Nordic Week in Sun Valley --Part 2 (Off to the Races)

As part of the “Nordic Week,” Sun Valley put on an exhibition skate sprint relay Thursday evening right in the town of Ketchum. Not realizing that the race was a mixed relay, i.e. a male and female partnership, I convinced my friend Leif Bergstrom to come up from Salt Lake a day early to race with me. As it turned out, he and I were each paired up with a couple of fast local junior racers.

The course was a very quick 30 second loop that we were to complete twice after each tag off. The women started first and the rest of the race was a blur. I remember feeling pretty strong for my first leg, and then the altitude started to catch up with me, and I spent the rest of the race mostly gasping for breath with burning legs. But it was still great fun, and drew some elite ski racers, and a decent crowd.

Mid-Sprint

After those harder efforts in the relay Thursday evening, I opted for an easy ski Friday morning on the final few kilometers of the Boulder Mountain Tour race course. The BMT begins at Galena Lodge and follows the Harriman trail for 34 Kilometers back toward Ketchum. Even though the trail is sprinkled with rolling hills, it ultimately finishes 1,000 feet lower than it starts, so it’s a fast race. I’ve always thought that despite the net downhill, the altitude (7,000 feet at the start) makes the elevation loss difficult to notice. Also, two of the significant climbs in the race come in the first few kilometers--a nice slap in the face.

After a relaxed ski it was time to get to work on wax. As a thank you for being such great hosts all week, I told Justin and Laurel that I’d do my best to make their skis fast for the race. The tricky part was the threat of new snow and warming temperatures over night. An added unknown was the chance of rain (rain!) during the race the next day. Thank god it wasn’t a classic race. But indeed, after I’d prepped most of our skis for the old snow that we’d been skiing on all week, we woke up to precipitation somewhere between rain and snow and approximately 29 degrees. Since I hadn’t put structure on any of the skis yet, this wasn’t a huge problem. I made a change to the top coats (going with Vauhti Mid) and added a Swix broken V structure. Our skis ended up somewhere in the mediocre to good range.

I don’t remember too much of my day prior to the start of the race. For BMT, racers park in Ketchum and take busses up to the start at Galena. With so much fiddling around with skis at the start I didn’t get much of a warm up in, just nervously switched from one pair to another, skiing for about three minutes at a time. By the time I had to line up to start I could tell that I’d be on less than ideal wax, and there was nothing I could do. I lost time on the first downhill, and went much too hard to catch back up on the following climb. Skiers started passing me, and I started to imagine that I was in for a long, slow day.

After the first kilometer the course crosses the highway, joining up with the Harriman trail on which it remains for the duration of the race, and to my great surprise, after the road crossing, my skis improved—or rather, the snow changed. I got the feeling, though it was difficult to tell for sure, that there was more moisture in the air, and the snow. Perhaps the slight elevation loss was all my wax and structure needed.

I fought hard for several kilometers to catch a group of skiers that included my friends Matt Briggs and Wyatt Fereday, both of whom I’d raced against while they attended Colby College in Maine, and I University of New Hampshire. It was basically all I could do to catch back up, but I knew this was a match I’d have to burn, for skiing alone, trending downhill, for 32 kilometers would have meant the inevitability of getting caught by a larger chasing pack of racers. Boulder Mountain Tour is one of the few races where drafting is critical, as the average speed is somewhere around 16mph, or faster.

After making contact with the group ahead--now five of us--there was still another climb before I’d get a chance to recover from the effort. Again I had to go deep into my reserves and just keep myself focused on the skis in front of me to hang on. Finally, over the top of the hill, I hunched over into a tuck gasping for air, but at that point knew I’d be safe. My breathing gradually returned to almost normal, my eyesight cleared, and my dizziness abated. I began to make out a couple of skiers ahead of our five-man train. Then to my horror I looked behind and caught a glimpse of a massive pack of skiers, chasing us down.

(Our chase group--your correspondent in 4th position)

At that point my bicycle racing instinct kicked in. I went to the front of our group, skied hard for about half a minute and swung off to the right. Now these four guys were my companions. As I motioned for them to ski past me I said, “keep rotating and keep the pulls short,” determined to catch the two ahead, and not get caught by the hundreds behind.

About half way through the BMT skiers pass the prairie creek trailhead, where I’d parked earlier in the week for my epic day. There’s one more climb just after prairie creek, and after that it’s about twenty kilometers of rolling downhill and flat to the finish. It seemed that Mr. Matt Briggs wanted to test our legs and possibly try to force some separation, knowing this might be the last opportunity to do so. Fearing a 5-man sprint for the finish, Matt went to the front and started to turn over a mean tempo up the climb. Because of the gradual grade I had trouble finding my rhythm and had to keep switching between V1 and V2 strides, never really trusting either technique. As we continued up the climb it became obvious that we were all more or less evenly matched, and tired.

As we crested the hill, still all together, I realized that we would likely reach the finish as a group, and that we’d need to continue working together to stay ahead of the chasing pack. So we traded pulls all the way into the final narrow section into the finish. As the kilometers ticked by I started to feel leg cramps coming on, and the idea that I’d be able to out-sprint the others in my cohort began to seem unlikely. And indeed, when the finish line came into view, and the five of us gave it our all, my legs felt disconnected from the rest of my body. I cruised over the line in 14^th place, a little disappointed to be so close to a top 10, but overall satisfied with a very hard effort and a solid week of quality training.

My Gear for Boulder Mountain Tour: 

Skis: Fischer Speedmax Skate Plus (191cm, flex 89, for race weight of ~70.5kg)

Boots: Alpina ESK 2.0

Poles: KV+ Tornado Plus Clip