Category: XCFeeds

A collection of live feeds from cross-country ski blogs around the web.

Most Unimproved: Men’s Sprint
Almost done with the series now, just the sprinters who struggled the most this season, starting with the men:

This list is notable for a few reasons, first because of the large number of big names on it. Usually there are at least of few people my metrics pick out that I don’t really know, but I’m familiar with basically all of these guys.

Secondly, this highlights what a rough season the Swedish men had, particularly in sprints. Joensson, Hellner, Modin and Rickardsson all struggled considerably this year compared to last. In Joensson’s case, he still had some decent races, but he simply wasn’t as absurdly dominant as he was the last two seasons. Hellner, Modin and Rickardsson all saw pretty dramatic declines, though. I mean, Rickardsson didn’t qualify for the heats once this year, Modin qualified but rarely advanced past the quarterfinals, and Hellner only qualified half the time.

Two Italians also make the list, Scola and Pasini. Scola’s sprinting performances last year are looking like they may have been a bit of an aberration, although his results have been pretty erratic from year to year. Pasini just plain struggled to qualify at all.

John Kristian Dahl has seen a steady decline (while still occasionally popping good races) for 4-5 seasons in a row now. But while he still manages to advance to the semis or finals a few times each season, his bad races are just getting worse and worse.

The Finns, Nousiainen and Heikkinen don’t do quite as many sprints each season as some of the specialists, so one might expect their results to be a bit more erratic. Northug’s inclusion here is probably somewhat marginal, stemming from his struggles with injury and illness that prevented him from doing more sprints. I sort of doubt that his actual sprinting abilities declined all that much.

Related posts:
April 18, 2012
Things I Learned in the City (that have pretty much nothing to do with skiing)
A Compilation of My Observations: Some More Factual Than Others
- Public transportation; what?! Seriously though how cool are trains? Hello country mouse this is awesome!
- Looking lost and ambivalent, totally in! Finally a place where my face (which is stuck in a constant state of awe and confusion) does not make me stick out.
- People will walk through, on, and NEVER around you. Hold your ground and smile.
- Super sparkly, glittery eye makeup is not just for women’s relay teams and cross dressers.
- A lot of people do not know how to run. Seriously T-rex, what are your arms doing???
- The more sheer your clothing, the trendier you are.
- Food should be organic, BPA-free, kosher, zero-cal, and preferably french sounding.
- Have no fear a Starbucks is near! I mean it. You are ALWAYS within a city block of one… and not because NewYorkers need coffee in order to survive (which they do)…. no, Starbucks are actually the only public bathrooms (fun fact!).
- In one day (without trying) you can accidentally crash a Scottish parade, a photo shoot in Union Square, a 5km charity run, a wedding, and an Asian press conference.
- I can run in heels. Who knew!
- You can talk to yourself and it doesn’t matter… everyone just assumes you are on a bluetooth.
- Hunter orange is big this season. Never thought Wisconsin could be so far ahead of a trend!
- You can wear whatever blows your skirt up (figuratively of course) as shock value is nonexistent. Someone will be looking crazier than you, no matter what. Unless that was you in the pink boa feathered hat.
- I have been a hermit for much too long… and should not be allowed around THAT much of the general public.
April 17, 2012
First Day Back!

Today was our first day back to school & training after our two week spring break! Everyone seems to be rested, healthy, and refreshed and it was a smiling and chatty bunch at practice today. This morning during our morning training block we had a team meeting to go over the plan for the spring and this week’s training – time to get everyone on the same page! This afternoon, we headed out for a short run after class and then hit the gym for strength. As anyone in New England knows, today was a really nice, warm day! Summer’s coming…

Tess & Mackenzie.

Hamish working on his pushups (above & below).

Mollie works on her dips.

Tyler was in fine form in front of the camera today. 🙂

Paddy working the rollerboard.

Paddy & Hamish.

Dramatic side lunges by Tyler Foulkes.

Kate.

Tess & Mackenzie.

Mac.

Tyler LOVES planks.

When sit ups are too easy…

Brooke and Anika – working on their balance.

Finishing up with some good old floor core.

Congratulations to Elite Team member Sophie Caldwell for being named Ski Racing Magazine’s Women’s Collegiate Nordic Skier of the Year! See the full article here.

