Training Log Archive: biggins

Ski-o world champs middle distance.
The terrain was nice and flat, and all were the kind that I could ski fast without fearing for death, so I went with the faster-but-risky version of navigation today, and it failed fairly spectacularly. Got wicked lost twice, once way more than the other, and lost lots of minutes. But the trails were awesome, and I hope the relay tomorrow is more terrain like this.

A few of us went back up to the top of the mountain (where the long was) because its unembargoed now and it was sunny and the skiing up there was sweet. A few big trails, a little bit of double poling, and some awesome little ski-o trails on the way back down. Good stuff.

Rest day, a few of us went up to the sprint area to play around. Snowing and foggy out, but still pretty nice.

Ski-o world champs long distance. I guess the good news is that I didn't break any skis.

Interval starts today, which is fairly unusual for a long, they're usually mass starts. Also it was 1:15, we've usually been on 1:12.5 for the last couple years. First part was up in very sparse trees on the top of a 'mountain', which was pretty awesome just because it was awesome up there. Long legs on crazy narrow trail descents. The snow was really soft though, despite how many times they've told us they've been driving the tracks for two months. Uphills were really tough, there were edges on the sides of the trails and the trail surface wasn't solid enough to pole hard in most places.

So the fun part, got to #3, with a real short downhill leg to 4. Two crazy drops in a row, made the first, hit soft snow at the bottom of the second and dug in a ski and bit it. Broke a pole, stabbed myself a bit with the ends of the pole, bent the arm of the map holder sideways, broke the plastic base sheet of the map holder in half (stabbed myself a bit with the pointy ends of that), tore the map into a couple pieces, and bent the toe bar on my boot. It was a pretty sweet fall.

I dug around in the snow for map chunks for a while (they all got speared down a foot or two when the map holder went in). Found all the parts with controls, couldn't find a chunk of the center I had to ski through to get back but I figured I could wing it on that part. It was another three controls until the equipment drop, and I figured skiing over there for a new pole then coming back would be just as slow as doing the next three with one pole, so I just kept going. In hindsight there's a pretty obvious route 4-5 that goes through the equipment drop, but I probably hit my head at the same time so I didn't see it at all.

The new pole had medium sized baskets, so that sucked on the soft trails, but most of my problem was the busted map holder plastic. Only about 1/2 of the bottom sheet was still attached, though I kept the other half and snapped it on because it sortof held the map in place. Except when I was going fast or it was windy, the the snapped on piece flipped up and stabbed me in the face. Good times.

All told the navigation was pretty uneventful, no mistakes that were worth worrying about. I wasn't moving too fast when I had the one pole, and took easy safe routes for the rest because I was a little sketched out and fairly sore, and couldn't double pole worth anything on the uphills. I was quite successful at generalizing the mazes into contours and catching features, and took lots of routes that were 'take downhills' or 'take horizontals' or 'go that wayish' until a target.

edit: seriously I was just skiing along and I don't know what happened to it.

C • oh man 7

Today's picture from the sprint.

Skio world champs sprint, went pretty well. It was all little trails except for one long leg that I went out and around on a big trail. I was pretty much nailing everything, purposely or accidentally, all the way through until the last technical one. Read the contours wrong (you could probably argue something about the map in that spot too) and was looking at the bottom of a hill when I should have been on the next trail parallel on top of a hill. Doubled back a ways and lost a bunch of time, maybe a minute or so. At the time I never convinced myself why I was wrong, but it clearly wasn't there so I went to the next trail, found it and moved on.

Trails were fun and open and skiable for the first half, icy and steep and in really thick pine forest for the second half. Good stuff.

C • Nice skiing! 2

A few loops around the model map before watching Alex and Adrian in the sprint relay. More of the juniors were out on the model today, so there were a few roving gaggles of teenage girl trains to contend with.

Model event at the arena. Mini trails were nice and sketchy - super rolly with fairly thick pine trees on all sides. A bunch of it was open treed marsh too, not sure how much of each we'll have.

Sprint relay is tomorrow, we have Alex and Adrian for the US. They'll both have gps if you want to follow along, start is 2pm norway time.

Random skinny trail picture.

Went for a bonus ski back by our house. Mostly classic trails that hadn't been groomed in a week or two, so it was fairly dirty and bumpy. Outside smells like wood smoke, though I'm assuming it's for different reasons than when that happens in california.

Random classic trail picture.

Got to Norway, found people, drove to Hamar, went skiing. Trails were pretty nice, and mostly groomed well.