Okay, so I won the sprints today. Don't worry, I won't let it go to my head. My team won't let it either-- after cooling down Caitlin & I had to walk home, then I had to scrub the burned spaghetti sauce out of the pot, then clean klister off my skis and wax them for tomorrow's 10km classic race.

Our first race was so so fun & everyone did really well. Three of us made the heats: Garrott Kuzzy qualified in 8th, Caitlin Compton qualified in 2nd, and I qualified in 3rd. Caitlin and I both won our quarterfinals. You should have seen Compton blow apart her quarterfinal and she breezed into the finish looking like she had just skied a warm-up lap, it was pretty sweet and made me laugh to see how hard the other girls were gasping trying to keep up with her. My quarterfinal was immediately after hers & I led out, kept the lead, and won it. Then Compton & I raced in the same semi-final. We started in 3rd & 4th, letting Kate Underwood face the strong winds on the front, then came around 200m before the finish to take 1st & 2nd, advancing to the Women's A finals. The top four prelim qualifiers were in the A final: Karin Camenisch, Caitlin Compton, Valaas, Martina Stursova. Camenisch pulled to the front immediately and I jumped in behind her. She led most of the way and I pulled around at the top of the second hill, 200m before the finish to take the win. I used one tactic at the finish that I thought was clever: Karin and I were lined up almost perfectly to take the 2nd & 3rd finish lanes, respectively, and I moved in front of her to take the second lane just to force her to change her line if she wanted to pass me. Compton came in third and Stursova in 4th.

Kuzzy beat out Kevin Hochtl to take second in his quarterfinal and advance to the semis. In his semi he got stuck behind one of the skiers who got tired and let the other two gap him, so Kuzzy raced the men's B finals. He demolished the other men in the B final and won with a huge gap to place 5th overall.

I had so much fun racing today. I kept lining up at the start with a big smile, looking down the course and just wanting to race. I didn't even think about winning, I just wanted to ski and compete. It was also awesome to have all the CXC athletes to do so well at our first race since this is the first season that the team has existed. And I loved having compton to race with, having fast teammates rocks! We are super psyched to take on some team sprints this season.

The support that we had today was excellent. We finally have all of our gear, & everything worked great. More importantly though, we Bryan Fish to spend all day today at the course testing and waxing skis and coaching and generally just making sure that we could each have the perfect race. And now he has to stay up late waxing our skis tonight and be up early at the race course testing waxes again tomorrow. I think coaching is a really demanding job and requires the ability to function at a high level on little sleep. I'm glad I'm on the athlete side of things.