All about Racing!

First off, this is not a a typical blog post that you can expect from me over the coming months. I plan on uploading a short blog post every month about what I’m up to, not novels like this post. This blog post will eventually turn into it’s own page on my website called “The Sport”, but I don’t have enough content for a full page yet so I thought I’d give a little sneak-peak into some of the content I’ll be adding to my site in the future!

RACING!!!

Cross country skiers enjoy an almost absurd variety of race formats, course types, distances, and conditions not to mention the two techniques - classic and skate. In other words, cross country skiing is the perfect sport for endurance athletes with ADHD! There are sprint races, distance races, and marathon 'Loppet' races. Mass start races, individual start races, and relays. Each race site has it's own types of weather that affect the snow conditions, and their own personalities: courses can be nice and rolling or climbs can be quite rude. Downhills are turny, surrounded by trees, and dangerous on equipment designed to be fast on the uphills. Speeds of 70km/h can be achieved on the crazier of the downhills. The number of snow conditions is ludicrous and there's dozens of both grip and glide waxes for each type of snow. Matching the wax that gets put on the bottom of the ski to the types of snow is an art form. Wax technicians know full well why the Inuit have so many names for the different types of snow. Athletes at the highest level have upwards of 30 pairs of skis to accommodate all the different types snow. A lot of factors go into the outcome of a race, and the best athlete is often the most adaptable in the sport of cross country skiing.

Sprinting:

Sprint races are about the adrenaline! Crashes, chaos, upsets, all out sprint speed, clever tactics, and attrition on these long competition days make for some exciting racing. Introduced as a new type of race in cross country skiing in 2001, it is a relatively new type of race format and a very unique one across all sports. No other sport offers the kind of speed endurance test that cross country ski sprinting offers. Sprint courses range in distance from 1.2km to 1.8km (800m to 1.5km for women). Sprint competitions involve a morning qualifier used to seed the heats which occur later on in the day. The top 30 skiers in the individual start qualifier move on to the heats. Heats of six skiers battle it out head to head through the quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals. The top two skiers in each heat advance to the next round and two 'Lucky Losers' - skiers with fastest times in the heats who didn't finish in the top two also advance. There is usually around 1.5-2 hours between the qualifier and the heats, and only around 15 minutes (often less!) of rest between each heat! Along with all the crucial warming up, cooling down and staying warm between heats, athletes will ski over 40km in total distance on a sprint day. Couple this with the fact that to win a sprint event, four laps of the course at maximum effort are required, it's certainly not an easy race to win at all! But if a normal sprint race isn't hard enough, there's always the sprint relay! Teams of two skiers take turns doing laps of a normal sprint course until they've each done three laps. A semi-final goes in the morning and the final goes in the afternoon. Truly the most devilish race format ever conceived!

Distance:

Distance racing is the bread and butter of the sport - the traditional test of a cross country skier’s endurance abilities. Distance races come in many, many types! Races can either be in the skate technique, classic technique, or both as in the Skiathon event. They can also be either 'mass start' races where everyone starts at the same time, or 'individual start' (sometimes known as Time Trials), where each skier starts alone, usually 30 seconds between each skier. There is also the Handicap Start only used in Mini-Tours or the Tour de Ski where the athlete's standing in the overall event determines their start time. Distance races range from the 3km prologue, a rare but excruciatingly painful race format normally only used in Mini-Tours or the Tour de Ski, up to the 50km (30km for women) ('Loppets' also known as ski marathons can be up to 90km, but is often considered almost a different sport by skiers who normally contest the NorAms or World Cup.) Almost any distance between 3km and 50km are also scheduled in the race calendar, the most common distance is the 15km which takes between 35 to 43 minutes depending on the snow conditions or the difficulty of the course. One of the more interesting distance events is the Skiathon where the first half of the race is in classic technique, then after a quick switch of skis and poles in the pit zone, the second half is in skate technique. Distance relays are done in teams of four, the first two ski in classic technique, and the last two ski in skate technique. Because there is such a diversity in race distances, techniques, and formats, cross country skiers have to be the most adaptable endurance athletes in any sport!