team today.

 

Galen again...

Like everyone, I like to start each day with a big bowl of Grape Nuts and a review of Ski Racing Magazine for all the best skiing news. So naturally I wasn't surprised this morning when I came across this:

 

www.skiracing.com

Girdwood Time Trial

The team is nearing the end of another "block" of high-intensity training.  Today, we had a skiathlon time trial on the trail that has the best conditions currently - the new Girdwood 5km trail.  It snowed overnight but the Girdwood Ski Club volunteers had the entire trail groomed before we even arrived there this morning.  Thank you Girdwood Nordic Ski Club!

There's video available at youtube.com.  You can search for "adamverrier2" and you'll find all the UAA ski team videos there on the "adamverrier2 channel", including today's videos, in chronological order. This allows the skiers to analyze their own technique, with or without the coaches' input.



At the start/finish area.

Viktor, Lukas, and Lasse, during the classic portion.

Sarah Freistone

For tomorrow, it's a sprint relay on the new man-made loop at Kincaid Park!

Galen of the Mountain

I hope you haven't been scrambling to your computer every hour, looking for updates on this blog, because I haven't been very forthcoming with the updates lately for a couple of reasons. For one thing, nothing's really changed around here lately.  It's still clear and cold, day after day.  They're still making snow at Kincaid and the fake-snow loop that we can ski on gradually gets longer and longer.  Furthermore, my work schedule has had me on a whirlwind tour of the islands lately (Unalaska and Kodiak) and I haven't had a chance to get together with the team much. I did get to spend a few hours in town on Wednesday morning between flights - I spent that time wisely - at a UAA Ski Team workout at Kincaid Park. I was just in town long enough to see Lasse and Viktor go head-to-head at the end of the workout in a double-pole sprint showdown.  In the opinion of the entire coaching staff they both lost - disqualified for rules violations.

Tomorrow evening, everything might change.  The weather is forecast to warm up and bring snow - we're all hoping.  But as I flew in from Kodiak this evening over Kincaid Park, it looked like they were blasting out the fake snow from the snow guns all over the stadium.  So whether we get snow or not, we are now beginning to have pretty good snow coverage at Kincaid, and that will only make our training conditions better day by day.

An old photo found its way into my hands earlier this week - a photo of myself with an eager little squirt, fired up for some ski racing in Fairbanks ten years ago.  He's a lot taller and faster than I am now and wearing green and gold ski suits instead of blue and red ones, but he still likes his ski racing!

 

So I thought it was appropriate to go out to the garage and snap a picture of the poster that's over my wax bench.  Galen gave it to me when he was eleven years old and the advocate and "poster child" for Denali KidCare. If you can't read the fine print under the photo, it says Galen is the youngest person ever to climb North America's highest mountain.  And if you're wondering what Galen's referring to in his "ps - na na" message, you'll have to ask him yourself.