We have made our annual pilgrimage out to West Yellowstone and are excited to be here and get the racing season underway! Skiing and racing in West, or “Jellystone”, is a tradition for a large portion of the American Nordic skiing community this time of year. Similar to everyone else out here, we are psyched to try out the gear of the new season, get in some k’s in good tracks, and test our

We have made our annual pilgrimage out to West Yellowstone and are excited to be here and get the racing season underway! Skiing and racing in West, or “Jellystone”, is a tradition for a large portion of the American Nordic skiing community this time of year. Similar to everyone else out here, we are psyched to try out the gear of the new season, get in some k’s in good tracks, and test our

We have made our annual pilgrimage out to West Yellowstone and are excited to be here and get the racing season underway! Skiing and racing in West, or “Jellystone”, is a tradition for a large portion of the American Nordic skiing community this time of year. Similar to everyone else out here, we are psyched to try out the gear of the new season, get in some k’s in good tracks, and test our

We have made our annual pilgrimage out to West Yellowstone and are excited to be here and get the racing season underway! Skiing and racing in West, or “Jellystone”, is a tradition for a large portion of the American Nordic skiing community this time of year. Similar to everyone else out here, we are psyched to try out the gear of the new season, get in some k’s in good tracks, and test our

I’ll have a post up tomorrow running through some of the notable European results from the weekend.

The short version of the weekend’s distance races goes something like this:

• Good: Kris Freeman, Kikkan Randall, Noah Hoffman, Liz Stephen
• Bad: Canadian men, Chris Cook
• Meh: Morgan Arritola, Andrey Newell

Americans

Here’s a closer look at the Americans:

Ninth place for Freeman is pretty darn good, but like last weekend in Muonio, not “skiing out of his brain” good.  For an idea of just how “in line” this 9th place is with how he was skiing at the start of last season, check out the following head-to-head plot that looks at how he’s fared against the particular skiers at this WC race in the past:

For a fuller explanation of these plots see here.  The blue is the Gällivare race, right in line with how Freeman stacked up against this crowd at the start of last season.  But the downward (i.e. better) trend of his median performance (red line) is promising.  Even more promising from my perspective was that it came in a freestyle race.  Freeman managed a 7th in a 15km freestyle last December, a 10th and 14th in 2007, a 15th in 2005 and if you go all the way back to 2003, a 6th place in a 30km mass start.  He’s generally been more comfortable classic skiing, so it’s nice to see him show some speed in freestyle.  It also makes me hopeful for his chances in a 15km classic race, assuming he can keep this up.

As for Kikkan Randall, 19th is also pretty solid and confirms her steady improvement in the distance events.  If you look at the corresponding head-to-head plot for her from Gällivare you see that she’s a little further behind the WC crowd than Freeman is, but the trend is encouraging:

If she sustains this kind of a year over year improvement for the rest of the season, I think we’re looking at her consistently being in the top 20-25, but only occasionally poking through to the top 10, if at all.

The other two “good” performances belonged to Liz Stephen and Noah Hoffman.  I had a sneaking suspicion that Hoffman might be primed for a good year (keep in mind that he’s still really young).  Obviously, it’s just one race, and anything can happen.  When I look at his graph above I find myself thinking about what it’ll look like in March: are the rest of the dots going to fill in above that red one or not?

Liz Stephen’s race was solid, but a little less obviously so.  This sounds a little odd seeing as how she finished inside the World Cup points at 25th, but let me explain.  Her FIS point trend above is a little deceptive in that it hides the fact that against WC fields like those on Saturday, she’s been, well, a bit inconsistent:

That’s not the sort of “trend” you want to see in a young, developing skier.  The good news is that if she keeps this up we’ll actually have two seasons of improvement in a row.

I don’t have much to add on Newell, Arritola and Cook.  While it’s certainly nice when Newell skis well in a distance race, and if he wants to contend in the TdS, he’ll certainly need to get some starts in, I don’t think anyone is really fretting a sub-par distance race from him.  Arritola had an unimpressive race but one that is well within the range of what she’s done over the past two seasons, which is itself a concern.  As always…just one race.  No reason to panic quite yet.  I think anyone who’s strapped on a pair of boards has had a day like Chris Cook’s on Saturday, which means we can all agree that the less said the better.

