World Cup Trial races

Well we are back again to our lovely roller ski trial races. Yesterday was race #1, 12.5km for the ladies and 15km for the gents. I was a little worried heading into this race because last Sundays 10km race I had nothing to give, my legs felt like dead weight. But things slowly improved over the week and by Thursday I was feeling pretty good. Thursday evenings weather forecast was for 5 - 10 cm of snow, so they pushed the race starts back to the afternoon. Lucky for us the course was dry and it wasn't too cold. Start was at 3:30pm so that left the rest of  the day to sit around and wait. I have a love/hate relationship with afternoon starts, I love it because I feel my body is more awake and ready to race in the afternoon, but I hate it because of the waiting, nerves building all day long. My warm up and zero went great and I was ready to go. It was 10sec starts which can make for a pretty exciting race. I came into my first prone shooting and missed two, not how I usually like to start a race but still lots of race left. As I left the penalty loop Melanie was leaving the range with clean shooting, it was great to be able to ski a loop together, each of us pushing the other to go out of our lap 2 comfort zone. As I came into the range for my second prone bout Geret told me that I had a perfect group but needed to go two down. I set up and made the correction, 5/5! Sweet back out on course. At this point Megan and Zina were not too far ahead of me. I come into the range for my first standing bout, set up and 5/5. Hammer out another 2.5km loop and come in right behind Megan and Zina, I see that Zina had 2 misses and Megan had 3, I try not to think too much about shooting clean, but to clear my mind and focus on the doing. I set up, hit, hit, hit, (brain starts going crazy) miss, miss. Darn two quick penalty loops and I leave about 20secs behind Megan. That last loop my legs and lungs were burning, I felt like I couldn't get enough oxygen into my body, but I just kept pushing, cheering my self on in my head. Coming up the last hill, my mom, dad, sister, Jan (sport psych) and Brendan are all cheering for me like there life depends on it, I push every thing I have and cross the finish line gasping for air!

I ended up 3rd about 20secs behind Megan and just over a minute behind Zina. I am really happy with how my skiing went and have some improvement for the shooting. Tomorrow is the 7.5km sprint race, so if you've got the morning off and want to come watch the race, start is 9:45am for the men and 11:30am for the women!

Cheers

Rosanna

This is a photo from last weekends race.