February 26th, 2008
The racing is done with in Falun Sweden and even though there wasn’t a sprint here this weekend it was a lot of fun. We’ve had warm sunny skiing conditions basically all weekend and with an exception of a few places on the course the tracks stayed firm.
Falun is notorious for close finishes during the 30k. The stadium is huge and there’s a really long gradual downhill leading into it so it always seams like there’s a huge pack of dudes hammering to the line at once. Saturday’s duathlon was a close one as always but the pack was broken up a little bit by Anders Soedergren’s big move up the massive hill with 1.5 k to go.
In the end Bauer took the final sprint and the win for the day.
It was awesome to be able to put together a team for Sunday’s relay. We don’t always have the luxury of having a full distance team on the road for the world cup, so to be able to put in a strong relay team was a lot of fun. I’m always stoked to be able to hop in and do a distance race whenever I can but being on the world cup makes that pretty difficult sometimes. I was picked to do the second classic leg and after a solid run by Freeman I had a good group of skiers to race with. Finland, Russia, France, Italy, and I formed a group climbing out of the stadium on our first lap and took things out pretty hard. We could see the lead pack in front of us so we were pushing really hard to close that gap. The pace felt fine for me for the first 6k but after another strong push from the Finns it was hard for me to hang on. It can definitely be a tricky thing to try to pace distance races when I’ve spent the last month only sprinting. Regardless it felt really good to get out and hammer out a 10k. Leif and Kuzzy both had strong legs and were able to pick off another team allowing us to finish 11th.
We definitely still have a lot of work to do in the relay department but having more true distance skiers on the world cup is a big step forward. We’re going to continue to give it our best shot in the relay’s until one day we’re in medal contention. let’s face it… there’s pretty much nothing better than winning a medal for your country in the relay so I know its a huge goal for everyone.
We’ll hop on the bus for Stockholm this afternoon and race tomorrow night around the Royal Palace. This is one of the tightest and scrappiest sprints of the year so its going to be exciting to see how we can match up against the rest of the world. There’s a quick transition to Lahti Finland on Thursday for this weekends world cups where there will be another sprint on Saturday and a 15k classic on Sunday.
