Two long days of inter- & intra-continental travel followed by a 30k race on Saturday has left me feeling like a train wreck today.

It wasn't supposed to be that hard of a race yesterday. More of a just-for-fun kind of thing. I can't even remember the last time I started a non-FIS race so I was set on enjoying a nice, chill ski. I was really going to do a nice L3 pace workout and then take it into L4 on the last lap depending on how I felt. And then this one guy was trying to catch me. And I didn't want to be caught. I kept looking back and he'd be a little bit closer every time on the 2nd and 3rd laps (the race was 3x10k). So I had to ski hard. Once a race is started it doesn't matter if it's a World Champs race or a local loppet-- the point is still the same: beat as many people as possible. It's easy to feel like a World Champs race matters but I was very glad to find that it mattered to me very much whether I could manage to beat this guy. As long as you still care, it's still worthwhile to be a ski racer. Anyway, he finally caught me at about 2k to go. Clearly he didn't have a clue who I was because he made the mistake of not throwing down and dropping me right away. And we all know what happens if you let a sprinter stay with you to within 100m of the finish line.

Labels: race