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!
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| Team bonding Finnish style! |
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| Andrew and our host Roy chat at that back of the house. |
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The more painful part of the sauna recovery routine. A fantastic 10th in junior men!  race yesterday.  |
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
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| The welcoming committee of host family dogs (plus a neighbor!) |
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| Would you like fries with that?? Wax room take out window. |
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| Klister anyone? |
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