Sci di Fondo

Ciao!

So I am beyond overdue for an update here. Let's start from where I left off...

Olympic Trials: 7th in both sprint events. I qualified 5th on day one then 3rd on day two. I was pretty excited about those results, but they weren't enough to qualify me for the Olympics.

From Trials I went home to Pakenham for a short Christmas break with my family.

On January 30th my buddy Pate picked me up and we drove from the Ottawa area to Quebec city for world under-23 (U23) qualification races.

I was 7th (3rd U23) in the 15km pursuit. That was the race that I was least looking forward to because it was the longest, hardest, and involved 50% skate technique... my weaker technique. Day 2 of racing in Quebec was the skate sprints. I qualified as the top skier in my category, but ran out of steam in a big way for the B finals. I pushed so hard in my semi final to try and make it into the A final but just missed an A final position but cemtimeters for the 2nd year in a row. This meant that I had to race the B final and win it, but I bombed it hard.

I went home after that race pretty shaken up. I felt like I had blown my shot at the world championships for a 2nd year in a row. We had a rest day after that race before or final race--a 10km classic technique.

When I woke up on the 10km day I kinda felt relieved. No one really counts me as a contender for a distance race anymore and it felt nice to have no one expecting anything of me. I knew that I could handle this race 2 ways. I could just give up or I could just throw caution to the wind and really go for it. I love classic skiing so I decided that today would be my day. I hit the trails and hammered for the entire race. I ended up 4th overall and 2nd U23. The top 3 women are all going to the olympics for distance races and I finished right behind then! I was pretty happy. the fun thing was that I didn't really care how my results looked I just knew that I had skied a good hard race and tried my very best and at the end I was happy with it no matter where i ended up on the results.

My 2 good distance results were enough to qualify me for the Under 23 world champs in Hinterzarten, Germany! Right now I am sitting in my hotel room in Livigno, Italy where we are staying for 4 days before we head to Hinterzarten for the championships.

Team Canada arrived in Europe on the 14th and spent the first few days in our home away from home in the Hinterzarten area. We raced 2 days after arriving and that was a weird experience. I was so jet lagged on the start line! I qualified first in the German cup sprint that we were competing in but ended up 8th at the end of the day. 8th and totally sleep depreieved! I was shaking because I was so tired, hungry and confused. I found that there was about a 3 second lag between the time that my brain would decide to do something and the time that it took my body to react. A bit of an out of body experience!

We start World champs in about a week. Stay tuned for updates!