Caitlin, Juergen, and the women’s podium (that check is not for Caitlin), photos courtesy of nensa.net

Mother nature threw everything she had at us today and the Catamounts weathered  the storm admirably.  The day started off with a light drizzle with temps in the 40’s but by the time the women were warming up there was thunder and a white out blizzard.  The ladies took it all in stride and skied to some great results.  Caitlin picked up where she left off yesterday winning a tightly contested race in the last couple of kilometers.  Not to be outdone Mary came through with her best result yet in a carnival skiing to 10th place!  Johanna and Kat followed close behind in 15th and 16th to close out another strong result for the women.  Ellery was just outside the top 20 again and Mae skied to her strongest result so far in a classic race.  They finished second on the day and more importantly their strong result pushed us from third overall in the carnival to second overall.

During the women’s race the weather made another dramatic swing as the wind blew away the clouds and we were left witha sunny windy day for the men.  The temperature continued to drop and what was a somewhat soft and wet course became hard and icy.  With the weather changing quickly we just barely started working on the men’s race skis till 20 minutes before the first starter.  We managed to get them all out to the start on time (not every team did) and Patrick and I were left standing in the stadium wondering if what we got on was going to be enough.  As the guys started to come around for the first of 3 laps of the punishing Trapp’s 5k we were relieved to see that everyone was skiing well.  Juergen, Franz, and Chris were all in the top 5 and everyone else looked solid.  Juergen slowly pulled away from the field for  the victory and Franz and Chris hung tough for 5th and 8th place finishes, leading the men to their first team win of the season!  All the men skied well with Alex and Ryan finishing just inside the top 20 and Cole skiing to his best classic result of the season.  The men’s finished cemented second place for the Catamounts on the weekend.

Almost everyone on the men’s and women’s teams skied to season’s bests in classic today.  We are getting stronger at the right time and we are looking forward to the Dartmouth Carnival next weekend.

Thank you to all the parents that were out there today and yesterday.  Despite some bizaar weather today everyone had a great time.  I don’t have any photos but would be happy to post any that are sent my way.  There will be pictures from the race here before too long: http://www.hb3.smugmug.com/

We also owe a big thank you to all the folks up at Trapp Family Lodge, the Stowe Nordic Club, NENSA, and everyone else who helped to make the first UVM Carnival/TD Banknorth Eastern Cup/Supertour event a smashing success!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Racing. 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.