ABOVE: Ti (center) starting in his quarterfinal heat.

Ti and Logan here – us Fairbanksans just returned from a pretty exciting weekend of being down in Homer for Besh Cup 3 and 4.  We all had our emotional ups and downs as well as physical out on the course.

ABOVE: Logan (right) setting up for a pass-and-draft in the finish of his quarterfinal.

Ti-

The sprint day turned out to be my best race of the season so far.  However, it also proved to be a very aggravating and long day.  It began with a 30 minute delay to our qualifier.  It was delayed because someone spilled their coffee on the timing system.  The delay messed up my usual warm-up routine, but that’s all part of being a skier: being able to adapt.  I ended up making the mens rounds, and went on to place fifth in the A final.  But it certainly was not a cake walk, as there was a long steep downhill straight into an icy set of S turns and U turns.  I nearly had a yard sale when a guy went down on this specific downhill, and my skis now have slightly shredded edges from taking an aggressive hockey stop trying to avoid the fallen skier.  All in all, I benefitted from skiing smooth and relaxed.  The burger I had that night at the Land’s End hotel restaurant was quite prime.

Logan-

I came into the sprint day mentally preparing for the notorious uphills of Homer, I had heard so much about. However, in focusing so much on the uphills I never gave myself a chance to be aware of the deadly downhills Homer also provided. In my sprint prologue, I actually found myself snow plowing, for the first time since I was twelve. There was a specific S-turn that threw me, and many other races literally of course. I thought this S-turn could be called an S-turn for two reasons. One being it resembled an S in shape, and two it made me yell Sh** every time I slid through it. Although the S-turn proved to be difficult, me as well as many other of my teammates qualified for our heats, and had a successful day of racing. Go FXC!

ABOVE: Getting psyched for our races by watching some world cup footage!

Ti-

At about 1 o’clock in the morning, most of us awoke to a 7.1 magnitude earthquake about 55 miles away – while we were staying at the Lands End Resort at the end of the Homer spit.  I personally was half-asleep when this occurred, and so I thought someone was stomping through my hotel room.  I was pretty surprised to hear how big the earthquake was when I woke up on Sunday morning.  Apparently there were numerous people bolting out of their hotel rooms and booking it down in their cars down the spit in fear of a tsunami.  It sure was a good thing that there was no tsunami, because most of the competitive skiing population in Alaska would’ve been wiped out.

Anyways, I went on to have a solid effort in my 5k classic race, but not my best race.  The margin for having a good pair of skis that fit the conditions was a very narrow one, so that was tough factor on Sunday.  There was a kilometer long climb, along with fast sweeping downhills, so it was an exciting course, and I had a lot of fun racing on it, even though I didn’t quite have the result I’d have liked.