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Location: Portillo, CHL
For the night following the 20-km biathlon race, the weather forecast called for a chance of heavy snow, strong and gusty winds, and dense fog. As Travis and I walked back to the warfare school from Hotel Portillo, whose Wi-Fi connection we used to get on the internet and make some phone calls, we could see the fog started to creep up the valley and start to block out the base of the mountains and some of the stars. Only time would tell if that fog would bring a blizzard worse than the one earlier that morning during the individual race.
When I awoke, I went outside to check out what had happened. Indeed the visibility was low, but no new snow had fallen overnight. The temperature was actually warmer than the previous day. The race scheduled was a 15-km freestyle cross-country race. Since I had won the 20-km biathlon race with 13 misses, and those 13 misses translated into a whooping 13-minute add-on penalty to my ski time, I was confident that the no-shooting ski race would be an easy affair. But I hadn’t done a ski race in maybe four years and a mass start race in six years. So I planned to take it safe and try to learn how to race better tactically.
The race started intense. I intended to sit back the first two of five laps, make a move on top of one of the hills, put on a big gap, and ski easy until the finish. During the 50-m double pole, I was passive. The guy behind me actually started yelling at me for going too slow. Amusing. It wouldn’t have been if he had broken my pole, of course.
As usual, the slower guys were the faster ones over the first 150-m. I don’t understand why this happens in every sub-World Cup mass start ski race. You can’t win in the first 150 meters of a 15-km race! That’s 1 percent of the race! But still people do it. Over the first lap around the 3-km loop, many of the guys “leading” the race tired like crazy. By the end of the first lap, I think there were about five of us in the front, with a big gap on the other 25 competitors.
On the second lap, I had planned to make a move. The course was relatively flat out of the stadium, becoming a gradual uphill, which then ended with an awkward canted, steeper uphill. After that was the longest downhill of the course. From the previous day’s race, I had noticed that no one pushed off the uphill. So my plan was to lead at the end of the uphill, then burst around the turn and push hard into the downhill and get a sizeable enough lead that no one could draft off me.
But on the second lap, I found myself in second position trying to get around the leader on this awkward canted uphill right where I wanted to get going. The hill was just so unlevel that I couldn’t get past him. And sure enough, he didn’t push off the top.
So around another loop, and finally, on lap three, I made a move and had 50 meters by the time I was at the bottom of the hill. And I just kept going. At a few points, I was worried I had gone too fast, and that when I least expected it, the 9500 feet of altitude would catch up to me and I would hit the wall. I wore a heart rate monitor, but it showed I was well below race pace, so I figured I was safe.
On the last lap, I was about 30 seconds up on second place. I determined that it would be impossible to make up 30 seconds up on me at this altitude with a sprint, so I put it in cruise. At one point, though, I saw my teammate Sam sprinting. (The whole course was completely open to seeing where people were.) And even though as far ahead as I was, I was surprised and became a bit nervous. But he was sprinting away from the third place guy, he later told me. Nonetheless, I picked it up a bit, wanting to make it two wins for two races. In the end, I took the race by 40 seconds over Sam, who said the third place guy behind him didn’t respond to either my move on lap three or his move on lap five.
While I was cooling down, it hit me that I had just raced twice at 9500 feet and didn’t feel very bad. I guess I am not as de-trained as I thought I had become.
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