Since the lap was a little long at 1.4km the women only raced two laps each in today's team sprint. When we got out to the race venue and started testing skis I didn't particularly like either pair I had race waxed. The beauty of having wax techs, however, is that I can just say that I don't like the skis and they get fixed. So Larry grabbed the skis I liked the best and one lap later I tried them out again and they were much better. What's more when I got back from that lap my other skis had been rewaxed for me to try again also (I decided that those were now too slick and stuck with my initial fav pair). Magic.

Then they closed the course and I realized that it was getting perilously close to race time and I was not a put together athlete yet. So I ran back to the where my bag was to change into my race top, bib, leg numbers, thin gloves, & dry hat. Then I ran back out to the stadium where I ran into Grover with my skis (apparently I wasn't the only one who thought I was a little behind schedule). All the other starters where in position already so I was a little embarrassed to be the last one to show up at the start. Grover set out my skis and I stripped out of my warm-ups. Then one of the volunteers started asking me where my transponders where. D'oh. Where the heck was I supposed to get the chips? So Grover's says, go, run & I have no idea what time it actually is but I doubted that the guy with the gun would bother waiting for me if we weren't on schedule. Luckily one of the volunteers had brought over my chips so I put on one and she put on the other and I was back and clipped into my skis safe and ready to go. Except not because I immediately realized I had a huge rock stuck in the heel of my boot and Bertrand and Grover with their boots picks had already cleared out from the start. I managed to pry it out of my boot though. I also managed not to fall over while doing so, which is good. And I even had a minute to stand there and focus before we actually started.

The first lap went well, it was super fun to be back in a pack. I like skiing in groups a lot more then in an interval start. Kikkan & I had some poor hand-offs and dropped away from some of the other teams to ski most of the race in 7th. The format is 3 teams advance from each semifinal plus the next 4 fastest teams (the lucky losers) so we knew that potentially 7 teams from one semifinal could advance to the final. I didn't think that there was much of a chance that we would have a faster time then the fourth place team in the second semifinal. And we didn't, but we were only 0.5 seconds off from qualifying. D'oh again. Kikkan and I immediately looked at each other and said, "it's my fault," and proceeded to explain where each of us could have made up half a second. And since your final place is according to seeding we got bumped down to 13th. In Sapporo we were 11th also just out of qualifying for the final. The Randall/Valaas sprint team has some work to do but at least we're consistently on the edge of making it into the final.