Anyone who raced a Michigan Cup race this winter knew Dave’s game was even surprising him at times. When he showed up fresh as a daisy and scored a clunker (for Dave!) of a first race (30k skate), he was mentally rattled. He could not explain a 13th place finish, which was about 4 minutes behind Milan, 6th fastest American, 47 finishers. For perspective, any of the rest of us would get out the champagne and have a tough time concentrating on the rest of the week after a 13th place at World Masters. Dave had a tough nights sleep Sunday night, and with Sunday’s 30k still in his legs, he lined up for the 10k FS race Monday. Dave popped a fast smart race and found the lead pack of four all the way. He moved around 3rd place Gianni Penasa from you guessed it Italy, just at the beginning of the finishing sprint, I mean straight. Duchampt (FRA) took it by 1.7 sec, Kent Murdoch (USA) took Silver, and Big Mac was 1.7 sec behind Kent for a WORLD MASTERS BRONZE MEDAL ! Despite the best racers of the Michigan Cup going to this meet every year for a long time, this is the first INDIVIDUAL podium finish by a Michigan skier that anyone knew of. By the way, at the finish, Gianni was 5.3 sec back in 4th, and I can tell you that 1 thru 4 looked even tighter than the clock showed! Extremely exciting finish, and way to go Dave, a huge payoff for a lot of smart training & work over a long time! A true pleasure to witness! Spectacular.
Dave qualified for the Wednesday relay which was a good thing. First two legs are classic, with Milan skiing the 2nd leg, Dave was 3rd and Kent Murdoch closed it for another Bronze medal for Dave and his M04 relay team! Pretty awesome stuff to see, it was completely exciting. 12 minutes for an advertised 5ks. A very nice worlds Dave, congrats!
It is completely unlike all the other races in every way. It’s not at all like the Birkie, which I was kind of expecting. At the Birkie we see some foreigners in some weird suits and some fast skiers. At World Masters I saw 160 Russian skiers in National Team kit (the World Cup suits with Lukoil headgear). They had coaches and wax techs who didn’t appear to even be skiing (cigarettes). Not a couple, heaps of these guys.
Not tons of Scandinavians, but they were all fast, especially classic, monster fast classic in every single age group. There were 600 Americans and 600 foreigners so you really saw more foreigners because they are obvious to the eye. Some of these people you can barely communicate with (for example a Siberian who is from Baikal, and that is the full extent of that chat), and others you can carry on a multi-day conversation with about anything from their World Cup skiers to occupations and how it is to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain as a child of East Germany. That was a cool chat. Many of these people look like they are still on the World Cup circuit, both around town, and on skis. I found it to be completely intimidating, making me want to slink back to Hanson Hills for something I knew I could handle.
Did you read Ian Harvey’s writeups on fasterskier? He wrote that he has been to the Olympics, he has National titles, he spent 2 years on the USST and 4 yrs on US Biathlon, and he has been exposed to the highest levels of the sport, and he found that this was the most thrilling racing, and highly competitive too. Even Harv had a tough time making the podium, and didn’t always succeed!
That says a lot about the level of game at World Masters, and Stephen and I lined up next to Harv and the people who beat him, every race. You just gotta try to keep your cool and not psych yourself out before you start, which for me was a challenge. I felt in over my head almost the whole time.
The Russians are paid to travel, paid to podium, and there are no doping controls. They ski over and thru others, needlessly, almost for sport, even over skiers in other age groups as they lap.
This meet format is completely unique, and I had found it hard to follow in past years, trying to decipher the results. There are three distances that you register to race; 30k, 10k & 45k. Women and some groups with more experience go: 15k, 10k & 30k. You select skate or classic for each one. You don’t get to do both disciplines for one distance. There are 5 yr age groups, so there are 12 mens and 12 womens age groups. This means there are at least 24 starts for each race distance. LOTS of races going off! The age groups begin with 01, age 30, and go up in 5 yr increments, so I am age 40 in M03.
You have to pay attention to your start list which tells you when to be in the start area, skis selected, training in the can, best attempt at waxing behind you, fuel tanks topped up, ready to rumble the best you can.
The age groups are started sequentially sometimes in ascending order, other races it’s descending order. What this means on the snow is this; I was just over a lap (16k) into my 30k CL race, when the M04 mens leader a Russian with a World Cup name (Sergei Ivanov) blazed thru. I had spotted this guy 10 minutes at the start stagger, so that means that he was roughly a minute per km faster than I was! He was 20 minutes faster than me after the finish at 30k (which I guess means that we held our paces with respect to each other? Ugh, I went the same slowness but consistently.). Usually the leaders are up ahead of me. It was hard on my mental state to see how slow I really am compared to this guy, and how much faster it is possible to go on skis, in the same race, in the same place, at the same time. I actually traveled several miles before seeing the Russian in second and the Norwegian (who lives in Vermont) in 3rd place, which had a repeat effect on my psyche. It looked like these guys were doing a different sport!
