Nationals wrap up Thunder Bay March 2015

CLASSIC SPRINTS: THURSDAY March 19

I left you on our training day before classic sprints, so I will pick up from there.  In the evening of our training day, our 2 incredible host couples cooked up a feast for us and treated us like royalty!  Not only did they open up their homes to our team, now they were cooking us feasts!  Cam Roe summed it all up very well with a big grin on his face . . . " I am soo happy!"

Feast for Kings and Queens!

Next up was the classic sprint day for younger age groups (open men and women went the day before).  In a word: awesome!

We had more good weather, with temperatures around -6 at the start of the day.  The snow remained coarse grained and icy but the groomers did another great job of preparing the trails.

The team raced well in the qualification rounds. Levi N and Conor made it through to the quarter final heats (all age groups take the top 30 skiers to advance to the heats).  Simon put in a great race and ended up 31st, a mere .07 seconds from a spot in the heats.  5 spots ahead of Simon all within 1 second.  Sooo close!  Great job Simon!  Conor qualified with 13th fastest juvenile boys time, within 3 seconds ahead of him were 7 finishers,  and 4 more behind him within 1 second. Levi N qualified with the 11th fastest junior boys time.

Advancing to the heats meant more waxing for our ever capable gurus - Andrew and Alan.  It was great to see Alan looking so pro in the stadium area with his Team Toba wax apron. 




Caution: wax guru

Sprint touch-ups in the stadium.

 Heats were VERY exciting.  By then temperatures had climbed up to about +2. Levi N moved from his semi-finals to the A finals as "lucky loser".  If you look at the zone 4 results you will see that the top 5 of 6 skiers all had faster times than the first place skier of the next semi final.  In his A final, he came from behind at the start and gradually moved his way up in the field, finishing 3rd at the line (and 2nd for national championships because the winner is actually a visiting Norwegian). 

Conor had a very solid quarter final race, finishing a comfortable 2nd place.  He also had a good second place finish in his semi final which qualified him for the A final!  He skied into a 5th place finish with great tactics, just 2 seconds shy of a medal.  Well done!

The team did some good relaxing after races were over for the day, including more sauna action and some good rest and recovery.  We also piled into the vans in the evening to attend the awards ceremony for Levi N and Conor.  We arrived in plenty of time and got good seats up front to support them! 

En route home we stopped for a few quick groceries.  In the aisle of Safeway, Alan announced "Pauline, we are out of treats for the snack room, er, the wax room".  And some non organic non-quinoa items were added to the cart :)


Levi on far right, blue toque

Conor Sprint podium

Levi Sprint podium



 

SKATE TRAINING DAY: FRIDAY March 20
One week home and this day seems a little fuzzy.  I know we made the switch from classic to skate skis in the wax room, and that the team all got out for a pre-ski of the course before lunch.  The team had the bonus of having both Tim Wintoniw (with the boys) and Andrew (with the girls) provide their technical expertise and tactical tips during the ski.

During the afternoon, Simon, Elora and I met up with Sean to go and see the Lakehead University campus.  We were just in time to join an official tour and Sean was pressed into service as one of the LU ski team guides as well.  Sarah Tipples also joined us to check out future possibilities for combining high level ski racing with University.


FINAL RACE DAY: SATURDAY March 21

Well we came to our last race of  Nationals and the weather dipped down significantly. -16 on race morning!  This was the first Nationals in at least 5 years that we have not finished the week of racing with a slush fest and so the cold was most welcome. 

Open men and women started the day with their 50km and 30 km races and a significant number of male racers were heard openly regretting their lack of sufficient wind panelling during their races.  Our crew had a later start which allowed things to warm up somewhat.  It was really not feeling much like March.

Junior boys and girls were first off the mark.  82 junior boys and 54 junior girls lined up for their respective mass starts.  It was pretty darned crazy.  The course was very congested on the first few km especially, and those not in the first few had to slow down to a walk as skiers reached a bottleneck up the first significant climb.  Levi N went down fairly early in his race and the first time I saw him a few km in, he was sitting in about 30th place.  He was to fall a second time in the first of two 7.5 km laps.  His second lap was epic, as he made his way back up through the pack to cross the line 11th.  Check the zone 4 results and you will see his lap 2 split was 4th fastest.  Now THAT's how to refocus and get back on task!

