Westerns pictures

Here is a slideshow of pictures from westerns  stolen from Pauline, Alan, Fiona and some of mine
http://fgr.am/f/qDOrjyvs4W

Westerns final day - skate mass start races

Junior girls looking happy before their Sunday race.

 

 Our final day here in Prince George again gave us great temperatures, around -2 C.  No complaints!

ALL raced well.  I was very happy to see Fiona race her 7.5 km as she had been battling a chest cold all week.  Levi W was very pleased with his race and felt that his fitness level was there for him.  Alex, Alan, and Pauline were happy to have the time to get out on course to cheer.  Our team handled the climbs and the technical downhills extremely well.  We are so proud of everyone.



Manitoba is gaining momentum!  Conor 3rd in juvenile 1,

Lisle 3rd in juvenile 2 and Levi N 2nd overall in juvenile boys. 

 



Team pauses for a photo before leaving the Waterfront Lodge.

The journey home was not as long or arduous as the day we left Winnipeg.  But Prince George airport does not have a big enough scanner for ski bags which meant a long time spent with EVERY ski bag being zipped open and inspected closely.  Good thing we had arrived with a buffer of time to spend on that.  I hope they get a big enough scanner for Canada Games next year!

We narrowly made our connection at Vancouver airport, with the departing WJ flight being slightly delayed for us while our PG flight sat on the runway waiting for enough ground crew to receive us.  We essentially jogged from one gate to the next, straight onto the next plane.  And you guessed it, folks.  The skis did not make it to Winnipeg with us . . .and this time neither did any of our luggage.  Well anyways we made it back to Manitoba and will enjoy the rest day on this stat holiday!  We are hopeful that this will translate into more travel vouchers to go towards future team trips.  More "fundraising" - it all works out in the end!!

Westerns Day 5 - Ben's classic sprint day

Well, Ben got the short end of the deal today as he headed off to race bright and early with Alex and Megan as his support crew.  The weather was mild once again and today the trail conditions were superb.  Ben was, as he put it, as pleased as he has ever been after his classic sprint race today.  We managed to give him decent grip and glide and he skied the very tough 1.6 km course once for qualifiers and again for the quarter final heat.  To put Ben's field into perspective, it is on the small side but almost every other skier is from a training center team.  Ben was not deterred.

 

 

 

The remainder of the team had the chance to sleep in a bit and have a relaxing morning.  There was some work involved as there was ski cleaning and travel waxing to be done, getting classic skis ready for home.  I heard some unverified reports of unconventional waxing methods and reportedly Dom picked up a bit of slack . .

 

We were given space in the boathouse below the Lodge

so we were able to do lots of waxing on site.

 

 

 

The afternoon focus changed to skate skiing.  We all had the chance to ski the trails in the afternoon, with the athletes pre -skiing their courses for Sunday. The support crew got our own chance to head out on skis, including me.  Conditions were beautiful, around -2 and warming up to near zero, still with a firm base of snow.  Pauline and I did some exploring and we saw parts of the race course and also the view from up near the top on one of the upper trails.  It was a very therapeutic ski.

 

The afternoon was spent resting, with most of us napping a bit.  The team was showing signs of the long week but they were able to use their refocusing skills after the team meeting in the evening.  Last sleep tonight and last race tomorrow. 

Westerns day 4 classic sprint day

Another early morning.  6:00 breakfast. Off to the races!

Today was very similar in terms of temperatures and again some new snow falling.  We are falling into a good rhythm and have had some good fortune with our waxing.  All of the training skis were prepped with grip the previous evening which really save time and grip wax proved to be a good guess.

The Alan/Alex wax team are getting serious.  Alan, aka "wolverine" was given a fancy wax apron by a guy from the Saskatchewan team and he wore it with pride.  Alex, aka "rhino" joined wolverine at the start area with a wax table ready for touch ups between heats.

Sprint qualifiers went very well.  All made us proud.  Dom was fantastic and moved up to 14th, top 1/2 of his junior boys field.  Levi Nadlersmith was 3rd and Conor 7th in Juvenile (first juvenile 1 again).  Elora posted 7th fastest junior girl qualifier.  Ex winnipeg skier Sarah Tipples also top 10!

Heats were exciting.  Levi N made it to A finals and finished 4th, passing a skier in the last 30 feet of the race.  Conor won his B final which was an excellent birthday present for him.  Elora raced well in her B final.  And Sarah Tipples made it to the A final for juvenile girls! Dom had really bad luck in his heat, with his pole basket falling off in the first few pushes of the race.  He hung in for about 20 seconds until somebody handed him a greatly appreciated but sadly, very short pole.  This made for interesting technique.  Dom finished the race, much to his credit.

