I was really looking forward to the classic race, because it had been a while since I had done an individual classic race, and I like to think of them as my specialty. The race went pretty well for me, the conditions were new, dry, soft snow, so for the whole race I focused on skiing smooth and gliding lots. The course was a pretty easy course, and I usually like to start out slow for these types of races but I think that maybe that was a mistake for this race. The course was so easy I had trouble pushing myself, and by the end I felt like I hadn't even started the race yet, I wasn't tired at all! But I still had a pretty good result; I placed 4th Junior, just 5 sec off the podium. I also got 59 FIS points for the race, which is quite a bit better than my previous record! Last year I placed 28th Junior in the OPA Cup I did so this has definitely been an improvement!
Sunday's sprint race was about average for me. Sprinting is not really my specialty, so I wasn't expecting too much from this race. I felt really sluggish in the qualifier and ended up qualifying in 16th position. In my quarterfinal I had a pretty bad start, and was trailing the rest of the field by a about 5 meters just 50 meters into the race, but I worked my way back into the group and up to 5th place on the course's one big uphill. I got into a good position for the big downhill and built up a lot of speed drafting the person ahead of me, and at the bottom of the hill I tried to use that speed to slingshot around some of the other guys, but ended up getting boxed in. But with just 200meters left in the race, two people ahead of me got tangled up and fell. I ended up 3rd in my heat, and was less than half a second short of moving trough to the semifinals.
Tomorrow we are off to Italy for one more weekend of OPA Cup races!
David
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