 Levi W put in a really strong race and had his best finish of the week, 48th of 80 with a very strong lap 2 (43rd).  Also very proud of Cam as he gritted it out to finish the 15 km skate. And still smiling too.

The junior girls race was equally crazy, according to Elora.  Poles were broken, people fell left and right, poles were grabbed (and yanked) and Elora had to lift a foot to clear a fallen skier.  She stayed on her feet for the duration of the race!   She looked strong each time I saw her, and she finished with former Red River Nordic skier Sarah Tipples just seconds ahead of her.  Lisle skied a gritty race ("We are Strong. We are grit." ;) and posted a strong 11th place finish.  Top 10 if you remove the Norwegian skiing for Edmonton Nordic!! 

The juvenile boys race later in the afternoon was a similar festival of broken equipment.  Conor started strongly but had a fall early on in the first lap.  He broke a pole.  The first replacement pole he was given had a bad strap; the second time he asked for a new pole he got the wrong size.  He finally got an acceptable pole on the 3rd try.  Meanwhile some bad sportsmanship from a competitor fuelled him to an epic come back all the way from about 28th to finish his first lap in 13th and climb up to a 7th overall finish of 73 racers.  He just needed a bit more time! 

Simon and Lucas, meanwhile, were experiencing the exposed icy corners and were fighting for their race.  Simon took a hard fall and hit his head.  He showed great determination as he re-focused and continued the race to finish strongly.  Lucas managed to avoid adversity and raced a steady race, finishing in 64th place.

The evening saw everyone cleaned up and at the Awards Banquet.  A highlight of course was
seeing Levi N accept his second overall award for aggregate points in junior boys 1998 birth year. Toba Pride!

Another evening highlight for 5 of 8 team members was something that passed for "dancing".  This consisted of  5% of the space in a very large room being used for a whole heck of a lot of people all pressed together with sweat, jumping up and down.  Three of them ran away when I went over to speak to them. I think I broke some kind of code by going too close - what, with some grey hair showing and all.

And now the season ends . . looking forward to a summer of hard work and even more great racing next year!  Congratulations to the team for some seriously good results this year.

Simon looking determined.

Lucas

Some of the crew as viewed from the take out window.

Cam passing through the stadium

Conor looking for speed.

Conor

Levi looking bright in his Games gear

Pony tails flying.  Mass start Junior girls skate race.
Lisle is in Team Toba neon near the elbow of bib 203.

A flying Lucas

Elora looking smooth!

 

 

 

Elora getting ready for cold mass start on skate day.


 

 

Thunder Bay Nationals

Hello from my very comfortable resting spot on this training day for junior racers.  Most of the team have gone into Thunder Bay to hit a few ski stores but I have elected to chill out for a bit.

Our team has been extremely fortunate to be hosted at 2 private homes as described in the last blog post.  This last minute change of accomodations has benefitted the whole team in many ways. The short drive time has made shuttles to and from the ski venue very easy and has resulted in more sleep for everyone, and better use of rest times this week.  The team has also taken advantage of the sauna and have replace recovery hot and cold baths with alternating sauna and snow burials.  Some of the team have had slight colds and so eucalyptus oil added to the sauna steam has been a nice addition!

Team bonding Finnish style!

Andrew and our host Roy chat at that back of the house.

The more painful part of the sauna recovery routine.

Sean in classic distance race yesterday. 
A fantastic 10th in junior men!

Levi looking powerful in classic
race yesterday.

Lisle at the top of "The Grunt".  Looking strong!!!
 

We have now done 2 of the 4 individual races for the week.  Tomorrow it will be the classic sprints!  The conditions have been very good.  There is still plenty of snow here and the weather is staying reasonably cold this week.  Classic tracks have been great, getting very cold at night. The grooming machines are breaking up the ice and mixing it in with the crystals of icy snow so it has been straight klister.

