Liberec U23s

Miscellaneous

Jan 25

Pepa and I travelled from Craftsbury to the Czech Republic last Wednesday and Thursday, the 16th and 17th. I am racing this week in the U23 World Championships and Pepa is one of the coaches for the event this year, which is being held in Liberec.

On Tuesday I raced in the U23 classic sprint, yesterday was the 10k skate, and tomorrow will be a 15k pursuit for the U23 women.

The sprint was a good way to start out the week. We had plenty of time in the days preceding the race to check out the course and get to know each aspect. The course featured three solid climbs, two quick descents, and a long double-pole finishing stretch. Since there’s been more time to manufacture snow, and more natural snow too, the loop was about 500m longer than the one used for the World Cup several weeks ago. While a few inches of new snow had fallen the previous day and night, the race day was overcast with no new snow, and the classic tracks were relatively firm and held up well during the qualifier.

While I didn’t quite qualify for the heats, with a 38th place performance, I was actually very happy with my race. My warm up may have been a little less than perfect, so I started out a bit too slowly (which is a reoccurring problem for me). It didn’t necessarily feel like I was going slow on the first uphill during the race, but in retrospect I can see that I was not quite ready to go. I think I got off balance and slipped a few times on the first two hills also, even though the skis were great (they were so good that I tested during my warm up and didn’t need any touch-ups at all). However, by the third and final uphill of the course, I felt great and I believe I was skiing with as much “snappy-ness” and intensity as I ever have.

Here are a few pictures of the sprint course, on a pre-race day.

First hill on the courses, photo from the stadium

The second hill on the sprint course, also on the skate courses

A long distance view of people climbing the last hill into the stadium

While 3.5 seconds out of 30th place isn’t close enough for a better last 50 meters or a better lunge to have made the difference, I still consider it tantalizingly close enough that I can reflect on where I could have made up those seconds. My sprinting is much better than it used to be, but qualifying is still a challenge, and I know I can continue to improve. I’m staying over here in Europe for about two more weeks beyond U23s, and in Estonia I’ll be racing two more sprints, so I’ll soon have an opportunity to test my qualifier speed again.

Yesterday, the 10k, was quite a nice race also. We woke up to it snowing, which wasn’t exactly expected. I crammed a Rudy Project visor into my bag for the day in case it kept snowing, and I ended up racing in the silly combination of visor AND yellow-lens glasses underneath. Silly, but effective. The visibility was so-so during the race even with appropriate eyewear, less from the falling snow than from the flat light that hinders depth perception. Luckily I didn’t have any major issues with not being able to see the course, as I knew it pretty well from previewing the day before.

As for the race itself… as it started out, I was worried, because I felt funny – weak, a little bit shaky even, and not very energetic while climbing the first few hills. Still, it wasn’t as if I could stop the race and ask to start it over or anything, so I put the funny feeling out of my mind and focused on skiing smoothly and using my naturally-long glide. A few hills in, I started to wake up and find more energy, and to be able to push myself into a faster pace.

Several of the coaches were out on two key spots of the course giving splits and cheering. It can be hard to process the numbers sometimes when you’re racing, but I was encouraged to find that they were giving me lower place-numbers each time I passed. When I look back at the results, I see that after a 20th place first lap, I moved to 16th by the end of the 2nd lap, then 14th by the end of the race. A good progression!

That’s it for now, but I have quite a few more interesting pictures of Liberec, beyond the ones below, that I’ll share in a future post. The 15k pursuit is coming up in not-very-many hours, and I’m very excited to race again!