30k CL race, Saturday March 1 Weather: lots of fresh falling snow at the worst possible temp, 32f, altitude somewhere around 4500’, this was not what I signed up for Pre-race we all had plenty of time to fret over all possible combinations and possibilities. Early rumours were hairies, but also people were on multi’s, zeroes hairied as well as regular skis harried, crowns, straight hardwax, straight klister unbelievably, and klister covered with hardwax. Every combo except skate skis. It was extremely difficult to get kick with anything that didn’t ice. I tried every possible method on my hardwax skis before bailing to the klister skis, and I went with a coldish hardwax which still had to be covered against icing and went with it because it seemed a smart, safe choice. It still wanted to ice, it kicked ok in testing but I wanted glide. I iced up at the top of the highest climb on the course which was a chilly spot. I was able to kick it off mostly but I seemed to still be partially iced up on the glides downhill (grabby), thus I didn’t have free glide.
Immediately at the start it was clear that my skis were inexplicably slow. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t have any choice but to just fight it out as hard as I could and make the most of the race. Due to 480 skiers doing two laps, the tracks didn’t merely glaze, they “ice rinked.”
Stephen was also on klister covered with hardwax and he skied a fabulous race, into 12th place! Dale Niggeman (USA) skied into 4th place overall also on klister covered with hardwax. Therefore it was one of those mysteries of ski racing as to why I didn’t seem to have kick nor glide but I did have a couple good climbs along the way, and I really went hard as heck, but it was tough to be 10 minutes behind Stephen, who was about 30 seconds from a Top 10! Nice race Stephen! Worlds were off to a good start for him, after a good solid Birkie (just over 200th place there). He exclaimed that it was his best classic race in years, and it was good to see.
10k FS, Monday March 3
Weather; World Cup style skate lane, fast sunny & fun
I went for broke, tried to hang onto the back of the lead pack. Got spit out for sure at the top of the first long grinder at 3k. Lost contact, fought home with stragglers, got popped at the sprint finish. 23rd place out of 42 finishers. Skis felt about 95% which reminds me that it seems like nobody with decent results has bad skis here, at least in front of me, and you have to have a solid day if you want to perform. It was thrilling doing a (non-certified) 10k course in 26:45, which basically means the wind is whipping the whole time and I wish I could ski faster but it seemed like it was just a few minutes of really fast skiing, as quickly as I could go, and maybe have ever gone. Felt pretty good about it. Was disappointed to not get Top 20. Tough crowd!
45k FS, Friday, March 7
Weather: again world cup style grooming/trail conditions, fast overcast but warming & fun
Again I went for broke, there is just no reason to ski conservatively here in my last race of the winter and my last race at the Idaho Worlds. I was very careful to take hours to pick the right skis. Early on, the cold skis were clear winners, but even though it was single digits overnight the daytimes were warming up even without the sunshine. I was careful to continue two ski testing on the course right till start time, to make sure I had the right skis because I had seen what a major selection skis were making in every race. JD told me to test skis on the course because the snow was very different there than on the test tracks where most skiers were.
Lined up next to Harv again, getting used to it. Had a gold medalist from Germany right behind me. Nearly got pinned to a Ponderosa Pine by an American as we entered the forest. I hit both the tree and the other guy at the same time (Thanks!) however I did not get spun out or hurt, which would have been really bad.
Repeat of before, I could not quite hang onto the lead pack thru 3k, then the downhills came and they left me alone with a handful of stragglers for the remaining 42k. After a month’s worth of waxing that week plus all the racing, I had wondered on lap two if I could finish Lap 3. I was really not sure, but I knew if I backed off that I would lose ground, so I stayed focused but was getting really tired & stumbly and just didn’t feel too good anymore, nor did I feel very fast. The skis seemed to go better as it warmed so it was good to know that the skis were as good as possible.
I got into the finish lanes with two fellow M03 age groupers for a raucous 3 lane sprint, which I was able to “win” by the barest of margins, for a 29th place out of 46 finishers. I was 2:02 for a reportedly short 45k, about 18 mins behind the champ, and even Harv missed the podium taking a 5th, and was 1m 45s back. Hard to know what to say about the result. I skied hard & got smoked, basically.
Most people stayed in a condo. We split it between 6 people, like many others, which was affordable ($140 per). When we arrived, UP GRNST’ers Mike Keenan & Kathy Marietti had spaghetti dinner awaiting us, and another surprise was the nationwide flu epidemic was already resident on our condo before we arrived. By the time we left, 3 of us seemed to have the flu, two had a cold & cough. I stayed healthy till the crappy night’s sleep after arriving home, when two times zones plus spring-ahead gave me the cough & cold. The condo was pretty cool though, we had a small garage that we rigged up completely for ski waxing, which is where some of us spent MOST of our free time during the week. McCall has foxes running all over the place, they would even come right up to the door for handouts!