We have a good amount of wall space in our room of the wax trailer which is nice.  Some years we have really been squeezed into tight spaces so this is much appreciated.  We have a new start wax bench which is AMAZING! (anyone who has gone shoulder to shoulder at our smaller Swix table will know what it would mean to have more space).  Andrew and Alan make a great team. Both like a very tidy work space and everything is well organized.  We have a window that looks out to the area where athletes convene to wait for their equipment .  This has become something like a take out window and we have been known to ask "would you like poutine or a smoothie with your skis?"

The team are racing very well and have been mostly happy with their efforts.  It is great to see young skiers like Lucas with such focus at his first nationals. He is taking in every detail and learning every chance he gets.  Cam has great enthusiasm with his races! He was spotted cooling down for a lengthy period on the 1 km loop after yesterday's race, smiling and soaking it all in.  Simon is settling into racing and showing good focus with lots of excellent technical questions.  Elora has been networking and is currently trying to find a way to be adopted into a Norwegian family, using her Edmonton. Nordic contacts.

We have had some amazing results so far and people are making more and more comments about Manitoba.  As of today, aggregate standings for birth years have both Levi N and Conor in 4th place and Lisle in 6th.   This is outstanding!

Andrew has been a ton of fun in addition to being extremely knowledgable.  He has a great sense of humour  and most of the team still can't tell when he is joking.  He played a trick on the team at an early team meeting and pretended to be upset for being levied a fine for Manitoba skiers going the wrong direction on a trail. Now this is actually a real punishable crime but our team had not in fact been singled out in front of the whole meeting as Andrew outlined.  Conor was quite white as he listened to Andrew, and it took him some time to process when Andrew could not continue his ruse any longer and started to laugh.

To cap off our great day yesterday, we arrived back to Surprise Lake last night to a wonderful display of Northern Lights.  We all went down onto the Lake to enjoy the show along with the beautiful bright stars.  We have enjoyed the dark night skies out here, unobscured by city lights.

Today we were out at Lappe preparing for the classic sprints.  We walked the trails as a team and got a thorough review of the course from Andrew.  It was a great opportunity to see the open categories ski the course and watch how they skillfully handled corners and track changes.



Megan

The welcoming committee of host family dogs (plus a neighbor!)

Would you like fries with that?? Wax room take out window.

Klister anyone?





 

Nationals day 1+2

This is Conor and Lucas (aka birthday boy) reporting lakeside in our beautiful accommodations.

Yesterday we departed from Windsor Park around 8 in the morning. Our drive was for the most part uneventful with some minor paranoia around getting hit by a truck (not sure about the cause of this) and a stop at a lovely little bakery in vermillion with amazing calzones. We arrived around 5 in the afternoon (T-Bay time) at two houses near Lappe.

Our accommodations so far have been pretty incredible. We're staying in two houses within 100m of each other situated on Surprise Lake. The guys are in one house, the girls in another. Both houses are absolutely stunning and we have 5 dogs between the 2 houses (including a duck toller who brought back a dead walleye the other day). The major advantage to our accommodations is that they're literally 8 minutes away from the Nordic center (which the Juvie boys are pretty happy about considering our previous accommodations were an hour away from Lappe and we have a 9:20 start time tomorrow).

Today we all pre-skied our courses for tomorrow (short distance skate interval start). The juvenile boys (Simon, Lucas and Conor) and the Junior Girls (Elora and Lisle) will race 5km. The Junior Boys (the Levis and Cam) race 10km. We're all on the same 5km loop (with the exception of a small hill the Juvie Boys cut out on their course). The course starts with a small climb out of the stadium, then loops back and goes back through the stadium. It then takes a sharp right hander and climbs a short but steep climb to a little ridge about the stadium. There's then a long, fast (but not too technical), downhill, which leads into the course's first major climb, Klukie line (about 1.5 km into the course). Klukie line is long and gradual, not crazy steep but long enough to really burn out your legs if you attack it too much. After that there's 2 small rolling hills, a long descent, which leads into about 1.5km of fairly easy rolling terrain. Don't be fooled by the easy flat section, however, for it leads into the infamous "Pilon's" and "The pretty self-explanatory name. Only about 150m, it's steepness is deadly. What makes the Grunt so hard is that it's at the end of your race and it's right after Pilon's. After the grunt there's about 150m of flat, then a quick downhill with a right hander into the finishing stretch.