April 16, 2012
First Day Back!

Today was our first day back to school & training after our two week spring break! Everyone seems to be rested, healthy, and refreshed and it was a smiling and chatty bunch at practice today. This morning during our morning training block we had a team meeting to go over the plan for the spring and this week’s training – time to get everyone on the same page! This afternoon, we headed out for a short run after class and then hit the gym for strength. As anyone in New England knows, today was a really nice, warm day! Summer’s coming…

Tess & Mackenzie.

Hamish working on his pushups (above & below).

Mollie works on her dips.

Tyler was in fine form in front of the camera today. 🙂

Paddy working the rollerboard.

Paddy & Hamish.

Dramatic side lunges by Tyler Foulkes.

Kate.

Tess & Mackenzie.

Mac.

Tyler LOVES planks.

When sit ups are too easy…

Brooke and Anika – working on their balance.

Finishing up with some good old floor core.

Congratulations to Elite Team member Sophie Caldwell for being named Ski Racing Magazine’s Women’s Collegiate Nordic Skier of the Year! See the full article here.

April 16, 2012
Most Improved: Women’s Sprint
Moving right along to the most improved women’s sprinter (at least, according to the metric laid out in this post).

Here’s the collection:

As usual, you can click on it for a slightly larger version.

Once again, I think we’re seeing that North America had a pretty across the board incredible year in sprinting, with Chandra Crawford making continued progress. The list of North Americans who had strong sprint races on the World Cup this year is quite long.

Van Der Graff, Kylloenen and Oestberg all have patterns that look roughly similar: young-ish skiers on a fairly steep improvement curve.

Kowalczyk sneaks in here with an increase in podiums basically (along with the usual smattering of “off” races), but it’s hard to make out in the graph due to some over plotting of points. Despite a sudden lack of consistency from Ingemarsdotter, she qualified through to the semifinals considerably more often this season.

Gaia Vuerich, Anastasia Dotsenko and Alenka Cebasek are skiers I don’t know much about, but they all appear to be fairly young. Given the women’s field, young sprinters showing dramatic improvement from the 40′s-50′s down into the 20′s-30′s isn’t all that uncommon. We’ll see if they can stick around…

Related posts:
April 16, 2012
Back In The Swing

The SMS Elite Team got together today for a 1:45 run followed by lunch and a planning meeting with Gus. It was great to get everyone together and we are looking forward to working with them this year. The group officially starts in mid June and they will be training with us for most of the summer and fall.

The SMS students return from spring break this evening and plunge back into academics and varied spring training activities tomorrow. Should be fun!

April 15, 2012
Country Mouse in the Big City

To catch my breath. To finally move out of this past season and into the next we need to reset. The best way I can do that is to gallivant around. (Oh boy I do love to gallivant) To go “home-home” back to Wisconsin. To see my family. Clear my mind. This way when we start the first national team camp of the year in May, I’ll be ready… mentally, and physically.

And so Country Mouse went to the big city. To see the people… I mean sights. To see the sights. I’ve always always always lived in pretty small places. I’ve never lived on the 38th floor “for the view”. I climb mountains for that.

And so I walk around with big wide eyes and big huge grin. Hello happily lost and perpetually mesmerized!

April 13, 2012
Most Improved: Men’s Sprint
Now we’ll finish up this series with the sprinters, starting with the most improved men. The methodology is simpler here, as we really only need to use finishing place as a metric (although we will still scale improvements so that, say, improving from 40th to 20th isn’t seen as a dramatically larger improvement than from 10th to 5th).

Here’s most improved men (click through for the full version):

Sweden’s Teodor Peterson tops the list here (which is interesting, given what we’ll see for the most un-improved men’s sprinters…) followed by the Norwegians Golberg and Brandsdal. Golberg is still quite new to the circuit, so rapid improvement isn’t terribly surprising for a guy getting more starts.

My general impression is that its pretty hard to sustain dominant sprinting performances for very many seasons in a row (too much luck is involved) so I wouldn’t be shocked to see Peterson have another successful season next year, but maybe not so relentlessly advancing to the semifinals.

