Nationals Part Two

Better late than never, right?

The last two races of Nationals ended up being rather poor results, leaving me without the motivation to write about them. No one enjoys hearing about bad things so I will keep this brief.

The third race of Nationals was a 15 kilometer individual start classic race. To make things interesting the race started at noon, when the temperature was into the 40's making the snow soft and slow. I finished fifth for juniors and 27th overall. Despite this result being well below what I wanted I was still happy with my effort and how I handled the warm conditions.

The final race of the week was a classic sprint in similar warm conditions to the 15k. Similar to the first sprint of the week I had a bad qualifier and did not make the open heats. However, there were heats for juniors that did not make the open heats so I went ahead and  competed in those. The heats were going well up until I broke a pole in the final leading me to end in fourth.

Although this week was far from what I wanted in terms of results I can still take some positives away from the trip. My performances can mostly be blamed on my inexperience with racing at altitude and I certainly learned some lessons for next time. Along with this, I find losing to be motivating which will help ensure a productive training block before worlds.

Moving forward, I will be training in Anchorage for the next month before leaving for junior worlds in Norway. I plan on keeping this time mellow and focused on preparing for Norway so there might not be another blog for a little while.