After pre-skiing we returned home and kept it pretty mellow for the rest of the afternoon. Dinner was a coconut curry with brown rice, which we devoured while watching snowmobilers take jumps on the lake.
 Grunt". Pilon's is long and steep, about 400m the only relief comes in a short, slightly less steep section in the middle of the hill. At the top of Pilon's, there's a very fast downhill into "The Grunt". "The Grunt" is a
Well, that's been the first two days of Nationals 2015, folks. Rumour has it that they've been clearing a track on the lake, and there will be some car racing on the ice, so we wouldn't want to miss that.


This is Conor and Lucas signing off

Canada Games

I think I speak for everyone when I say that Team Manitoba had an amazing time at Canada Games. Unfortunately we were too busy to update the blog while we were there. Here are some highlights and pictures from the games.

We flew out on the disney plane which was kinda cool and also a bit weird since we were not going to Disney land. We had a charter flight with all team Manitoba and we arrived early afternoon.

The next day we pre skied the two classic courses. The courses at Otway were fun. They call one of the upper sections the race maze and that is exactly what it is. It was up and down and then back up and down over and over. It was fast and icy and the corners were a little scary and had me worried I was going to fly off a ledge if I didn't step turn fast enough.

One of the highlights from the trip included the synchronized swimming team coming out and cheering for our whole team on our mass start skate race. Going by them on the course was like going by a giant wall of yellow. They screamed their heads off and were ringing their cowbells like crazy. They are very good at cheering and I somehow found the energy to hop skate when I went by them. Thank you synchro team! We also went to watch the team synchro finals on our off day and we were very impressed by them and by their ability to smile during their entire routine.

Also congratulations to Jesse and his guide Brendan on their Silver and Bronze medals! Watching them ski together was really cool to watch.

Pin trading was very intense at the games. Some people like Maya were highly skilled at it and managed to fill their entire accreditation lanyard up. Some pins were of such high value people were trading them away for jackets and hats. I was not very good at pin trading because I kept accidentally letting cute little kids rip me off.

The Manitoba ski team ate better than any other team there. Pauline worked her magic and we had quinoa to eat every race day! What is a trip without quinoa. The cooks also provided us with a blender and Pam made smoothies for the whole team for breakfast. They had a chocolate milk tap there as well and I don't think I've ever drank more chocolate milk in my life. Lisle also enjoyed the food and rumor has it she ate 13 donuts after our last race.

The athlete lounge was in a big library which was pretty nice. Lisle says her favourite part of the games was the life size jenga game. When it was staacked really high it was proabably 8 or 9 feet tall. I think Lisle probably liked this game so much because we were playing it with some BC snowboarders.

The library was also a good place to relax and do homework, I managed to get some done but I think there was too much stuff going on and a few people are a tad behind on school work now. I also decided to write this blog right now instead of doing the stack of homework I have and I will proabbly find something else "important" to do after this.

On the team relay day the girls did 4x3.75km and the boys 4x5km. The whole team dressed up with face paint, ribbon and hairspray. Both teams did really well in the relays each coming in 6th place. When the girls finished we painted TOBA! onto our stomachs and went out to cheer for the boys. We were also able to spell BOAT! when we rearranged ourselves which was also very useful.I was the exclamation mark.

After the closing ceremonies we had a few hours to trade gear with the other provinces. It was a very stressful few hours. Everyone was after the Yukon jackets. I was not persuasive enough to get one of them, and I had to send other people to do my trades and charm people out of their clothing. If you see a whole bunch of skiers around in Yukon, Quebec and BC jackets and hats, its actually just the Manitoba ski team.

Thank you especially to our great coaches and support team! Everything went really smoothly our skis were fast and everyone was happy, you are the best.

here is a link to a video I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLleW6i9gnY
Apparently the video is not working on mobile. I will work on this. It should work on computers or laptops. mobile link this second link should work for mobile
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Elora

bus selfie

me and the synchro team cheering squad

spotted on TSN