Friday, December 5, 2008

Broken planes and rain

Our first day on the road began with a false start. We arrived at the airport as planned, Maryann dropped us off, and Lorris and I walked straight to the self-service baggage drop. That should have been a hint of what was to come! As it turned out, our flight to Kelowna had been cancelled due to aircraft maintenance. We think that might be code for a broken plane. Luckily, Maryann was able make a quick u-turn in Nisku and come rescue me and Lorris.

This morning Lorris and I were up early to scrape and zero five pairs of Mado's skate skis. Her skis spent the fall with Zach Caldwell who completed extensive testing on the skis and ground them to match. His machine does nice work. Very nice work. Mado's skis look amazing.

We got to Sovereign for 9:00 in time to test race skis. All five pairs that we tested were very good, however three in particular stood out.

This is where things get interesting. As of yesterday, Silverstar had very little snow. Luckily, it snowed quite a bit overnight which improved conditions a ton. That part was good. Just as Lorris and I were getting set up to test wax, however, the ski opened up and it started to fully pour rain. That part was bad.

We decided not to waste our time and headed back to the condo. It seems like there was some kind of weird temperature inversion because at lower altitude, the rain we had experienced was beautifully falling snow. Lorris and I decided to capitalize on this opportunity and do something we almost never get to do... ski for fun! We managed an awesome 90 minute ski, which was a fantastic treat.

This afternoon we did a ton of work on Mado's skis to get them ready for tomorrow. We also set up our test skis as we've got a pretty good idea of how things are going to play out.

Tomorrow is the first test; a skate sprint. Mado starts at 9:28 with heats later in the day.

Start list can be found here - startlist

Results will be on Zone4 tomorrow afternoon.


Game on.

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