Canadians

The Canadian men certainly had a rough day as well.  I confess that I was surprised to hear about Babikov and Grey travelling to Europe so soon before a race.  I know I couldn’t manage that kind of turn around, but who knows, they know their bodies better than anyone else.  I feel like those two can chalk things up to travel, fatigue, first race, etc.  As for Kershaw and Harvey, well, let’s take a closer look:

Definitely a bad race for Kershaw; terrible really.  Once again, though, with the constant refrain: just one race!  We could easily find ourselves in March with that dot being his worst race by far all year.  Here’s to hoping…

As for Harvey, not his best race, but he was 34th.  I mean, that’s not terrible, really, but I think after last season, expectations for him might have been a tad high.  He’s still pretty young, remember, and note that it wasn’t like he was just pumping out the top 15 results left and right last year in interval start races.  In fact, a surprisingly large number of his best results are in mass starts.  So I actually think this was a pretty decent early season result for him.

Ok, that’s all I’ve got on the North Americans.  I’ll tackle some of the Euros in a subsequent post…

Related posts:

1. <Head-to-Head: Marit vs Justyna
2. <USST Preview: Liz Stephen & Morgan Arritola
3. <Week In Review: Friday Nov 12th

a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_xxDw1qNK1JA/TOvwjqlr2YI/AAAAAAAAAn0/MaT7-p50jvo/s1600/PB220089.JPG”img style=”TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand” id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542788261927967106″ border=”0″ alt=”” src=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_xxDw1qNK1JA/TOvwjqlr2YI/AAAAAAAAAn0/MaT7-p50jvo/s320/PB220089.JPG” //a div style=”TEXT-ALIGN: center”Oh yeah, all roads in and out of West are closed!/divdiv style=”TEXT-ALIGN: left”br //diva onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_xxDw1qNK1JA/TOr90E4VEDI/AAAAAAAAAns/_1XP9pOuxtw/s1600/PB220090.JPG”img style=”TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand” id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5542521362537844786″ border=”0″ alt=”” src=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_xxDw1qNK1JA/TOr90E4VEDI/AAAAAAAAAns/_1XP9pOuxtw/s320/PB220090.JPG” //a div style=”TEXT-ALIGN: center”yep there sure is snow here and another 6-12″ for tomorrow/divdiv style=”TEXT-ALIGN: center”br //divdiv style=”TEXT-ALIGN: center”br //divSkyler and I headed to West Yellowstone, MT early span id=”SPELLING_ERROR_0″ class=”blsp-spelling-corrected”Sunday/span for the span id=”SPELLING_ERROR_1″ class=”blsp-spelling-error”USSA/span/span id=”SPELLING_ERROR_2″ class=”blsp-spelling-error”FIS/span Super Tour sprints on Wed. We had a pretty simple travel day, only delayed 30minutes or so. Monday AM we headed south from span id=”SPELLING_ERROR_3″ class=”blsp-spelling-error”Bozeman/span after a trip to a local coffee shop downtown. Then we hit a little hitch with our rental. A few warning lights came on so we took her back 8 miles to the airport and got a fresh one. Then headed up and into the snow pack. The further we went the snowier it got. We took a simple hour ski and headed home. It should be real cold for the sprints on Wed. so tonight we’ll start getting some cold wax into the bases, switch out some bindings, and dial in the pole straps and baskets. We saw a few Easterners and tons of span id=”SPELLING_ERROR_4″ class=”blsp-spelling-corrected”Midwest/span teams. A big storm is brewing and all the truckers are hunkered down waiting it out.div class=”blogger-post-footer”img width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4680416899705879324-1380493734953993882?l=smsxc.blogspot.com’ alt=” //div

My CXC teammates and I are in West Yellowstone for just under a month this year. That is a long time to be living in a hotel room. This is my 5th winter in West Yellowstone and I arrived with the goal of making a greater connection with the local community during my stay.

Happy Thanksgiving pop-up cards. My mom made pop-up cards with me when I was younger and they were awesome. Although the finished products from Annie, Lillith, and Mason were really cool.

It has been a hard week of training. Visiting and working with the kids was a great way to add energy to the day and take a mental break from training. It was fun to see the excitement in the kids eyes for the first big snow storm. Plus I like seeing how new kids respond to my favorite games of Squirrel Olympics, Last-Man Standing, and Speed Tag.

In the run up to the World Cup season, I had been trying to think of ways to create a single graph that would do a decent job of communicating how good each person’s race was in the context of their past results.  I wanted something relatively simple and easy to read that would hopefully allow you to just scan down the results and get a quick read on how that day’s race compared to each skier’s historical results.

