travels: 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