Uhlfelder News

Today started like any other day. Assuming you’re in Austria and planning to go skiing in a marathon distance (42K) cross country ski race. In any case that’s what was going on here today and I felt like it kind of worked out for me. I have no choice but to go out slowly because I was behind what I thought was about 1000 people but was probably 500 or a bit more, and many of them were awful Skiers. They don’t seed here so it’s a free for all. Poles are broken (not mine luckily) but I was worried. I ended up passing hundreds of people (the 42K race and the 21K race, which also had about 300 people, were started simultaneously) and never got passed, which in my mind is the best race I can ski. It was very pleased.

What was strange is that for the first half of the race, as I was passing people who were in both races, some of them who I didn’t catch until the end of the first 20 kilometers looked like they had drunk a keg of beer over the last years, and one guy in particular looked like he was 25 pounds overweight and was squeezed like a lumpy sausage into his race suit. Not only was it not a pretty sight, but how did he stay ahead of me for 20K? Another strange thing was that once I passed the 20K mark, I almost felt like I was alone. The 20K skiers had finished, and the skiers who were left were in the longer race, but they were all pretty far in front of me. The good and bad news is it gave me a chance to ski faster, but there was no one to ski with.

My time, I thought, wasn’t very good but given the competition (it was a truly international race), I guess it was okay. On looking at the photos on line I see tons of form issues for me to fix.

Here is a panorama showing the race start.

I ended up with 156th out of about 340 finishers in the 42K race. I was eighth in my age group.

Here’s a photo of me at the end of the race. I think I look great, but that’s just me. Thanks to Noah Hoffman for providing such a cool race suit and great training advice.

Fresh as a spring breeze

Here are results:

http://results.racetime.pro/results.php?CId=16658&RId=6131

One thing worth mentioning is that I was pulling up to one of the last stops for food and drinks and one of the guys serving drinks had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I asked smoking guy for “Essen” (food) and he pointed back to the table which I was already about 30 m past. Given the lingering cigarette smoke, I skipped this food stop. Welcome to Austria.

Garrett is insisting that everyone’s time is well spent so he brought the group to a distillery for a tour. Free tastings of hard alcohol—mmm good. Not my thing, but I liked the lighting in the cellar, a really great basement room. It would certainly make a good model for a nice private wine cellar.