Hey everybody, I wanted to let you know what I have been up to lately.  Summer always flies by so fast, but I have been able to get in a lot of diverse training.  My training has been going really well, and I am back living in Wisconsin!  Yup, I just moved down to Delafield, WI, and I am really excited for the upcoming Fall down there!

Finally finished my cross bike!

About to hammer on my brother's new motocross bike! Great training.

We have a singletrack motocross trail around my parent's house in Rhinelander. Here are the pros.

Happy Hodag!

As you can see, I have been pretty busy!  I also have to thank Tom and Susan Brian of Farmer Q’s Market in Marquette, MI for the last four years of putting up with my crazy work schedule there.  If you are ever in town you have to stop there for the best produce around!

It is great to be back training, and this is what I have been up to so far this training season:

Keep on ripping it up, and buying your produce from Farmer Q’s Market–one of my great personal sponsors–when you’re in Marquette, MI.

It seems that after the Birkie the season always seems to start to wind down really fast.  This year after the Birkie the weather seemed to immediately change from Winter into Spring.  For the past two weeks I have not skied without it being over 40 degrees and sunny.  It really has been amazing, but at the same time it makes me want to hop on the bike more than train for the upcoming 50km skate National Championship in Fort Kent, ME.  However, I am really excited by the chance to become a National Champion so I am hammering out my training (minus getting a head cold this past weekend.)

The trails here in Marquette are still really good despite the fact that they will not groom very often for some reason.  I do not understand why people think that if it gets warm they should no longer groom because they think they will lose more snow that way; when in fact grooming the snow makes it way more enjoyable to ski along with keeping the snow more compact so it will last longer.  I just finished an interval workout at Blueberry Ridge where they decided to groom and the trail was clean and fast.

A really cool thing Maria and I were able to do last Friday was help with the new disabled program we have here in Marquette that is headed by Jodi Tervo and Andrew Rickauer .  CXC has sent a bunch of sitskis here for the new Opportunity Center.  The goal is to give people with disabilities the opportunity to get hooked on cross-country skiing.  Skiers have been meeting on most Friday’s at 5:30 at Suicide Bowl in Ishpeming.  Suicide Bowl offers equipment rentals and a nice flat loop to ski on.  The program already has youngsters with their eye’s on the next Paralympics.  I was able to ski with Dominic and his twin brother for about an hour and it was really fun.  Dominic is probably around six or eight years old and really enjoys being able to get out and ski despite having some balance and numbness issues in his lower body.  He was also really interested in why we could not just go and jump off the ski jumps?  It was really fun to see his excitement about everything outdoors.

As for the rest of the season, Maria, Gus, and I are heading to Gus’ house in Vermont on the 16th where we will be doing some races at Craftsbury before heading to Maine to finish off the season with the 30/50km and the SuperTour finals.  It should be a really good time especially if the weather stays like this!

I have been charging since West Yellowstone last November. (Ian Harvey Photo)

I have finally arrived back in Marquette after my two week long trip that started at the Telemark SuperTour and ended in Canmore, Canada.  The trip was really awesome and I have to thank all of my supporters who helped me make the trip up to Canmore possible.

However, the trip did start with a weekend in Hayward, racing the always great Telemark World Cup trails.  There is something about the number 147, my amazing old, white Salomon classic skis, and the Telemark 10km classic course that really suit my style.  The reason for mentioning these things is that I was able to win the 10km classic last year and this year wearing the same bib number 147, on the same pair of skis, and skiing the exact same course.  It was especially nice being able to sweep the podium with fellow CXC Team Vertical Limit teammates Matt Liebsch and Brian Gregg for the second weekend in a row.  It was also great to be back racing in my home state on a course I have skied on since I could walk.  Once again the Tidd Tech grooming was great for both the 10km classic and the 15km skate that was held the very next day.  I decided to sit out the mass start 15km because my asthma has been bothering me for the past couple of weeks and I did not want to chance anything heading to my first World Cup race the following Friday.  My teammates did awesome though with Brian breaking away with Matt for first and second while Karl Nygren was out sprinted by quite the sprinter (Chris Cook) to end up fourth on the day.  The women then managed to get a podium sweep of their own with Rebecca Dussault, Maria, and Kristina Owen skiing really well.

Last year or this year?

The very next day I was on a plane heading to Canmore for my very first 15km skate World Cup.  The travel went really well with a three hour flight from Minneapolis to Calgary followed by an hour and a half shuttle ride up to Canmore.  Once in Canmore, Matt and his amazing wife MaryBeth picked me up and brought me to the condo that Bryan Fish, Tad Elliot, Matt, MaryBeth, and I shared while we were there.  The condo was really nice but it seemed like the housekeeper’s had some kind of marijuana addiction as it tended to smell pretty intense while they were cleaning the condos around ours.