We enjoyed some very nice down time this afternoon and tonight. This included napping for some, and a bit of tobogganing for a few!  We celebrated Conor's birthday with cake and a seriously cheesy valentine's day card which served as a birthday card.  We sung badly and Conor blew out imaginary flames on his candles.  He apparently has a lot of girlfriends.

Time for sleep.  Ben races sprints tomorrow and the rest have a recovery day and pre ski for Sunday's skate race.

Westerns day 3 classic distance race day

So the racing began!  A whirlwind.  Test skis, keep records, touch up wax, wish good luck. . Good focus from the group.  Conditions mostly around -3 but up and down a bit all day.  Slightly colder up on the top half of the course.  And then there was the heavy heavy snow that practically rained down at one point of the day.  Well we found lots of grip but similar to many teams did not have quite the combination to also give good glide.  Team hung in and had some solid performances which EVERYONE should be proud of.  Levi N was 4th overall in juvenile boys, Conor a remarkable 8th and top juvenile 1 boy ( they are using a 2 year bracket for juvenile boys here), Lisle a fantastic 7th in juvenile girls.

Alan and Alex found their rhythm in the wax room and we have good plans involving a late night of waxing but a slightly different approach to grip waxing tomorrow . . .

Conor - top juvenile 1 boy today.

Westerns day 2- Training day

Waking up on Wednesday training day allowed us to see what a gorgeous setting we are in.  A large pine lodge which is part of  Ness Lake Bible Camp.  We are surrounded by huge pine trees and huge amounts of fluffy snow hanging everywhere.  The director of the camp was great to stay up and receive us when we finally rolled in close to 1:00 AM.  NOT a typo.  This brought our travelling day to almost 24 hours factoring in the time change.

The Waterfront Lodge, at Ness Bible Camp

View from our Lodge.  Not hard to take!

You were left hanging while we were in Vancouver airport last evening.  Here is a quick summary . . Propellor plane . .kind of small (foreshadow) . .dark, snowing, collect vans . .skis don't arrive . .fill out forms . .drive in dark . .rural roads . .Prince George doesn't seem to believe in clear road signs . .bad maps. . Not great directions . .Ben navigates us despite the factors against us . .small winding snowy roads . . .finally arrive!  Fall exhausted into bed.

How fortunate that we had that extra day thanks to Pauline's planning.  So we adjusted our plan to accommodate allowing the team to sleep for 8 hours and also to allow for a drive into PG to pick up the ski bags which thankfully did arrive eventually.  Bonus we now have a significant $$ amount from this further westjet inconvenience which will be applied to the next team trip.  Hmm.  Strange way to fundraise.

Well we finally got to the Caledonia Nordic club.  Wax trailer is good, sharing with Yellowknife and Saskatchewan.  Course is hilly, technical downhills, virtually no flat except for stadium area.  Similar to birch I am told,  "but harder".  LOTS of snow.  Snow to spare.  Apparently that's the norm for around here.  Learn to wax for piles of fresh snow to come here.

Pre- ski and rest was the focus of the day.

Westerns Prince George

Hello all.  Well, here we are, the intrepid team off to the great adventure of westerns!  The flight time for this morning was dismally early but everyone arrived at the airport at 4:45 AM to begin sorting and weighing ski bags.  Strangely there was a REALLY BIG LINE UP to check in and we found out that the reason was a cancelled flight to Vancouver.  Yes, our flight.  Now in order to keep our group together (13 of us) we had to wait until 4:45 PM (NOT a typo).  We mostly handled this information with grace, plus or minus groaning and with a healthy helping of disbelief (last phrase stolen directly from Alan).

Pauline swung into full super manager mode.  In short order we had secured food vouchers for 2 meals each and 5 hotel rooms at the nearby Four Points hotel.  We watched the Olympic sprints on our devices over breakfast and discovered that Alan had an uncanny instinct for choosing what he thought would be the sprint winners.  Unfortunately for the first 3 heats this proved disastrous for each and every skier he chose, with Alan's pick either crashing or finishing last!  Alan redeemed himself on the men's final by backing the winning Norwegian.

We then headed over to get some rest.  Most of us slept for at least a few hours and Alex claims to have reached REM sleep state.  Go Alex!

Well . . . .the day passed one way or another and it was a very long one.  This update comes to you from Vancouver airport at 8:00 PM local time, 10:00 PM Winnipeg time. . .one hour until we can finally get on the plan to PG. 

