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