I’m glad that Simi Hamilton gets his due here, while perhaps overshadowed by other successful North American sprinters this year, he really did finally put together a solid season. Similarly, Devon Kershaw pretty dramatically stepped up his sprinting performance, which is a major reason why he finished 2nd in the World Cup overall.

Morilov’s improvement doesn’t look terribly impressive, at least to the eye, but he’s getting credit here for some increased consistency.

Len Valjas basically doubled the number of times he qualified for the heats this season. And that’s nothing to shake a stick at!

Roddy Darragon, Fabio Pasini and Eligius Tambornino (awesome name!) I’ll group together as they both saw some improvement after a handful of sub-par seasons. Pasini showed some flashes of his 2009 self, but wasn’t terribly consistent. Darragon has two pretty bad seasons with not many races (injury or illness perhaps?) and improved, but not quite to where he was in 2009.

Related posts:
April 13, 2012
Crust Ski To Twentymile Glacier

The Twentymile River valley has lots of great terrain for crust skiing, and a couple of cool lakes to explore. But it can be finicky. Often times, when enough melting has occurred to create crust, the alders have started popping up, or the section near the road has turned to swamp. You need a lot of snow to get a good crust window. So this year Twentymile, like most other crust destinations in Southcentral, was the best I’ve ever seen it.

Bill and I only had a few hours before work, so we made a quick out and back run straight to the glacier.

GPS Track here

Heading upriver

Hope you sharpened your edges

Twentymile Glacier

Twentymile Glacier Crust Ski – P4110026.JPG

There's white gold in them thar hills!

Twentymile Glacier Crust Ski – P4110029.JPG

Twentymile Glacier Crust Ski – P4110030.JPG

Twentymile Glacier Crust Ski – P4110035.JPG

Twentymile Glacier Crust Ski – P4110036.JPG

Cruising along the Glacier River

Heading home

Yeehaw!

April 12, 2012
How Continental Cup Winners Fare On The World Cup
I got an interesting question from a reader the other day that I though I’d follow up on:

As you know, the winners of all the continental cups gets to start the World Cup season. There are also intermediate rankings during the season that allows the current continental cup leaders to join the WC’s. My son , the skier, was wondering if you could do a comparison of how well the leaders and winners of continental cups fare when on the WC circuit? More specifically, how do Canada’s and the USA’s leaders and winners WC results compare to other continental cup skiers? Or have you already done this and I have missed the post?

So, this is harder to examine directly than it might seem, mostly due to the availability of data. FIS isn’t in the habit of publishing lists of Continental Cup leaders someplace that remains accessible for more than a year or so. (At least, not to my knowledge. If anyone knows of such a series of lists, I’d be happy to take a look.)

In particular, the starts awarded to the intermediate leaders during a season will be the hardest to track. Also, there’s the issue that sometimes the nominal Continental Cup leader may decline the starts, or be ineligible (wrong nation of origin) so you’d have to filter out those cases too.

To avoid getting lost in the technicalities of Continental Cups, let’s look at something that’s pretty close to the original question: take the top three skiers in each Continental Cup series at the end of a season, and look at how they did in the 1st period World Cup races the following season.

This will allow us to address the question of how the “best” Continental Cup skiers from different regions compare on the WC, without getting bogged down in too many details.

The following graph shows the median result for an aggregated collection of Continental Cup series:

Even though I’ve expanded this to the top three, rather than just the winner, it’s important to note that these results will be very strongly influenced by a single very strong skier from a particular region (I’m thinking Justyna Kowalczyk here, but there are other examples).

But this also means that it’s tough to glean any general trend, since the results from any particular region will be so strongly dependent on whether they happen to have a “super star” that year or not.

That said, I do think it’s clear that the Scandinavian and OPA Cup skiers are generally stronger on the men’s side. The women’s field, not surprisingly, is a little more mixed. The recent good fortunes among the women’s UST/NAC skiers is probably in large part to Jessie Diggins/Holly Brooks.

Related posts:
April 11, 2012
Crust Loop in the City

We have had an incredible crust skiing season here in South Central Alaska. A record-breaking amount of snow, followed by a lots of sunshine and freeze-thaw cycles during April and early May. You couldn’t have dreamed up a better crust recipe. Nearly every crust skiing hotspot was in-season starting in the beginning of April, and some of them are still going strong as we close in on June!

