Photo by Bill GreerThe 15km Skate race.
This was a pretty decent race for me. I used my usual individual race strategy; starting a bit slow, and cranking up my speed as the race progressed. In the end, I finished 2nd in the Juniors, just 10sec back from 1st. This put me 9th overall for the Men.
Photo by Stephane BarretteSprint day! Over the last two years I have been working a lot on my sprints and I was looking forward to this race. I felt a bit sluggish in the qualifier and ended up qualifying 3rd Junior. In the quarterfinal I polled between my legs and fell on one of the hills, but still managed to win my heat without wasting too much energy.
My kick wax wasn't working 100% for me, but I didn't want to ask for more because it would have probably slowed the skis down a little bit. I thought that it would be worth it overall to have a little less kick on the uphills, and a little faster skis for the downhills and flats as I'm stronger at double polling.
Off the line in my Semifinal I had a rather slow start because of my slippery skis. I caught the pack shortly after switching to double poling, finishing 3rd in my heat. This automatically put me through to the A Final. Again I got a bad start off the line in the Final and got boxed in at the back of the pack. I tried to ski outside of the track to pass another skier but as soon as I pulled up beside him I saw that a line of pylons were blocking my way, so I had to slow down and let him pass me and try to get by him on the other side. By the time I got by, the rest of the pack had gapped us. I maneged to catch back up to the rest of the field, but by the time I got there, Jesse Cockney and Matt Wylie had maned to pull away. I ended up beating Graeme Killick in a sprint to the line for 3rd place. I was a little frusterated with the final result but I overall, 3rd place was a still a good position to finish for me.
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