Sam: Colby Carnival

It's currently -1 degree outside, which is a big step up from the -10 that it was when I first walked to class this morning. While walking across campus is literally painful, I'm pretty thankful that the deep freeze didn't quite set in until yesterday.

Originally it was supposed to be in the negatives this past weekend while the Big Purple was in Maine with the rest of the EISA racing the Colby carnival. We headed to Augusta, ME fairly early on Thursday to ski the course before checking into the hotel. Originally we were supposed to be skiing laps of a 5k course. The first section of it seemed fast and fun with a lot of tight turns and a couple of quick uphills before the long gradual one toward the end. We then worked into the next section and went up up up. When we got to the top we were really surprised to find that we had actually made it to the top of a bobsled course. That's how we ended up describing it anyway. Check out Adam's blog for a picture. I promise that it's ridiculous.

As it turns out a couple of coaches felt that the course was a little too sketchy, especially after a UNH skier broke his finger skiing it earlier that day. The course was changed to a 3.3k loop and the races from 15 to 10k classic for women and 20 to 15k classic for men.

The snow started coming down before we woke up on Friday, but it didn't let up until that evening. It made for some VERY powdery conditions. The tracks were only existent due to the number of people on the course, but once you were tracked you had to fend for yourself in inches upon inches of powder until the skier had gone by.

Game face.

Rizzle

I started 25 minutes after the start and right off the bat I was really not having a good race. While I'm really confident in my classic skiing right now, it's actually my stride that I'm liking. This course had maybe two hills you could stride straight up. There were plenty more that involved lots of herring bone through lots of powder. No good. Long story short, I was less than pleased with my race. These things happen.

Bear skiing to a solid 37th

Trudging through it...

Saturday was a much nicer day. The set up was a three person relay with 2 loops of the 3.3k course each. Luckily the girls went first, so it was fun to run around and cheer for the guys. We actually only have one person on our men's team, which makes for boring cheering, but after 6 1/2 years of skiing I've gotten to know a good number of people, so it was a little more exciting.

Our relay went well. The twists and turns were really fun to ski with all of the powder packed down. And relays are always fun to race. Plus, our finish was the best the SMC women's team has had since 1999. We've got this weekend off from carnival racing, but have a time trial against UVM and Midd on Saturday. It's going to be a hard week, but hopefully it'll really pay off.