 

And here we are finally at Prince George airport close to midnight.

Easterns day 5

This is Elora reporting on our last day of races

sorry if this doesn't make sense. Im tired.

This morning the other junior girls and myself had another ideal start time of 12:05. Today was the first and only classic race and also the only mass start. Pulling out of the parkade this morning I noticed it had snowed overnight. Alot. According to Fiona approximately 15-20 cms. Unlike how Winnipeg looks after a dump of snow this big.Ottawa was all slush and puddles and looked like Winnipeg in April. These conditions proved for trying and difficult classic race conditions. The majority of the course was covered in a couple inches of loose snow and the tracks were non existent over a lot of the course. The wax team did an amazing job today and nailed the wax.

Certain parts of the 5km course which I believe everyone with the exception of the midgets skied, proved to be very challenging. In particular a certain downhill called dirk's dive. If you think the black diamond hill is steep, think again. This hill starts off as a gradually downhill on a tight turn and then gives the illusion of flattening out but instead drops. Like a rollercoaster. Your gut drops and you can actually get some air.I skied this course yesterday in my skate race and had a very big wipe out halfway down the hill after loosing my balance on loose snow. Today I approached it terrified of falling again only to watch the 6 girls in front of me wipeout at the bottom. Sadly I did not make it past the pile of human carnage scrambling on the ground on my feet and I joined them in about a foot of powder snow. The second time round my 5km I came to a complete stop before plunging down this hill and managed to pick a side with less loose snow. I didn't fall and it was a very happy moment. I felt like screaming at the officials and spectators "DID YOU SEE ME NOT FALL??" Others had similar experiences with this hill and cam describes it as "dangerous and horrible" and Simon apparently has some good stories about it as well. Megan plans on skiing it tomorrow morning as she is heading out to get a feel for Nakkertok seeing as she never got on course. Goodluck Megan.

Everyone faired well in their races and some of us discovered we are surprisingly good at climbing hills considering we come from Manitoba, and we passed some Nakkertok athletes climbing in their home territory. I know we are all happy we don't have any more races and really gave it our all while trying to eat our full plates of burgers and fries tonight.

Big thank you to our entire support team, Megan, Pauline, Betsy, Lorne and Joel. We hope we didn't drive you too crazy.

Elora

Anna's finish

Dom climbing

Elora finishing

group picture on the podium

Maya

Sam

Karly and Claire

(Photos stolen from Pauline)

Easterns day 4

Anna Kroeker

Aaaaand day two of racing is a success!

The races were staggered throughout the morning and afternoon, giving the majority of the group (save the younger skiers, who raced at four yesterday, but were up bright and early this morning to race starting at nine) time to sleep and have a nice breakfast before heading out to the course at appropriate times for their individual races. The clubhouse was even more packed today, and we didn't even manage to get a parking spot, Betsy having to swear up and down that she would come back out after delivering us athletes to the course. 

In the morning before my race I was was hoping to be able to fix the problem of my baskets spinning due to lack of glue on the baskets and grips, and was lent a glue gun and helped immensely by the coach of another club when he found me trying to use a roll of duct tape as a last minute solution. It really gave me a nice warm fuzzy "I hope I destroy his racers on the course" feeling. (Honestly though, his generosity made my day, I hope karma gave his skiers an extra boost or that he found 20$ or a tube of HF powder on the ground.)

The second day marks the start of the distance races, something that more of our racers are comfortable with, compared to the medium distance not quite sprint, not quite distance race yesterday. The distances today were between 5 km and 10 km, two loops of 2.5 for midget girls and boys, one grueling 5 km loop for the junior and juvenile girls, two loops of a 3.75 for the junior and juvenile boys, and two loops of the five for Maya. The five kilometer loop features some killer hills, (imagine looking at a wall) and all of our skiers did incredibly well, and maintained good spirits before and after the race. The wax techs continue to work their magic, the skis carrying all of us down the hills at breakneck speed. The one hill very aptly named "Dirks Dive" a hill that gives you a feeling comparable to dropping off the edge of the earth or going down a roller coaster was a source of great success for Cam, who achieved his goal of getting air off the top. (The rest of us were just praying to stay on our feet and keep out stomachs inside our bodies.)

Levi discovered the invaluable information that the volunteers in the food tent don't mind of the hard working athletes take a larger portion of the food offered, and loaded up on cheese curds and brownies, much to the delight of everyone in his general vicinity.

Even longer races tomorrow, a classic mass start, which should bring great excitement with the large age categories.

some pictures of today courtesy of Pauline