I had big ideas about cashing in a lot of my vacation time to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But in the end, there were just too many real-life issues and responsibilities for me to essentially play hooky for a month. I have to say, I think I’ve dealt with my lack of adequate crust fixes quite well. And by that I mean I haven’t killed anyone yet.

So I only got out for a handful of crust skis this spring. But they were all great, and most of them took me to places I’d never crust skied before. The first one worth posting about was a loop I did in Anchorage. I got the idea after doing the long commute loop in January and then seeing Tim’s crust ski from Oceanview to Westchester. I decided to do a loop down Campbell Creek to the coastal flats, around the flats to Westchester Lagoon and then up Chester Creek to complete the loop. I was able to stay off-trail and on-crust most of the way along Campbell Creek. The coastal flats were amazing skiing, especially the stuff on the north side of Kincaid. There is something really cool about skiing along a few feet away from where the ocean is lapping at the crust’s edge. Getting back up Chester Creek kind of sucked, but even there and through the university area I was able to find intermittent spots of crust along side the trail.

I didn’t take my camera on this one because I didn’t think I’d be going anywhere interesting or remarkable. After all, I was in the city the whole time. But man, I was wrong. So many cool areas on this ski. For me, the added benefit of this loop is that I could park right at my office on the Campbell Creek trail, so everyone thought I was hard at work all morning.

GPS Track here

April 11, 2012
Most Un-Improved: Women’s Distance
Last in the sequence of related posts covering distance events, the most un-improved women from this season:

As always, you can click through for a slightly larger version.

The Slovakian Prochazkova takes the cake here with what looks like a small set of somewhat mediocre results after two fairly strong seasons. The small number of races compared to previous seasons suggests to me that she may have had injury or illness issues, but I wasn’t following her closely so I don’t know for sure.

Both Ingermarsdotter and Fessel are relatively young skiers who had seemingly breakthrough seasons last year, but seem to have come back to earth slightly this season. Finland’s veteran Saarinen, if I recall correctly, was injured early in the season, and apparently never quite got back up to speed.

Anna Haag is a sort of interesting case as she had some rather dramatically good races in 2010 (an Olympic year) but has pretty consistently slid backward in each of the following seasons. But if anything, its the 2010 campaign that seems out of place; she’s basically back to performing at the level she was pre-2010 at this point.

Silvia Rupil appears here as one of those skiers with a “decline” simply because she failed to pop the occasional outstanding race, although her “average” result has remained roughly the same.

Kolomina and Novikova are both young Russians, part of a squad that two years ago I thought maybe was seeing signs of a resurgence, but my general impression was that they really struggled again this year.

Laura Rohtla looks like she shouldn’t be on this list at all, but remember that my ranking includes 3 other measures besides the one I’m showing here. Still, she’s probably a marginal inclusion.

Related posts:
April 9, 2012
Recharging the Batteries

The 2012 ski season came to a close with the 50km National Championships in Craftsbury, Vermont. The organizing committee and hosts, the Craftsbury Outdoor Center did an amazing job making the event happen. When we arrived in Vermont we were greeted with temperatures in the upper 70s and the prognosis for the week was looking grim. It is impressive to see what can happen when a community comes together. The organizers focused on defending a short course of snow by trucking snow on to the trail from two incredibly large stockpiles of man-made snow.

We raced 33 laps of the 1.5km course for the 50k. The lead pack was quite large until about 8km to go which made for pretty exciting skiing. I finished 11th which I felt pretty good about after struggling at the beginning of the week. After a surprise second place in the hill climb up Jay Peak I was hoping that the longer slower pace of the 50km would treat me better but I think that I am pretty worn out after the year.

One of my favorite things to do after the ski season is to experience something totally different. It was quite the shock to leave simple Vermont and head to the Big Apple. I am not much of a big city person but it is fun to experience a completely different lifestyle. Plus it was great to take advantage of being on the East Coast to visit family.

Tara (my Sister), Caitlin and Simon enjoying $1 slices of pizza. Perhaps the best deal in New York City.

