Robert's Mt. Orford Mashup - Classic

As Wes suggested an Orford race report, here you go. All temperatures are in Celsius, as per International Norm's. Mont-Orford is a park with really wide, smooth trails, sort of like Craftsbury. The long race is a 30k classic,  on pretty hard trail. This year it was supposed to be 3X 10k.

New Englanders present were Dave Currie, Leigh Mallory, John Brodhead, ‎a Harvard girl, and myself. I apologize if I missed anyone.  

Last Tuesday night Jamie told me that type of weather makes NE skiers tough. Well today was another example. It seems to be one of those winters where Mother Nature is working against us. ‎The forecast was for 5-10cm of snow, great! But temps were at -1C, and climbing to +5, with light snow changing to light rain. We woke up to 10-15cm of snow, yahoo, but the temp was as forecast. Also, earlier in the week, they had spread snow in the overflow parking lot for the starting plateau. Well it got washed out, so we were now doing a 30k individual start, really old school. The race schedule was delayed half an hour, putting our race at noon (not good for us as snow was supposed to change to rain). As well, the groomer broke down, so our course was changed to 4 X 7.5, I thought no big deal, but it turns out half the course wasn't groomed! It was only skied in by earlier racers. Boy, it was a shocker when at about 3k I was on 15cm of soft track.

But the story of the day was what wax to use. We had plenty of time before the start, so we decided to ask the clubs who were set up with their waxing trailers." How's it going" we asked. ‎A nightmare, nothing is working. My brother and I tried various universal and silver klisters, not great. We covered it, better but really not good enough for a 30k. We asked for more advice "use your arms". Then getting close to start time, let's try the zero skis? By far the best, they finally worked after 4 years in my ski bag. At least they worked for me, as my brother had good grip, but his skis were dead slow. Zero skis can be hard to match to the skier, but today mine paid for themselves! 

I'm not sure yet how everyone did, as half way through the race, it changed to light rain. So we were pretty wet and getting cold at the finish.

Tomorrow is a 15k skate, tired body, but no rain in the forecast.