Four MNC skiers competed in the event which was shortened from 30 km to about 24 km due to areas of the course that were flooded out during the heavy rains earlier in the week.
Snow conditions were generally frozen granular with no significant powder to effect waxing decisions. The course generally setup quite hard with some sections getting “sugary” after getting skied in. The final downhill was …well quite fast and somewhat challenging but fine.
- Overnight temps were in the single digits and at 7AM on race day it was still around 5 F but warmed to near 20F during the race.
- Liam and I experimented with kick wax the afternoon before the race although temps were near 30F so no decisions could be made other than a klister binder would be needed.
- We tried using the TOKO recommendation of green klister ironed in, cooled, then ironing TOKO green hard wax on one ski and straight klister on another ski. While both worked the klister hardwax combo was better. On race morning we again tried this combo along with Oslo Blue and Vhauti violet klister. Generally we liked the TOKO mix the best but it was still not quite good enough. We then added some blue (swix k30) klister over the TOKO combo and it felt very good. We found that as long as a stiff, klister type ski was being used a fairly liberal amount of K30 over the initial TOKO mix offered good kick and and glide.
- I also tried a Rode Super Weiss cover over the klister but found it really didn’t improve (or hurt) the kick and glide. The snow was extremely abrasive but our kick held fine for the entire race and there was still enough left for a cool down ski.
We used this on skis for me, Liam. Karen and Sean. While I’m sure other combos would have worked we had limited time to test and were generally pleased with the grip.
In terms of the race – Liam had an epic battle with Tyler Mangan and Neal Graves and eventually finished 11th over all and 3rd in his class. Kris Freeman crushed everyone easily. Sean Scanlon snapped a pole about 400 M into the race and was able to circle back to his car for another pole and spent the rest of the race chasing down skiers. Karen was all smiles and had a solid race finishing 3rd in the Women’s M5 division. I struggled in the beginning a bit (not enough of a warm-up) but eventually recovered and settled into a comfortable pace finishing 28th and 3rd M6. NWVE won the mens club championship again and the Stowe Nordic women easily won the women’s division.
Link to photos from Jamie Doucett from CSU:
Comments are closed.