The New York City girls (Caitlin Grandma, Mother, and Caitlin)

We arrived back in Minneapolis for the Easter weekend. I am looking forward to being home and in one place for a while. The Minneapolis schools all had Spring Break this week and the kids were excited to have us back in the ‘hood.’ I am not sure where they all came from but at one point there were 15 kids working and playing in the backyard. Check out Cailtin’s blog for some great pictures on the garden project http://in-the-arena-ccompton.blogspot.com/2012/04/spring-time-garden-time.html

April 8, 2012
Super Tour Finals

Hi Everyone, sorry this has taken a couple days to get an update to you all. I’m back in Alaska, trying to get caught back up on my school work.

I haven’t been to a race in Vermont since I was younger racing the Bill Koch Festival. The east coast weather is just WEIRD, I’m not used to the quick weather changes.We raced in Craftsburry, a small town where one of the strongest elite programs in the U.S. is based, the Green Team Racing Project. It went from 70 degrees and sunny to below freezing and snowing in three days. The volunteers at Craftsburry did a great job putting up with the weather and had the only snow in the area nicely spread out around a 1 mile loop. It was good to be back in the United States and it felt close to home after being in Europe for two months.

I raced five races in Vermont. A four day mini tour and the 50km National Championships. The World Cup has ended so the best from the United States competed at these races. I had been skiing stronger and stronger the last two weeks in Europe so I came into this race series feeling really quick and I skied to some of my best results ever. The four day series included two distance races, a sprint, and another event I don’t get to do very often, a uphill climb. My standout performance was in the 15km classic race. Below is a picture from the race a long with a youtube recap of the race at this link.

It was such a good experience to duke it out with the best guys from the country and a real confidence booster going into the off season. It was the best race of my life… what a good feeling!

The fourth and final race of the tour was an uphill climb. In the uphill climb they seeded us off the results from the previous three races. I had skied strong all week so I went into the race seeded second. The way they find the start times is they add up all the times of the other races and then who ever has been the fastest the previous races starts first. I started 18 seconds behind Kris Freeman(two time Olympian, several World Cup top 10 results, and multi-national champion). Behind me I had 70 or so races and among then was Simi Hamilton who started 8 seconds behind. He has also posted some top 15 world cup results this season and was at the last Olympics. I somehow managed to hold him off and only let one of the 70 guys chasing me pass. That man was Noah Hoffman, a great hill climber, who skied to second overall in the Tour. I finished up the Super Tour Final race series in third. It feels great to end the season on such a high note.

–Overall podium, from right to left, Noah Hoffman, Kris Freeman, and myself.

What a great week. Now I’m back in Alaska. Getting caught up on my school work and enjoying being back home.

April 7, 2012
2012 National Championships

Under sunny skies and in temperature up to the 20′s, Black Jack put everything on the line for the 2012 Haywood National Championships in Mont St Anne, Quebec. Club members Rebecca Reid and Geoffrey Richards lead the charge, both taking several trips to the podium throughout the week, and finishing second in the Junior Women’s […]

April 6, 2012
Shred Ready: Hike and Ski and Sugarbush

Inspired by a little late-season snowfall and the visit of our friend Luke from Williamstown, we decided to hike up Sugarbush and ski down the one remaining trail with snow. We packed into the van and drove up to South to see if there was any powder to be had.

It was still snowing when we got there, and excitement was running high. Luke and Hans didn’t have alpine gear, so they prepared to improvise: Hans with a chest protector wrapped in heavy plastic, Luke with sneakers.

Everyone was excited for the climb up, but mostly looking forward to seeing what mother nature had bestowed upon the mountain the night before.

Things were a little scratchy near the bottom, but by the time we had hiked midway up the mountain we had some promising fresh snow and a spectacular view of the Mad River Valley with just a tiny bit of frosting over the newly green farm fields and forest.

After taking a moment to ponder, we made the final ascent to the top of Steins, while MK (our photographer) and Fitzy ran back down the way we had come up.

Here’s what it looked like going down:

April 6, 2012
Most Un-Improved: Men’s Distance
These are definitely less pleasant posts to write, but part of any season assessment should include what went wrong as well as what went right.

Once again, you can refer to my initial post in this series for an explanation of the general methodology.

