City of Lakes Loppet

I finally made some money!  It was a while ago now, but two weekends ago I was the winner of the 2010 City of Lakes Loppet in Minneapolis, MN!  This was a super sweet race: it starts at Theodore Wirth Park, which is where my teammate Garrott lives, winds through 35 kilometers of the city using parks and frozen lakes, and ends up downtown right by my other teammate Jojo’s apartment!

CXC had some very good representation at this race: in addition to Matt ‘Chuck’ Liebsch destroying the men’s field, we had myself, Jojo, and Maria all racing in the women’s.  Going into the day I though i was going to have a horrible race.  I felt lethargic and just generally not fast.  The plan was just to try and keep up as long as possible, but i was pretty sure that Maria was just going to run away with it.  She’s been skiing super well lately, and this flat of a course is perfectly suited for her powerful style.

After the start the women’s field settled into a group of five pretty quickly…the CXC ladies, as well Lindsey (Weir) Dehlin and Carline Bromante.  I kinda hung out in the back for a while.  The other girls were taking turns pulling, and i felt a little bad about not jumping into to take my turn, but after they’d pull, they wouldn’t circle all the way to the back, so the rotation was happening ahead of me.  I certainly wasn’t going to waste any energy fighting my way up to the front.  Not when i felt as poopie as i did at the start.  I was still pretty sure that Stubs was going to take it…her pulls were noticably faster.  I was also pretty sure that we would drop the two non CXC’ers…theirs were noticably slower.

At some point, Carolyn was in the lead, and one of her supporters started yelling at her “Don’t lead! You’ve got a wall of CXC behind you!  They’re going to use you!”  She looked back to confirm…and decided to slow up a bit.  That’s when I took my first pull.  By then i was starting to feel much better, and we dropped the other two pretty quickly after that.  I started having visions of a three way CXC sprint to the end.

But then Jojo started yo-yoing, and it was obvious that wasn’t going to happen.  Stubs and I got a nice little rotation going, and settled in for the long haul.

I have no clue where in the race it was, but somewhere it was clear that her pulls were becoming slower than mine.  She was either doing this on purpose, to save energy for a final sprint which she would win (cuz i can’t sprint for shizzzz), or she was pooped.  So the next time i pulled, i picked it up.  I figured she would either go with me…in which case she was faking, or I’d drop her.  Well…i dropped her.  Which was a little sooner that i’d maybe planned, since it meant i had to hammer from there in all alone.  And we were much further from the finish than I thought we were.  I could still see her around some of the corners, and I knew that she had been absorbed into a men’s train.  That meant she very very much could come back at any moment…so there was no relaxing.

But I held her off, and won the race! Which is especially exciting, as it came with a $1000 cash prize!  It’s hard to make a living as a nordic skier in US, so when an organization like the City of Lakes Foundation offers a large cash purse, it’s a huge incentive for elite racers to come participate. I’m super excited about the payout, and super grateful that they are so generous.

It’s also especially exciting because my teammates came in 2, 3 behind me!  A total CXC sweep of the podium!  There was no official CXC waxing presence at the race, so we didn’t get that special “Fish Factor”, but we did have Josh Korn there from Salomon helping us out.  He helped all of us CXC ladies out with our boards, so we were all running the same sauce.  Which is kinda fun, especially when we clearly had the 3 fastest skis in the race.  Thanks Josh!

This post was written by KO at 9:39 am, Friday, February 19th, 2010, and is filed under "Uncategorized ". You can leave a response here, or send a Trackback from your own site.