After working all day on Friday, I woke up today at 6am to drive to Prospect to see the Berkshire County race. It seems so weird seeing my friends now as seniors and juniors ripping up the circuit back at home, but I am very proud of them. Patrick had a sick race, he finished first by almost a minute and a half over Dylan, who was second. Greylock swept every race soundly, even down to the JV boys and girls. They placed five in the top nine and eight in the top nineteen. It was an eye-opener for sure.
My brother and I ran a mock time trial on the same course in the same conditions. I had a decent run and finished at 15:54, a bit more than 30 seconds better than my bro. That is promising considering I now have two more races this week: Wednesday, a skate 5k at home; and Saturday, a NH Series EHS Qualifier 5k skate at White Mountain RHS. For now, the intervals seem to have paid off. There will be more posts about those races to come, since now we start getting into the heart of the season.
I snapped as many photos as I could before the battery ran out on the D80. I got about 50 really good ones out of about 300 total…here they are: (in small format)

That’s it for tonight. I head back to school on Monday, so blog posts may get less frequent, but I will try to cover the races with some regularity.
Happy 2009!
-Ian

Yesterday after the storm I had a sweet ski at Prospect Mountain. I think they got a solid 6″ of fresh powder, which they rolled and groomed. Unfortunately I skied about an hour earlier than the tracks were set, so I had to do my classic 4×4 intervals without a real track. The classic skiing was fairly nice though; I put on some Swix green and was set to go for most of the day. The only problem was when it started to get colder (9º F) towards the end of the workout, the green started to get slower.

Today I skied with the Mounties at the high school and did a workout with them. Basically it was an hour and a half ski with the business end of the workout being 100m head-to-head sprints on the track. I got beaten by the two top Greylock skiers, Dylan and Patrick, and tied my brother. Those guys do sprints a lot at the end of their workouts, which is something I’d like to do more of, but don’t always have the time at school. At the end some Greylock Alumni showed up and sprinted as well. Overall, a good two days.

Happy New Year!
Ian