Silver Star

Today we wrapped up the last race in Silver Star. After arriving on Wednesday, it's been a busy week. Here are a few pictures of the goings on. Note - the pictures are from my phone so they are a little ghetto.

This is what it looks like when we unload the ski bags for twenty athletes and a bunch of service staff. We travel with a LOT of skis.

I love finding Fast Trax ski ties in random ski bags. Fast Trax is everywhere.

Getting ready to test. The stadium up here is super nice - West Yellowstone, you should take note.

It is snowy here.

Homemade powder mix. This looks like Holmenkol cold, but that is just a container. Mixing your own wax is the new cool.

The "Performance Team" at work. Race skis to the max.

Sometimes in snows in Silver Star. Usually it snows a lot. This is what we drove through to get to the venue this morning.

Main street Silver Star. This place is like the inside of a snow globe.

On the technical front, we tested a lot of wax over the past few days and liked the following things:

Paraffins: Swix LF6 (always low liability and will never hurt you, may not win the test but never far out)

Powders: Vauhit Goldfox, Homemade mix

Top Coats: Swix FC7WS, Holmenkol Cold block

Grip: Swix VR 40 (binder), Magnar 2.5 (main), Magnar 3.5 (cushion), Star Blue (cover)


Tonight I'll head into Vernon to have supper with the Williams. Tomorrow is a training day for the athletes and on Tuesday we drive to Rossland for the next set of races. Next week is a mini-tour (where there are results for both individual races and also cumulative results, like the Tour de Ski), so that will be a new experience.

Now we shower. I haven't had time to do that since Friday evening.

As promised

Today was a good day at the office. The team swept the medals in open men, had four in the top six in open women (including second and third), and our four juniors took first and third for men and first and second for women. Great day - full results.

On the skis front, speed was better in the afternoon for the heats. The service team did a great job completing a methodical test and settled on an awesome combination. We won't give away all the secrets, but Mike tweeted a big part of it:

Part of the recipe.

Tomorrow is a short classic race - 9km for everyone. The loop is tough, but not crazy hard. The key for that course is having classic skis that get consistent grip as the climbs are significant.

We are done eerily early tonight - Dieter and Peter finished up the base on the classic skis while we were testing so all that remains is to finalize topcoats, structure, and kick wax. We'll take care of that bright and early tomorrow morning.

Check Zone4 later for tomorrow's start list.

Canmore - testing day update

Here is the lowdown as to what we did today:

1. Tested five paraffins for feel. Eliminated the worst two and retested.

2. Tested five powders for feel. Eliminated the worst three and retested.

3. Tested the powders included in #2 in the speed trap. Highly conclusive results validated feel test.

4. Tested the paraffins included in #1 in the speed trap. Highly conclusive results validated feel test.

5. Tested hand structure for feel. 

6. Now we have lunch.

7. Made a call on paraffins. One of them was ludicrously fast.

8. Repeated powder and structure tests in the afternoon. As expected hand structure was far more useful in the afternoon.

9. Conducted initial top coat tests.

10. Applied paraffins to race skis and made test skis for tomorrow.

11. Tidy up work area.

12. Now we have supper.

Tomorrow is a skate sprint. Stay tuned to Zone 4 for results. Qualification starts at 9:15 for men and 9:29 for the women. Heats should happen sometime around 4:15 (crazy late). You can check out the startlist here - startlist.

Quick Canmore Update

Tonight I made the regular trek to Canmore to meet up with the team for this weekend's Alberta Cups. This drive seems to be getting shorter every time!

Chris and I met up at his house and headed up to the wax room to make test skis for tomorrow. He already had our three test fleets waxed, scraped, and brushed so it was a simple matter of settling on the powder test to make. We put together five great options and made the test skis. Holmenkol, Ski*Go, Toko, Vauhti, and Solda are in the mix.

Tomorrow morning I will coordinate the wax testing and assist the athletes with race ski selection. We have a skate sprint on Saturday that is qualifying for Canada Games, so things are serious.

The ski depot at a Canmore World Cup. With all our athletes and test skis, it's going to look something like this tomorrow. 

Do this NOW

You should all help out my friend, Marcelo Lafuente! 

 1. Go to Salomon Nordic on Facebook and like their page. 

2. Scroll down and find his comment it should involve Fast Trax Run & Ski Shop.

3. Like his comment. 

This will win him a pair of skis, the race is ridiculously close.

A prize to the first person to do this....

Small print --> there isn't actually a prize.

West Yellowstone - A Better Update

After a ridiculous day of travel (see update here - By the Numbers) on Monday, I finally made it to Bozeman. As I had missed my ride due to the debacles with flights, I arranged a shuttle into West Yellowstone. That actually worked out quite well as the roads were terrible. Highways were shut down everywhere, and in fact the race originally scheduled for Wednesday had to be moved to Thursday; partially because it was brutally cold, but mostly because the timing crew and equipment got stranded in Idaho (see article on Faster Skier - article). Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself...


Monday night in West Yellowstone consisted of getting the Boulder Nordic Sport trailer organized and ready to work. For those of you who remember the xc.com trailer, this is very similar. Unfortunately, moving the trailer to the front of the hotel, where it would sit for the week, meant that we immediately got stuck. There was a lot of snow.


Tuesday we were up early and out testing skis. With temperatures hovering around -23C and howling winds, it wasn't looking promising for the race. Nevertheless, we braved the cold and went out to test some wax (Tuesday results). Given the wind and falling snow, using the speed trap was out of the question and we resorted to testing by feel. Ski*Go was running well and Chris and I decided to go with a base of Swix LF4 covered by Ski*Go C380 on the race skis. In the end it wasn't relevant and the race got moved to Thursday. Boom.


Wednesday was more of the same - cold temperatures and blowing snow. We ran some more tests and C380 continued to run well (Wednesday results). We continued with the same setup and spent the evening working up race skis for Drew. 


Thursday was race day and Drew stomped the field. This race was basically just a points grab to help the US sprint field improve their FIS rankings. It's an odd event, but the organizers held two sprint qualifiers (classic then skate) back to back with no heats. Weird. We were on old school Ski*Go -2 - -15 kick wax and Holmenkol Cold powder.


Friday was the skate race - generally a good day but room for improvement. Moving on...


Saturday was probably the most interesting race day of all. The field was super tight with the leaders changing throughout the race. Drew had some tough luck breaking a pole and probably would have challenged for the win otherwise. Nish and Graham Kilick were right in the mix too. Really great.


Is there more to report on the weekend? Probably, but I'm getting hungry and the all day breakfast upstairs at BZN is calling. Here are some pictures, stolen from Drew, to give you an idea of just how much snow there was.

Jeffries, Butler and Nish check out one of the many snowed in team vehicles.

A Yellowstone Parks building - mad snow.

Downtown West Yellowstone looking more like the Antarctic than Montana.

West Yellowstone - non-update

It has been brought to my attention that my frequency of updates from West Yellowstone has been poor at best. In my defence, it's been really busy and the internet connection is like something out of the early '90s. The good news is that I'll have the pleasure of spending five hours at the Bozeman airport on Sunday. Look for something good to come out then.

In the meantime, here are a couple of pictures of us making race skis for tomorrow's classic race.