A Tough Sprint Day
Early Monday morning was the first race of the Championships; skate sprint for the Junior Ladies!
It was pretty cold out, starting at -24 and warming up and the course was pretty tough. As soon as you left the stadium you had a long hill to climb which was deceivingly long because there are no trees around it. Then you got a little downhill break, a sharp turn, another uphill burst and then back into the stadium for the loop around and finish. I went what I felt like was as hard as I could in the qualifier tying for 26th spot. Not as good as I had hoped considering last year I qualified 20th but this time it's skate and with a new field of girls. Even though it wasn't as good as I hoped for, I ended up being the only North American girl to qualify!!
When the gun went off in the heat, I was a bit startled. He didn't say 'set' or 'ready'! He went straight from 'to the line' to pulling the trigger! Even though I wasn't in my ready position, I had a pretty quick start coming out of the tracks in 1st or 2nd position. I was in the outside lane (26th gives you last lane of choice..) so I had to try and cut over to the inside before the sharp corner out of the stadium. After the corner and at the start of the climb I was in 4th spot hammering to keep up with the leaders. About 2/3 up the hill a bit of a gap broke out because I just didn't have the strength to keep up to them one-skating and I had to switch to offset. Something I need to work on. For the rest of the race I was in 5th spot and I made up some ground coming into the stadium but the finish still wasn't very close. On the last corner a German girl got by me and cut me off as soon as she could. Hey, that wasn't very nice! I thought, but wasn't able to make a sound..I could only staggered a bit to keep from falling. I finished the heat in 6th place making my day's result 28th. I would have liked to get threw my quarter final and finish in the top 20 but I did the best I could on that course.
Skitrax has an article on the day, here is the link; http://skitrax.com/38463/
It was pretty cold out, starting at -24 and warming up and the course was pretty tough. As soon as you left the stadium you had a long hill to climb which was deceivingly long because there are no trees around it. Then you got a little downhill break, a sharp turn, another uphill burst and then back into the stadium for the loop around and finish. I went what I felt like was as hard as I could in the qualifier tying for 26th spot. Not as good as I had hoped considering last year I qualified 20th but this time it's skate and with a new field of girls. Even though it wasn't as good as I hoped for, I ended up being the only North American girl to qualify!!
Skitrax has an article on the day, here is the link; http://skitrax.com/38463/
