This is my first time in the Vancouver area and so far I’m digging the scene. The US team has been here since Friday and we’ve been staying in Squamish and driving up to the Olympic venue every day. Squamish is a small ‘green’ looking town but as the road climbs up toward Whistler you can see that they get tons of snow in this area. I don’t think a day has gone by when there wasn’t something falling form the sky up at the ski trails… Sometimes rain, but mostly huge wet snowflakes. It makes for some great wintery skiing.
The Olympic venue is sick. There are two separate 5k race loops on the cross country stadium side but the trails link right into the biathlon stadium where there is a completely different network of race trails. the Ski jumps are also right next to the xc venue and there are many, many k’s of easier cruising trails winding all around the complex. It’s really cool to have all the Nordic sports disciplines so close together.
The world cup season is over but that doesn’t mean we’re not getting in a lot of racing. This is the time of year it’s awesome to be able to do as many races as you can throughout the week. While focusing on sprinting this year I haven’t been able to do many distance races as I’d like either so this is also a great time to get in some longer races.
We’ve already had 3 races in the past 4 days so things have been getting off to a fast start. On Sunday there was the annual club sprint relay. In order to enter the race you need to pair up with someone from your own club. Luckily fellow SMS’er Pat O’brian was here so we teamed up for the relay. It was a lot of fun, but also a hard effort. The most important thing about entering the race was to be able to get in some racing around the Olympic sprint course and it was great for that. We then had a day off before the 10k classic on Tuesday. We were met with some of the toughest waxing conditions of the year. Typical warm new snow falling made it a tough call to go on harries or klister. For one reason or another my harries were not working at all and I could only made it around about 4k. It was a bummer… but good practice for how hard it might be to hit the wax here in 2010. Today was the 15k skate, and I was really looking forward to starting this one because it’s been at least two years since my last 15k skate race. There was hard snow falling again today but with no kicking involved in made for a less stressful race. It actually went better than I though it was going to and I ended up 7th. It felt good to get in a distance skate race and it was also my first race ever that I’ve had to wear a visor!! So I was stoked to do that to. Simple pleasures.
We’ll we have a day off tomorrow before the skate sprint on Friday. From what I hear there is going to be a lot of international competition here for that race so I’m sure it will be a tough showdown. Sorry for no pictures on this update… i will try to get some over the next few days and some of the sprint comp.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 6:52 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.