Williams & Bowdoin Carnivals

After a nice snowy weekend at Dartmouth, it was back to warm temps for the Williams Carnival.  By the time we got to Prospect on Thursday afternoon, we were in full spring skiing mode.  Sadly, the massive melting wiped out the stadium and kept us from accessing some tough climbs and fun descents, but the organizers did a nice job of pulling together a decently challenging 2.5k loop for Friday's 5/10k classic.  It was an unusual waxing day - super warm when we started testing, and then gradually dropping down toward freezing as the morning went on.  As with any klister day, we had to do some scrambling, but we got good skis on almost everyone's feet.  The team was really feeling the strain of schoolwork this week - mid-February is a tough time for us every year - and a lot of people were tired, but they managed to put up surprisingly solid results nonetheless.  Elliot was 9th and Christian 20th to lead the men, with Renae 14th and Gabby 19th for women.  These 4 have been amazingly consistent all year, to the point where it's easy to take these results for granted - I have to constantly remind myself how impressive it is that a sophomore and three first-years are putting up these performances every week.  Sam also had a nice race, scoring a big classic PR in 35th - lots of technique work paying off.  One other fun thing about this race was that a bunch of local HS skiers came out to watch the races - lots of them knew Ian since he grew up just down the road in Williamstown, so there were a ton of excited kids cheering for him every time he came around - very cool.

Things kept cooling, and the next morning we had a nice fast track to work with.  With no stadium, the originally scheduled sprint race wasn't possible - very sad, since this was our only sprint of the year.  Instead, we did a 3.8k prologue.  I've never loved the prologue as an event, but this was actually a really great race thanks to the fast snow and fun course - a couple big climbs in the first 800 meters, followed by a series of short descents and fast rolling terrain - tons of free skate, V2alt, and all the fast stuff that makes skating so much fun.  This race wasn't an NCAA qualifier, and this combined with the weird distance had me worried that the skiers might not be able to get fully focused.  Fortunately, no problems there - everyone was excited to let it fly, and everyone came back talking about how much fun it was.  Turns out we got some pretty good results out of the day as well.  Renae led the women in 18th, with Gabby 22nd for a skate PR and Lily 30th.  For men, Elliot was 6th, beating Gabby's record from last week for the best first-year result ever.  Sean was 22nd, Jake 29th, and Christian 30th.  Seven people in the top 30 - that's a good day even by the standards of this season!  Thanks to the strong team showing, we were able to overtake Williams to claim 5th place overall for nordic teams.

A few other notes on the weekend:  1) Rachel served as our third wax tech this weekend and was a great help.  She did a little bit of everything - testing, structure, klister touch ups, and a ton of glide waxing and scraping - and her efforts really helped make our good results possible; 2) Jane Culnane led a small but determined group of parents who went above and beyond to provide a great array of hot and delicious food on a damp chilly weekend; 3) Last but not least, a few of our men lost their minds and fashion sense and decided to get really bad/amazing haircuts:

As someone who lived through the late 80s/early 90s, I enjoyed this little dose of nostalgia despite the questionable aesthetics.

While some of us were racing and cutting hair in Vermont, others were back in Maine doing an informal race I dubbed "the Bowdoin Carnival" - a duathlon with several skiers from Colby and Bates at Pineland.  Russell and Orion broke away from the group, with Russell taking the win in the final sprint.  Many thanks to John Eldredge and John Tarling for handling timing and helping the skiers get organized!  Here are results:

MEN				Total
Number	First	Last	School	Time	Place
43	Russell	O'Brien	BOW	36:12'	1
45	Orion	Watson	BOW	36:13'	2
48	Anders	Hanson	COL	36:20'	3
44	Cirque	Gammelin	BOW	36:57'	4
46	Carter	Hall	COL	37:17'	5
50	Mark	Young	COL	37:31'	6
47	Gabe	Forest	COL	37:43'	7
54	Tucker	Pierce	BAT	37:49'	8
51	Addie	Sinkler	COL	37:55'	9
55	Ben	Keener	BAT	37:57'	10
52	Ben	Theyerl	COL	38:34'	11
53	Cole	Fuller	BAT	39:07'	12
57	Charlie	Cobb	COL	39:12'	13
WOMEN
Number	First	Last	School	Time	Place
71	Talia	Seltzer	COL	29:44'	1
72	Meg	Yoder	COL	30:14'	2
75	Amy	Bruce	COL	30:43'	3
74	Julia	Lazzeroni	COL	31:06'	4

One more carnival to go:  Eastern Regional Championships at Middlebury this weekend.  Can't wait!