After Presque Isle, these are the things I see I can do to be faster next time I race:

-sleep (plenty each night starting plenty early in the evening, and of course no all-nighters. This is an obvious one and shouldn’t be a problem now that I’m moved out, settled in in VT, and don’t have to travel for the next week and a half. But I will for example be extremely careful to pack / get things taken care of enough in advance of my flight to Anchorage that there will be NO CHANCE I have to compromise sleep the night before I fly out.)

-figure out classic skis …nothing makes you hate skiing like not having kick…or worse yet, not having very good kick OR glide. This is the one that is going to take the most hard work and dedication and relentless persistence!!! I’m going to do everything I can possibly think of to get my classic skis dialed in a lot more and/or try to get some different skis with a better flex within a time frame that will still allow enough testing of the new skis, before the classic races at Nationals.

-get some good, hard, short, fast speed/intervals in at sea level over the next week and a half. Two short interval sessions and a time trial which will in effect be more like a 5k than a 10k (see training plan below.)

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In a slightly different category, some mental notes of things to be alert to / aware of / do differently in the next races:

-positioning: not getting boxed in at the wrong times. Important in sprint heats, mass start races, and also specifically in the first 200 or 500m of a mass-start race. I think this is more true the higher level a race it is.

-pole baskets …may seem like a small thing but in 2 out of the last 3 races I’ve done, I could have done way better if I’d just simply gotten the heat gun out, pulled the small baskets off, put the big ones on. Boom. Now you can use your arms and poling power! DUH!! I keep thinking that these really punchy conditions are abnormal but even if that’s the case it’s CLEARLY worth it to spend the 4 minutes to change the baskets out so you can actually push on your poles during the race. And it’s easy enough to switch them back to small baskets if the next race has firm conditions and you want the benefit of lower swing weight on the end of the pole. Tip: go grab some different sized baskets and have them on hand (as well as some pole glue and hopefully a heat gun…or if you have a gas kitchen stove that works too) so you can adapt to the conditions!

-warmup …pretty hard to be too warmed up for a sprint race. Start early!!!! In classic races, I’ve decided I’m going to start testing my skis 2 hours before the start. An hour may seem like a lot but it goes by fast when you are skiing a few km testing kick, bringing the skis back to the waxer, getting the other pair of skis (or waiting for the first pair to be re-waxed, or re-waxing them yourself), skiing another km or more to test, repeat 3 - 5 times etc. Sometimes it really does just take a whole bunch of tries and whole bunch of adjustments to get things right. The worst that is likely to happen is that you end up being able to relax for a little bit before the race and you feel ridiculously well prepared and ready for the start gun!

-pacing…even in sprints, you can blow yourself up unnecessarily. In hindsight I’m quite sure that if I hadn’t opened up such a ridiculously big gap during my semi-final and filled my legs full of gallons of lactate as a result, I could have not only been fresher for the A-final, but probably actually done better in the semi-final itself because I would have had more juice at the end of the race where it really matters. And that also would have meant I could have had a much better lane choice in the A-Final and maybe been in there for top 3 or the win. (Of course, it’s a very fine line, as going to easy in the semi and getting boxed in could have been just as bad.) I guess maybe I should have titled this one something more like “DO look back!” or, “keep track of your competition” while in the sprint heat. If I’d realized how big a gap I had half way up the hill, or even at the bottom of the hill, I could have not pushed so hard, and just done enough to stay in front to the finish, rather than blowing up and barely hanging on for 3rd after leading by 5sec. at 500m.

When I was a Bill Koch racer (10 or 12 years old or something) I had this book written by John Morton, an Olympic Biathlete I think, called “Don’t Look Back”. And I was told by my dad never to look back in a race no matter what. It’s been a hard thing to get rid of or feel okay about doing, but I think with the way racing has changed, it is actually an important thing TO do, at certain times. Much as I like the idea of going 100% for the entire race, the reality is that if you want to have your best finish in a sprint or mass-start (assuming that you aren’t at a way higher level than everyone else you’re racing against), then you really have to work with / factor in what other people are doing.

Like Carl Swenson said: if you’re leading a mass-start race, you better either be going a lot faster than everyone else wants to, or slower than everyone else wants to.