Maine Event and More

Last weekend we attended the Maine Event, a fun agility challenge hosted by NENSA at Pineland - so great to have a NENSA rollerski event come to Maine!  The course featured three different wooden ramp-type rollers along with the usual slalom, grass skiing, figure 8s, etc - fun stuff and a real skills challenge that showed us a lot about everyone's strengths and weaknesses.  The dire forecast kept the numbers down, unfortunately, but even so the Maine teams showed up in force - lots of Colby, Bates, and Gould skiers joined us, along with a couple local skiers from Freeport.  It was pretty fun to watch everyone learning and improving as the morning went on - as they figured out how to ski the rollers you could see body position change as confidence grew.  The rain held off long enough for everyone to get several practice runs and a good clean qualifying round.  Our women crushed it - Renae 2nd, Perrin 3rd, and Gabby 4th.  Men were solid as well, with Noah G 6th and Elliot 7th.  Good showing by the first-years!  The heats were set up bracket-style, with skiers going head to head starting on opposite sides of the loop - a super cool idea that ended up being a bit too time-consuming once the cold rain started up.  With the course getting slick and the skiers starting to freeze, we all huddled and decided to cut the event short - a few rounds of heats heavily compressed, with the qualifier serving as the final results.  It was kind of a bummer that we couldn't stick to the original format, but everyone still got in a great morning of skill work and competition.  Thanks to NENSA and Pineland for hosting a fun event!

We got up to a lot of other good stuff in the second half of October:  mystery intervals at Pineland, a couple visits to the quiet back roads of Woolwich, a pair of fast and high-quality workouts on the bike path, some good hard hill repeats up the water tower hill in Topsham, and lots more.  We're just now wrapping up our favorite recovery week, the annual Most Boring Week Ever - short and simple workouts close to campus as the daylight gets shorter and shorter.  Daylight Savings on Sunday, so next week it'll be time to shift to the earlier practice schedule.  We're trying an experimental new practice schedule that should make it easier for everyone to get to practice.  Hope it works out - we'll find out soon!