In all of my thoughts about what might happen in today's 10km classic race crashing never even crossed my mind. Just goes to show that you can't take anything for granted. I was sitting in a tuck going down the first long downhill thinking to myself, "man, my skis are rocket fast." Then the tracks ended and I got ready to step turn the hairpin corner. Then my right ski caught an edge and flipped my onto my side. Like I said, I hadn't really thought of falling as an option so I was pretty surprised to find myself with a facefull of snow. I think I even said something like "woa" when I fell. (KK- it was a zac efron style "woa" from HSM2, definitely.) No broken poles, thank goodness, so I skidded around on my butt and popped back up to ski around the corner and back to racing. Maybe I should stop considering falling in a race as way beneath me and actually focus more on staying on my feet.

The rest of the race went well, worked hard, stayed on my feet. Barely managed to hang on to tenth place but I was pretty happy about that. I'll take a top ten at US Nationals, no complaints.