The weather for the entire week really could not have been better.  Every night it would cool off into the teens and every day it would be in the 30’s with a bright, blue sky.  The course was also in perfect shape even though the Canmore Nordic Centre had to make all of the snow for the entire 5km loop.  They had at least a two foot base around that loop as well as about another 10km of biathlon and other trails groomed to perfection around the Centre.  Combine the great snow conditions with arguably the hardest 5km course in the World and you have a World Cup in Canmore.  To see the course map and profile click HERE.  The course started with about 3km of climbing to the high point before flying down some sweet hills with a couple 90 and 180 degree turns added in.  I really liked the course, but it was pretty hard to keep it easy while training on the course with all the climbing.

The week flew by with mostly just easy distance training, and Friday came around with me feeling really good.  I was able to pick out a really fast pair of my new Salomon skate skis the day before the race, and I was really confident that Bryan Fish and the rest of the waxing crew would have the skis dialed come race time.

To be continued…

We are one day away from the end of U.S. Nationals here in Anchorage, AK, and I am very happy with my results.  My Nationals kicked off with the 15km skate race after I decided to sit out the skate sprint in order to be better prepared for the two events that I have been training the most for.  I was feeling great right up until two days before the 15km when I started to get a few cold symptoms.  Unfortunately, I was not able to fight these off and I just decided to go with it, hoping for the best.  The 15km went all right considering that was probably the breaking point of my sickness.  I just was not able to get full power because I was pretty congested and had a pretty sore throat.

After the 15km I continued to hit the vitamin C and was hoping to be 100% for my favored classic technique.  The morning of the race I woke up and felt the best I had, but was worried that I would simply run out of gas because my body was still fighting off my cold.  However, I knew that it was a mass start race and that I just had to try to stay with the leaders for as long as I could no matter what.  If my body would allow it, I believed that I could stay with the leaders the entire race.

The team left for the venue after a little bit of a scare.  Brian Gregg knocked on  my door and told us to bring our zero skis if we had any because it was about 32 degrees and snowing, a classic waxing nightmare.  Of course, by the time the race started our waxing team of Igor, Bryan Fish, Brandan Ostroot, and John Hugus had nailed the wax and we had great skis as usual.

The course was pretty soft because of all the snow and having the women race a 20km before us, but it held up pretty well except for the steeper uphills which made for a lot of herringboning.  I was a little disappointed because my kick was good enough that I could have skied up a lot of those hills had there still been a track.  Also, this is where eventual winner, James Southam, and 2nd place finisher, Kris Freeman, were able to drop me a little bit each lap.  I was able to close the gaps on the gradual uphills and downhills for three of the four laps, but I eventually was dropped for good on the third lap.  This was also when a junior from Fairbanks, AK, David Norris, blew past me and closed the 10 second gap to James and Kris.  He was really moving and I was pretty concerned I was not going to be able to catch anyone and would end up 4th, just missing the podium.  I tried to stay calm and continue to ski relaxed keeping the gap steady.

Midway through the third lap on the biggest climb James and Kris were able to drop David, and Kris stopped to get his blood checked a little after that climb.  Kris then proceeded to pass both me and then David in an attempt to catch back up to James who had widened the gap to me from 15 seconds to about 30  seconds.  James and Kris then skied away from David and me most of the last lap, and I was just trying to catch back up to David without spending too much energy.  I wanted to keep some in reserve for the last kilometer where I was planning on going as hard as I could and hope that I could close the 10 second gap that David had on me for most of the final lap.  We hit the final gradual uphill with about 1 kilometer to go and finally the effort of bridging up to James and Kris took its toll on David.  I could see he was having some trouble getting kick and his legs started to look a little unstable.  I decided this was the time to go for it and I was able to use the hill to bridge up to him.  Then I sprinted as hard as I could hoping to get a good gap before the descent into the stadium.  I just kept my head down and hammered into the finish for my very first Nationals podium.

It was great to get my first podium here because my parent’s made the trip up here and were cheering me on for the duration of this extremely hard race.  I would like to thank them along with my coaches and teammates for helping me achieve this result.  I would also like to thank all of my supporters as well as the sponsors of the entire CXC Team Vertical Limit.  Without the support of so many people, especially my family, there is no way I would be able to be a fulltime ski racer.

Just about finished.

Just after finishing.

Finished.

Thanks to teammate Audrey Weber for the great photos.