Stemilt Ski Trails!

WVNSEF Team at practice on Saturday.

Saturday marked the first day of grooming at the Stemilt Ski Trails! My dad & co. have been working this summer and fall on creating a ski trail up in the hills near Wenatchee for the Wenatchee Valley Nordic Ski Education Foundation to use. It's been a long process of scouting out trails, coordinating with the property owners and the Wenatchee snowmobiling club, cutting out brush, marking the trail, getting a groomer set up, and waiting for snow! I think it's pretty impressive that my dad decided we needed some trails closer to Wenatchee and then made it happen.

Laura Valaas walking the trail this summer.

The same huge ponderosa, cut up and cleared, with TJ Owen walking through with a 12' pole to make sure the trail was wide enough.

It was negative 8 (-9 at the coldest, actually) when we pulled into the parking lot Saturday morning. Which wouldn't be so unusual if it was Celsius, but it was FAHRENHEIT.

The first pass of the groomer around the trail!



Cal Anderson grooming with Peter Valaas riding passenger and providing insight into Nordic grooming techniques. The Apple Country Snowmobiling Club is going to groom and set up their cat with all the Nordic grooming accoutrements. Which I also think is pretty impressive that they're interested and willing to do that.



Some of the WVNSEF athletes enjoying the fresh grooming.

Kristina Owen coming back home to help her mom coach the WVNSEF Team.

Here's to having a vision and making it happen, in whatever endeavor!

p.s. since the trails are on private land I don't think they're officially open to the public so if you want to ski 'em you should check in with someone first.

Sovereign Lake NorAm Skate Sprints

We come to race. It's simple like that-- show up, ski fast. During our stay in Silver Star, BC, with two sprint races and three distance race, I stepped up to the start line eleven times. At each of those starts I knew the cold air was about to burn in my lungs, my muscles were going to scream in pain, and that I was about to lay my best effort out there and find out how my best compared to the competition. After most of the starts my best effort was good but not the best in the field. After one start, however, I had the satisfaction of being the fastest to race that day.

In the prelims for the skate sprint I felt leaden and frustrated that I couldn't accelerate my limbs through the motions like I wanted to ski. Our race course at Sovereign was fun, with tight turns, rests, and uphills and I came up to the quarterfinal excited to have another chance to play on it. The six girls started out fast and my body objected to the sudden load off the line but managed to get me into third before the first turn. I took advantage of the wide trail on the gradual uphill to move into second. I tucked into the draft on the next downhill and had the pleasant realization that my skis were wicked fast that day as I sling-shotted around Daitch on the short, steep uphill without even particularly desiring to. Since I only needed to be top two to advance I had planned on hanging out in second. Once I was in front, however, I had no desire to give anyone else a draft so I accelerated over the top of the hill and down, around, and back into the finish. The semifinal played out almost identically.

When the A-Final started my body knew what it was about to go through and, more importantly, wanted to do it. I started off the line maybe too eagerly and pulled into the front. Not particularly wanting to be in the front from the start, I eased up around the corner and relaxed into a tuck on the first gradual downhill instead of skating through it thinking someone would come around me. My skis really were the fastest out on the course that day because when I looked back to see where the other girls were, even in my draft, they were strung out in a line. When we hit the gradual uphill my tactic changed to racing off the front and I took advantage of my rest on the downhill and put in a quick acceleration to try to get a gap on the field early in the race. It must have worked because I skied the rest of the course and sprinted into the finish with the unusual peacefulness of not having someone kicking my pole baskets and breathing half a second behind me.

It feels good to win a race. Really though, I'm happy as long as I get the opportunity to start. I know that most of the races I start I'm not going to win, but every race I start I get the satisfaction of putting 100% of my focus and effort toward a goal. Standing on the start line is akin to announcing that I am going to show you the best I have, without excuses or explanations. Regardless of how good my best may be on any given day, there's purity in facing the challenge.

A musical line

We sprinted on Saturday. I spent my entire training session on Friday doing laps around the 1.1k sprint loop. I hate doing laps but at so many of our venues there's no option for skiing other than a crowded sprint course so I decided I needed to learn to deal with the crowds and the short loops.

