Thursday, March 25, 2010

J2 Championships

The J2 Championships, held the first weekend of March turned out to be pretty darned nice.  The weather was spectacular the whole weekend with many of the skiers racing in T shirts and the coaching staff doing their work in short sleeves as well.  Its not rough duty standing in the bright sun under a bluebird sky waxing skis for a great event for 3 days!  To add to the roughness of the weekend, the Mass team stayed at the Eagle Mt. House and so I parked the car on Friday and didn't move it until Sunday afternoon since the races started across the street.  Awesome! 

Racing commenced on Friday with a 5km skate race on the Wave at Jackson.  The course softened up just enough for the afternoon races to make for good skiing.  Jackson had just barely enough snow to pull off the event and they had worked hard getting the courses ready and fixing spots here and there, although we couldn't use the entire field as we have in the past.  Rion O'Grady had the race of the day for the CSU Jrs., popping an excellent 3rd place finish to start off the weekend with a bang.
Rion O'Grady
Calvin Wight also had a solid race, finishing in 17th place while Eric Brote came home in 30th.  On the girls side Olivia Meyerson led the way with a fine 10th place followed by Julia Schianterelli in 39th, Rebecca Smith in 53rd and Blake McCartney in 83rd.  
Blake McCartney
Saturday morning I was up wicked early having been thinking about the klister selections we would need to test out.  The day started with the classic 5k, this time on a 2 lap 2.5k course up Christmas Farm and the first part of the wave and had quite a bit of climbing.  It warmed up rapidly but stayed dry enough that we got away with Toko Multiviola, which as it turned out was a colder wax than NH employed for the race.  This time it was Erik Brote's turn to really step it up as he improved 14 places to 16th.  Rion stayed hot, coming in 15th with Calvin in 46th.  In the girls race we had to add in some Toko Orange as it was slushing up fast, but the girls still had good skis.  Olivia banged out another great race coming home in 7th.  Rebecca moved up to 47th with another solid performance while Julia and Blake followed in 81st and 94th.   

After a lunch time hiatus where we soaked up more sun, cleaned up the morning's skis and got ready for the 1.2k classic sprint.  The sprint course was basically flat at the beginning and end with one hill in the middle.  To try and speed up skis we shortened up the kick zone as much as practicable but now it was really wet so I wasn't happy with just orange so we started dabbing in a couple dots of Toko Silver.  Silver is often forgotten, but it provides buckets of kick and I felt it actually sped up the skis.  It must have worked though, because all the girls banged out excellent races!  Olivia finished in 11th, another excellent race, but races of the afternoon had to go to Julia, who improved 28 places to take 53rd, only to be topped by Blake who improved 40 places!!!  Hot races left big smiles on both girls. Rebecca finished up in 68th.
 Rebecca Smith and Kathryn Foley
In the boys race both Rion and Erik had another solid race and moved up as a team, Rion taking 10th and Erik 11th.  Calvin finished up in 43rd.  In the team competition, the Mass boys had good results all the way down the line, coming in ahead of NH while the girls really kicked it up and came in ahead of both Maine and NH in the sprint.  Mass is knocking at the door New England!  
Olivia
Sunday morning dawned clear, dry and with sun coloring the tops of the surrounding peaks as I had my early coffee, running through klister combinations once again.  The last race of J2s is the mixed gender mixed technique relay, always an exciting race.  The top team was clearly a contender for the top spot and certainly for a podium position with Luke Costley (Mt. Greylock), Rion, Olivia and Mackenzie Hitchcock (Mt. Greylock).   Luke took the scramble leg and put the team right in contention in 2nd at the handoff.  Olivia skied a strong leg but unfortunately got tangled up with a NH girl on one of the corners and they both took a spill.  Rion got the hand-off and skated well to move the team up a couple notches, handing off to anchor Mackenzie who got the team up into 3rd by the finish, beating out the 4th place team by 0.1 sec and the 5th place team by 6 seconds.   Erik's team came in 13th and Calvin skate very well as his team took 16th.  In the team competition, however, the Mass team couldn't rack up enough points and finished in 4th place.  
Erik
In the all around scoring Olivia finished a solid 8th place, Rebecca in 51st, Julia 54th and Blake 82nd while for the boys Rion came in 6th and Erik in 13th.  The Mass team was led by Luke Costley, finishing in 2nd place and Mackenzie Hitchcock, also finishing up in 2nd place.  An excellent weekend for the CSU team and the Mass Team!!!  The juniors had a great time, the skiing was good, the weather was incredible, the snow held up (barely), the waxing wasn't too weird and we finished a couple of the races ahead of NH and Maine.  Can't complain about that!
Julia
Calvin

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