Going into these first races of the season, I’ve had some doubts about my preparedness, as I haven’t raced big races before the new year in the last several years. I was still training quite a bit until recently, and felt like I didn’t have the time to get my body ready for racing. I managed these dismissals by reminding myself why I’m here and that I can complete the motions I need to race the best that I can, so that’s where my focus went for the weekend. I obviously still had result expectations in the back of my mind, but as I got closer to racing, my specific steps for racing took precedence as my main goals.

These ended up being:

1. Dialing in my race routine (warm up intervals, pre race eating, ski testing.

2. Pacing, and

3. Relaxing in the middle of races.

These are all some things that I end up feeling disconnected from in the summer with fewer and different types of race efforts. The pacing was my biggest source of nervousness for Saturday’s 15km interval start, especially as these courses had some hills with potential to really slow a bonked racer down. So after the race, when I realized I thought I’d paced it well, I was super happy! There was still a twinge of disappointment with the result, but I tried really hard to focus on that good pacing and the fun last lap I had skiing behind Sjur Roethe and then Klaebo, De Fabiani, and Kruger for the finish.

After that, I was just excited for some tactics and group skiing on Sunday. I started 2 seconds behind Kruger, and 4 seconds ahead of the wave of 30 (