It’s been a wild couple of days for me, my teammates and some other juniors who made their way to Canadien Nationals after Junior Nationals in Alaska. I guess you could say we took Pat Casey’s words to heart and started our 2008/9 season directly after awards on Saturday night logging a good two hour sprint/agility workout on the dance floor. Shoutout to Reese Hanneman for getting lower than anyone else out there and “severely” spraining my foot. New England rounded out with 5 of the top ten places at the dance with strong performances made by Mike Mommsen(NE), Graham Egan(NE), Sam Tarling(NE), Gage Fichter(NE), NOAH HOFFMAN(IM), Erik Anderson(IM), Natalie Flowers(IM), Andrew Tillman(MW), Scott Krankalla(IM) and Parker Tyler(NE). Honerable mention for the evening went to Ian Havlick(IM) who unfortunalty dropped out in the home stretch.

Twelve hours after the exrtravaganza I was groggy eyed and lost in the Vancouver airport, fortunatly only to be found at customs by none other than my mom, lolly, who made the trip from Maine to cook and hang out with the Burke kids for CNats.. The bus from Vancouver to Whistler took 2 1/2 hours, enough time for a good nap before jumping out into Whistler Village at about 10 pm! What a difference from our downtown digs in Anchorage, talk about culture shock!
After much needed sleep and food we picked it up and raced Tuesdays classic races and took all of our tiredness in stride(no pun intended) and battled it out over the challenging course. I guess it was more of a running race for the girls, not many people seemed to nail the wax so we found ourselves sprinting up hills and then stopping to try and clean the ice chunchs from the bottom of our skis.

Back to back races called for a 10k skate. Getting out of bed was RUGGED, as we realized that for many of us this was our 6th race in 9 days! The race went well, 3 laps of a 3.3k loup with a good climb and some verying terrain made it a great final distance skate race. Corinne managed to stay on the TD’s good side and Janey Mclelland had a great day posting one of the best lap times for Junior Girls. Sam was just edged again from the podium for junior boys and finished another 4th place. Behind him was Lucas with a stellar 15th. Everyone seems suprised at how well they were doing against the Canadiens, but mostly we are all greatful for our day off tommorow!
No matter how tired we all are, it’s cool to still be out here racing. For most of us the end of the season is bittersweet. We really want to put up our feet, but it is so fun to be racing with kids from Intermountain, Rocky Mountain, Midwest and New England as Team America, soaking up the nordic atmosphere and enjoying the final days of winter!

Stay Classy Everyone/ don’t forget to move your body like a CYCLONE

gittin somme

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