This is what I thought about on Friday. I broke the course down, thought about it, and reassembled it. I asked myself, "if this was a line of music, how would I play it?" This isn't normally how I think about race courses. Music, along with most other skills, is a decided non-talent of mine. The course had a playfulness and a flow to it that made it conducive to my musical analogy. I imagined playing this race course on my oboe. It starts with very simple quarter notes, full of energy because they're the first notes and you've been waiting for ever so long for the oboe solo. The pace picks up briefly to eighth notes around the first broad bend, more interesting certainly, but still legato. Then some slow quarters, but these notes carry more potential. It's only a few bars, but there's the option here for some vibrato. how many pulses can you squeeze into each note? How much extra speed can you add with each kick?

Then it starts getting challenging, up the first rolling hill. Now is time for accelerando. The fingering gets tricky and there's no break in the phrase. You have to use all those little keys running down alongside the oboe. You had better know without thinking where exactly you're going step, how exactly you're going to move. Then there's a breath mark, a short down, a short tuck. Which is good because coming up is a short, steep section. Stacato. Allegro. It's going to be hard and there's no room for error because you only get a few seconds of playing before the next breath mark. Then it's a series of trills around a sharp, fast corner. Played with vivace. Finally it's straight into the finish and there's fewer options for technical mistakes but it gets more and more difficult to maintain the proper tone. And then, a finish, a lunge, and the rest of the orchestra takes back over.

This analogy only momentarily got me distracted with trying to remember all the musical terms that I used to know. Thinking about where the breath marks were along the course was helpful. I told myself to take the opportunity to breath and relax. I also focused more on my tempo on the uphills. It's good to be able to look at a race from more than one perspective.

Pictures, Part II

The view looking down toward Vernon, BC, from near the Sovereign Lake Nordic Center.

I qualified in 6th & then went on to win my quarter, semi & A-final. My skis were ridiculously fast. So fast one of my competitors specifically asked afterwards about the flex/grind/wax that I was using. I felt absolutely awful yesterday, this morning, and in the qualifier. Once we started the heats though I started to come around. Racing can be odd like that. Don't worry, my team doesn't let me get arrogant at all... after my 20 minute cool down I came back to find that everyone had left. I had to hitchhike back to our house.


Jeff Ellis got a bloody nose in the race today (along with a fabulous 2nd place finish). It wasn't your traditional bloody nose... it was a a stab wound from, I believe, George Grey. Beware of pole tips. Wear glasses. Maybe even a face guard.

Jeff Ellis (2nd), Laura Valaas (1st), Anders Haugen (4th). Some good results for the APU crew. Anders, incidentally turns 28 tomorrow. I think Taz made him a birthday cake. I love it that my teammates cook.

Casey Fagerquist, Laura Valaas, Becca Rorabaugh, Anders Haugen, Erik Flora. Bart Dengel & Jeff Ellis in front. Being a part of a team and working together is a big part of what makes this fun.

Podium shot. It was LAV vs. Canada in the A-Final. Good job to "the team" (aka: Alberta World Cup Academy), they were trying to tell me they weren't all as fast as Shayla, but I think they lied.

Pictures

I have been abysmally bad at taking pictures this trip. I took some this morning but they lacked any merit as pictures so I didn't even bother bringing my camera with me to the coffee shop to upload them. So, some verbal snapshots for you from Silver Star:

-Two kids (well, the older kind) in snow pants rolling around on one of the hills in the Sovereign Lake stadium. With scissors. Cutting down the plant stalks poking through the snow.

-Men with crow bars and shovels digging big rocks out from their semi-covered state near the high point of the sprint course.

-A man on a very tall genie lift hanging Christmas lights on a very tall tree in Silver Star village.

-Hans, who is Belgian and served me my mocha at Bugaboos. Hans speaks German and French. He was bemoaning that fact that he only had two years of English in school, so silly. So he's here for the winter to improve his English. He tells me this in perfect English. Of course, his native language is actually Flemish.

-The Lindt chocolate that came with my mocha, nestled comfortably in the spoon.

-Ronsse, Becca & I stopping one night on a run to dance in the middle of an empty Silver Star village because there's speakers on top of the ticket booth playing music. Directly in front of the "This area under constant video surveillance" sign.

-Snow. Falling from the sky.

-A small child pulling an even smaller child in the smallest sled.

-My skate poles after training on Friday-- dry and clean on the upper half but accumulating more and more ice from precipitation as you go down toward the baskets. A clear indication of the differences in velocity between the grip and basket.

-Matt Whitcomb (incidentally, Kate's brother) walking down the trail holding a chunk of snow. When I asked him why he replied, "because I'm hungry [takes bite] and I'm waiting for Pat to bring my a ham and egg sandwich."