Saturday morning we woke up to a perfectly groomed course with clear blue skies and nothing but sun in the forecast.  It was an awesome way to close out the 2009 NCAA Championships.  We started off the day with a slim lead over Denver, New Mexico, and Colorado and while we didn’t end the day at the top we didn’t go quietly either.

Caitlin on her way to 7th place in the 15k skate… (photo courtesy of flyingpointroad.com)The women lead off the last day of the championships with the 15k Free.  Caitlin had one of her best double pole starts of the season and then on the first climb she was tripped up twice, going down to her knees.  Despite dropping back into the low 20’s she was able to battle back to the lead group by 4k.  This was the fastest 15k the eastern women have skied in this year with several of the western women throwing down hard moves right from the beginning.  By the end of the second lap Caitlin and a group of 6 other women, (2 CU, 2 DU, 2 Dartmouth, and Caitlin) had seperated themselves from the rest of the pack.  The extra work that Caitlin had done to get back to the front started to take it’s toll on the last lap as she found it hard to go with the accelerations of the top women.  Despite her difficulties she managed to hang tough and stay ahead of the chasers for a hard-earned 7th place.

Jennie also suffered a bit from the hard early pace.  When she came through the stadium after 10k I wasn’t sure she was going to make it another step let alone finish another 5k.  I have rarely seen her look that tired but she pulled herself together on her way down to the low point of the course and put together a hard charge on the last climb catching a few people I thought for sure were gone for good.  It was an inspiring effort in her last college race of the season.

After the women’s race DU had really seperated themselves from the pack but we were still sitting in second just ahead of CU and New Mexico.  We know it was going to be tough to stay on top of those guys as they all were starting full teams and we only had 2 but Franz and Juergen have showed themselves to be pretty tough in the mass starts so we were still hoping for a top 4 finish.  Unfortunately it just wasn’t our day.  Juergen had a tough go off it right off the start.  There wasn’t any drama he just didn’t have it on Saturday.  He fought hard throughout the race trying to use those around him to move up but the men’s race had an even more punishing pace then the women’s did earlier.  Several guys took their chances early which strung out the men’s field quickly making it hard to recover from a bad start.

Juergen celebrating the end of a stellar career! (Photo courtesy of flyingpointroad.com)

Franz on the other hand had a solid start and skied with the lead group for the early part of the race but broke a pole and then started to lose contact with that front group.  He worked together with Glenn Randall (Dartmouth) who had a spectacular crash on lap 2 (see it here) to work their way up towards the end of the race.  In the end it was a solid effort for both guys as they finished 17th and 26th.

DU won and CU, New Mexico, and UAA (after an unbelievable men’s race with all three of their guys finishing in the top 5) slipped past us which left us all a little disappointed with our 5th place finish.  BUT… I think if you had told us before we started that we would have two individual national champions, 8 of 10 participants earn All-America finishes, beat Dartmouth, and be leading the way after 3 days at the NCAA championships we would have gladly taken it.

Franz on the way to a 17th place finish, note that he has two different poles… (Photo from flyingpointroad.com)

Thanks again to all the people that came out to watch, the Benders for making sure we didn’t go hungry, Black Mountain volunteers, and the Bates staff for putting on a first class event!

You can find more pictures at hb3. smugmug.com, flyingpointroad.com, and hopefully on the UVM picasa site before too long.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 4:31 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.