One of our more experienced club members is offering to help you to preview the course over the next several days. This will be a great opportunity to check out the course, hopefully with fresh grooming, and to practice a race pace. His 50-60 minute pace suggested for Wednesday at 10:00 is a good goal for most any first-time racers, including those using fishscale skis. Here are the particulars from Will:
If you would like a tour of the ski to sea X-C ski course, meet me at the ski to sea starting line location in front of the Heather Meadows lodge at 10:00 AM this coming Wednesday, May 24th. The start location is not clearly marked but look for me out in the meadow skate-skiing back and forth for the 5 or 10 minutes before we depart at 10:00 AM. I’m 5 feet 8 inches tall with a short grey beard.
I will go at a pace that should take about 50-minutes to one hour to complete the course. That timeframe also assumes we don’t have to get out of the way of any grooming equipment. If the groomers are still out there, we will need to get safely well-off to the side of the course and give the groomer wide berth when and where we intersect with them.
The course is most likely to be completely groomed by the time we start at 10:00 AM.
Parts of the course may be a bit post-holed by trekkers and their pets making their pilgrimage to artist point.
If you are in great form and would like to ski the course a good bit faster, meet me at the same location at 8:45 AM Monday, Wednesday and/or Friday. I will ski the course with you in 30 to 40 minutes depending on conditions. The 30-minute estimate assumes the course is well groomed for us. That timeframe also assumes we don’t have to get out of the way of any grooming equipment. If the groomers are still out there, we will need to get safely well-off to the side of the course and give the groomer wide berth when and where we intersect with them. The start location is not clearly marked but look for me out in the meadow skate-skiing back and forth for 5 or 10 minutes before we depart at 8:45 AM. I’m 5 feet 8 inches tall with a short grey beard.
To give you an idea of what the faster pace will be like, my 8:45 AM sessions will be skied with the same intensity that enabled me to average 6:20 per mile for 50 km in the hilly Cabin Creek Ozbaldy on March 5th.
Will