Andrea Dupont

You always want your first race of the season to go well, but sometimes, it just doesn’t happen.

Some people believe that you have a certain number of bad races that you need to get out of your system. I am not sure if I believe this to be true, but all I can say is that if anyone is counting today was one for me.

I starting the day ready to race, just itching to get on the start line. The morning was  a crisp -20 degrees or so and the slow snow threw off my plans to double pole the course. The course itself was a little odd. There was no stadium to speak of. The course started in the middle of a trail and ended a couple of km later. Unfortunately no one was allowed on the course to pre-ski and see how the grooming was set up. The day before the corners were all fairly easy, even when skied with speed.  And this is how I committed the sprinter’s fatal flaw.  I went absolutely barreling into the first corner with way too much speed, hit some ruts that the boys had graciously left behind and had a minor crash. Nothing too major, but unfortunately as a sprinter, if you fall the race is over.

And so I got up and finished and went off to do my workout for the day. Since Olympic trials depend soley on your finishing place in the heats, the workout of the day included doing heat simulations after a couple of shorter sprints with some other girls hanging doing intensity. All in all, not a bad day training, just a rough start to racing :p

The upside to the day was that I felt as stronger in my last heat than I did in my qualifier and every other heat. This is big for me and shows that training is paying off! I’ve never had trouble qualifying with the top girls, for me the struggle has been having something left for the heats. All in all, not a bad day of training, just a rough start to racing :p

 With Canmore still only having a 1km loop of snow, a small portion of our team decided to pick up and head to Silver star for our final volume week before racing starts. The conditions in Silver star were amazing and the 200km of groomed rec trails made the 3 hour distance workouts just fly by. Skiing on the race trails and doing both distance and sprint time trials have made me start to be hungry for racing season. So we packed up our bags with a week left before our first race, with all the hard work done for the year, and excited for the racing to begin.

Here are some photos of Dasha and I doing some double pole sprints and celebrating the end of training and the beginning of the race season!