Here’s what I came up with:

First I’ll explain, and then I’ll show you the women’s version.

Obviously, each row is an athlete, in the order they finished, in this case the men’s 15km skate race on Saturday in Gällivare.  The red dots are the FIS points for each skier from that race.  The horizontal bars represent the middle 50% of that skier’s FIS point results from WC, OWG or WSC races over the previous three years.  If a skier had fewer than 10 WC, OWG or WSC races over that time period, I plotted the values for the actual races themselves rather than the horizontal bar.

So obviously, if your red dot is to the left of your bar, that’s a “good” race, and if it’s to the right of you bar that’s a “bad” race.  What’s relevant here is,

1. The location and width of the bar representing an athlete’s middle 50% of race results, and
2. Where the red dot is in relation to the bar

The blocks of color just mark out groups of ten skiers, hopefully making it a bit easier to scan through to and see roughly what place each skier finished in.  This is a “reduced” version, showing only the top 30 plus the North Americans.  You’ll note that the finishing places start jumping up after Noah Hoffman in 31st.

Ok, here’s the women’s version:

My intention with these graphs really is that they serve as just a snapshot, a quick way to put the race results in some context for each skier.  The hope is that they will lead to some more interesting things to look at in more depth in subsequent posts.

I didn’t this weekend, but going forward my plan is to have these up as soon as I can on the day of race for WC, TdS and WSC events, with almost no commentary.  (I can make similar graphs for sprint races using finishing place rather than FIS points.)  Then I’ll dig a little deeper in follow up posts.

Full versions, which include every racer, are below the fold.  They are big, so click through for the full versions.

Related posts:

1. <Most Improved: Women’s Distance
2. <Head-to-Head: Marit vs Justyna
3. <Post-WJC/U23 Development: Norway

divspan class=”Apple-style-span” style=”font-size: 15.8333px; “divOk our plan did not work totally as we planned but through some editing we were able to prove our point. Skiers should think about some aspect of technique every stride, every pole plant. This is especially true when you are trying to make changes and corrections to your technique. /divdivbr //divdivenjoy../div/span/divdivbr //divdivbr //divobject width=”320″ height=”266″ class=”BLOG_video_class” id=”BLOG_video-2e30bdb79b6d8930″ classid=”clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/get_player”param name=”bgcolor” value=”#FFFFFF”param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true”param name=”flashvars” value=”flvurl=http%3A%2F%2Fv23.nonxt8.googlevideo.com%2Fvideoplayback%3Fid%3D2e30bdb79b6d8930%26itag%3D5%26app%3Dblogger%26ip%3D0.0.0.0%26ipbits%3D0%26expire%3D1296056884%26sparams%3Did%252Citag%252Cip%252Cipbits%252Cexpire%26signature%3D6546F3D087ECFC081BDBD4503902F473974BDB94.45C8CC5D04F3D420F8F262F289596D96F7CC7658%26key%3Dck1amp;iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2FThumbnailServer2%3Fapp%3Dblogger%26contentid%3D2e30bdb79b6d8930%26offsetms%3D5000%26itag%3Dw160%26sigh%3D3SdSe5_IUFK7279Gg6j-UP9ZBCcamp;autoplay=0amp;ps=blogger”embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/get_player” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”width=”320″ height=”266″ bgcolor=”#FFFFFF”flashvars=”flvurl=http%3A%2F%2Fv23.nonxt8.googlevideo.com%2Fvideoplayback%3Fid%3D2e30bdb79b6d8930%26itag%3D5%26app%3Dblogger%26ip%3D0.0.0.0%26ipbits%3D0%26expire%3D1296056884%26sparams%3Did%252Citag%252Cip%252Cipbits%252Cexpire%26signature%3D6546F3D087ECFC081BDBD4503902F473974BDB94.45C8CC5D04F3D420F8F262F289596D96F7CC7658%26key%3Dck1iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2FThumbnailServer2%3Fapp%3Dblogger%26contentid%3D2e30bdb79b6d8930%26offsetms%3D5000%26itag%3Dw160%26sigh%3D3SdSe5_IUFK7279Gg6j-UP9ZBCcautoplay=0ps=blogger”allowFullScreen=”true” //objectdiv class=”blogger-post-footer”img width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4680416899705879324-5805993242867105831?l=smsxc.blogspot.com’ alt=” //div