For those like me who didn’t realize that flying to a week of ski races is not nearly the same as packing the car, you only get 50#, plus a ski bag, plus the “aha” bonus pack which is an alpine ski boot bag where my wax stuff went, so where does the wax bench come in? It is actually pretty tough to pack everything you need with no room for extras, and make sure it is secure against breakage. When we got off the first plane, we saw our ski bags being thrown into the bottom of a cargo bin. I do stress the word thrown. Randy is looking into an aluminum bench & legs. Mainly it’s the legstand that is the problem. Most benches travel alright but you still gotta put it on something, and it’s not the dining room table with 6 people in the condo. We constructed several sawbuck tables and bought more lights, only to discover a REALLY weak electrical circuit so the lights flickered, for hours on end...
When you aren’t racing, eating, sleeping, cooking or waxing you are crewing for the others on your off days; bottle feeds, helping with pre-race things, cheering, etc. So it was fun to invest some effort into Randy Bladel’s 45k CL race on Thursday under epic Rocky Mtn conditions. He was 18th place, second American, and just THREE seconds away from 1st American. It was a sweet race.
As the week progressed, Stephen’s 30k CL 12th place became more apparent as a really outstanding race.
It is not clear who is who out there. We are ostensibly racing for the USA but you can’t tell who our people are while skiing. When you are cheering on the others, you want to say, “Go get em that guy is dying up there!” but unless it’s somebody you know you can’t ID them. The Russians are easy to spot in their National Team suits. When you are working with a group, you have to try to say, “Are you American?” and then trust the answer. Sometimes I would press further and ask what state the other guy is from, but we were all out of breath all the time & communicating was very tough. Mostly the Euros want to just drop you. Mostly there isn’t a lot of working together like we do a lot of here, the others try to drop you, and sometimes they die trying, pull off not to be seen again. Sometimes they do re-emerge, then do it again.
Beth Heiden is now Beth Reid, who spent some time up in Houghton and know’s Tom & Bobbi Wood. Beth is a monster fast 48 yr old with Factory Team gear. She took 3 Individual Golds and a relay Gold. Beth had the fastest CL leg of all womens relays – just 5k’s yet over a minute lead! She won her 30k FS race by 5 minutes, which is largest gap I saw all week in all races. She is still impressive.
Next Worlds is France. Amy & I are not going, but we may ski the classic Birkie, and then go the 2010 Worlds in Falun Sweden. 2011 is Canada, either Silver Star or Canmore. See you there, and maybe Falun too. It’s expensive, challenging & fun when it goes well(ish).
No pics. Our camera died while on the trip, my computer died just before that, and besides Kenny Dawson has plenty of them on muha’s site. So how did the Black Mtn race go and the Hanson Hills makeup race, and the awesome Boyne race weekend go?
See you at the relays if I can shake the cold.
OY to ya till a long time from now, it was a good season, see you next season otherwise,
DT
GRNST Newsletter #16, 02-4-08
GRNST Newsletter #15, 01-30-08
GRNST Newsletter #14, 01-21-08
GRNST Newsletter #13, 01-15-08
Check your email
GRNST Newsletter #12, 01-10-08(PDF)
Don Camp is having surgery tomarrow(1-8-2008)
GRNST Newsletter #11, 12-18-07(PDF)
GRNST Newsletter #10, 11-30-07(PDF)
Latest GRNST Newsletter 11-12-07(PDF)
Latest GRNST Newsletter 11-08-07(PDF)
Latest GRNST Newsletter 11-05-07
Latest GRNST News Letter 10-17-07(pdf)
Provin Challenge Series Is Complete
Other Workouts
Sten-Jen Clinic, Cliff Notes Courtesy of Ernie
Latest GRNST News Letter 9-24-07(pdf)
Team Suit Sizing Chart
Gotta like all the in between sizes, that’s new. Many of you have already sized yourselves and if you submitted it, I have it on file. Thank you. If not, please do so.
New GRNST Race Suit, email or call Dell to place your order
Latest GRNST News Letter 9-19-07(pdf)
There are seven spots left open for the Sten Fieldheim Clinic on October 6 & 7 this year.(9-19)
Latest GRNST News Letter(pdf)
Sten/Jen Clinic
When: Date: Oct 6/7
Place: Grand Rapids Area - Venue still to be determined
Cost: $150/person
Max: 30 skiers
What: Video Analysis of skating technique (maybe double pole and double pole kick)
How to get the most out of your training
Strength Training and What to Do.
Hill Work
Please let me know within the next two weeks of your interest @ ernie.brumbaugh@accessbusinessgroup.com, as we will advertsie to the general ski population after that.