For the year...

Today is the final day of the 08-09 season. Monday, April 27th we start training for the 2010 season!

Number of races: 35
Kilometers raced: 317
Pairs of skis raced: 8
Workouts Skate skiing: 89
Workouts Classic skiing: 102
Number of times I went for a run: 185
Hours spent doing activity defined as "other": 72
Times I went rollerskiing: 63
Countries visisted: 5
Number of entries in my morning HR chart: 0
Percentage of my training that was ski-specific: 60%

Everything we did last season is now officially base for next year. It's time to build the next level of fitness, take our technique and improve it, and train with a purpose once again.

You can always check out last year's recap too.

Ridge To River

-Sadie Bjornsen came over Friday night and took me to the airport. I flew all night and Saturday morning
-Valerie Valaas and
-Susan Valaas picked me up from the Wenatchee airport. After some time at home I borrowed
-Tom Feil's surfski and ran the Wenatchee river (dumping TWICE). Later, picking up my registration which
-Biosports had sponsored and taken care of, I finally made it home to find
-Chad Gregg,
-Aleeta,
-Simon, and
-Tara Gregg had not only brought food to our house but were cooking us dinner. Entertainment was, as usual, provided by
-Kirsten Valaas and her posse. It was a frantic, frantic day and I was starting to get frazzled so I was glad to have my
-Dad and my
-Mom around to keep my calm and make me feel like everything would go smoothly. Sunday morning was race day. After sleeping through my alarm (due to not sleeping Friday night) I headed up to Mission Ridge. Until the car had a mechanical 2miles from the parking lot & we unloaded our gear and a white
-F-150 pulled over and we hopped in the truck bed.
-Hugh Owen took my xc skis and poles up the chairlift for me in his ski bag. I set up my exchange zone and ran into
-TJ Owen on my way to the start and she rubbed some jet stream into my skis. At my xc-alpine exchange
-Sean graciously stepped in at the last minute and baby-powdered my alpine boots and pulled open the tongue so I could get my feet into them. Sweet boots given to me by
-David Tewell and skis borrowed from
-Michael Hansen. At the ski to run exchange,
-Aleeta had my shoes and even had a gel with the top torn off for me already. Mid way through the run
-Mark Broberg caught me (as usual) and gave me a good pace for the rest of the run. I was super psyched when I heard my old running coach
-Kelso cheering. At the run-bike exchange I was super happy to see
-Emily Martin with my helmet and
-Barb Braley with a stool for me to sit on, my bike shoes and my beautiful time trail bike. I caught
-Broberg and teased him about putting a 13 on the cassette on his wheels which I had on my bike so I wouldn't be able to peddle down the (long) hill. It wasn't a 13, but I was using a sweet set of his wheels. Then we hit Saddle Rock and stopped talking. And then he pulled away from me. At the bike-paddle exchange, the lovely miss
-Kari Koos had my shoes for me and picked up the front of my boat and ran full tilt into the Wenatchee River, handed me my paddle and sent me on my way. My mom had my lifejacket for me. Of course the lifejacket and paddle were borrowed from
-someone-who-doesn't-know-I-borrowed-them and the boat belonged to
-Greg Harnish and was one of the very coveted Futura IIs, which are nice and fast and I couldn't have flipped it if I'd tried. Post race a cold, stiff & soggy LAV got a ride home to a shower and dry clothes from
-Barb Braley.

I did, incidentally, win the race (Max Christman, one of the junior nordic skiers in town won the Overall!!!) but before you tell ME good job, count the number of dash marks in my race report. And those are only the obvious contributors on this particular day.

Ski Clinic

On Saturday some of the elite skiers who were in Anchorage coached at a youth ski clinic at the Hilltop Ski Area sponsored mainly by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, Alaska Chapter, as a vehicle to educate young athletes about, as you probably guessed, asthma and related issues.


We broke into small groups to ski with and talk to the kids and then reconvened as a large group for some obstacle course competitions and a game of speedball. Above, Kristina Strandberg demonstrates some skating technique.


Speedball is one of the standard ski-games. For this game we had two soccer balls, one ski per skier, and no poles. This set of equipment minimizes the severity of the inevitable collisions. It's a melding of ultimate frisbee and soccer-- you can either dribble or throw but not run with the ball. Then again, as far as rules go it's the kind of game where rules can change on a whim.


There was also race video from the World Champs playing and we signed posters for the kids. It was really fun to see how excited the kids were about skiing and how engrossed they got in the race video. Are these kids going to take home these posters, hang them up, look at them, think about skiing, start identifying as a skier, and become a skier? I don't know. It's certainly possible. I could see that possibility at the clinic. I could see that seed being planted and that the kids thought that being a skier was something super cool.