That said, here’s the twelve men who took the biggest slide in distance events this season, compared to last:

Daniel Rickardsson didn’t exactly have terrible results this year, but after several years of steady improvement 2012 just didn’t include the top level results we’d seen from him last year. You’ll note that, with two lone exceptions, he really didn’t have any truly bad races compared to his general range in the past. But he was apparently just lacking that top gear this season.

Nikolay Chebotko’s appearance on this list is something of an aberration, as it’s mostly due to an unusual set of races last season. Notice that this year’s results aren’t terribly different than what we’d seen from him in 2008-2010. Algo Karp is probably a similar case here.

In the “truly dramatic decline” category I’d probably include Curdin Perl and possibly Petter Eliassen. Perl obviously had an unusually good season last year, so some regression was probably to be expected, but he definitely fell back below where he’d been before. Eliassen is a more ambiguous case, since he has less of a racing history on the WC level.

Franz Goering also didn’t have a great season, but his was mostly a case of a lack of consistency. Four of his races were roughly on par with his past, but then his other five were all over the map.

Tom Reichelt is a marginal inclusion here, probably, mostly due to fewer truly exceptional races compared to last season.

Pietro Piller Cottrer, Fulvio Scola and Kris Freeman all strike me as somewhat similar in that I see a slow steady decline across multiple seasons. Granted, Freeman’s trend is only 2 seasons long, while the Italians have been nursing their’s for longer. But I will be particularly curious what Piller Cottrer’s future looks like. I’m not sure if he’s planning on sticking around until Sochi or not.

Related posts:
April 6, 2012
SMS Names Elite Team (updated)

April 5, 2012
NordiX on Vid

Red Bull Holmenkollen 2012. Bettina gets some serious screentime, skiing through the rounds and onto the podium. Norway’s national broadcaster NRK1 showed this whole event live.

Bjorn Lind speaking in Swedish about how to go fast on the classic skis. Perhaps it’s worth a watch, even if you can’t understand a word the man is saying. He gives mad props to Frode Estil.

April 5, 2012
A Weekend in Vermont

The end of the season had rolled its way in …But I was still stuck waiting for that sigh of relief to really settle itself. That feeling of absolute done-ness. What better way to really ring in the end of the season than Spring Series? So that was it! I proclaimed to the sliders… I was going to Vermont. Going to celebrate with “my own kind”.

Thanks to Elizabeth Simak of F.A.S.T Performance Racing for these awesome pictures!

I was going to cheer, and dance, and dance and cheer… and then when everyone was tired of dancing and cheering we would dance and cheer a little more. We would light things on fire (oh yes!!! … figuratively and literally) …and the season would be truely, utterly, and soulfully done.

I made it in time to watch the men race a 50k… on a 1.5km loop. Yes…. 33 loops! I struggled to keep track of which lap they were on… how were these boys not getting dizzy? Or bored?! (this coming from a biathlete, the kings and queens of skiing in circles) The men put on an incredibly good show. There was a pretty solid pack for the first half of the race before they started to get dropped off the back. Cramps, fatigue, crashes… I did my best to cheer and not totally mess up anyone’s feeds. Check! The best part? Getting to watch my team mate Russell ski right up there with the “big scary cross country ski dogs”. He finished 7th, but man was it fun to watch him take pulls at the front and chase down a few early breaks!

The men starting!

Yum? Coke Feeds!

Packing it up! (That’s Russell rocking the MWSC suit on the left! BAM!)

After the race the Craftsbury Ski Center transformed into a “thee” cross country skiing hangout. People sipped beverages, pizzas went into the big outdoor pizza oven, barbecue was there for the taking. A little wiffleball, a little bluegrass, a little dancing… and then an impressively large bonfire!

It was fun. Fun to see people I haven’t seen in well… two years! I didn’t realize switching to biathlon has made me something of a recluse… Getting to see all these athletes I had gotten to know over the years on the cross country circuit was awesome. Getting to see them all in one place (albeit slightly disorienting) was even better!

Oh what’s that? The weekend isn’t over? Nope… the next morning after emerging from my cot in the corner we all donned our outfits of choice (WonderGirl all the way) we headed back over to the Nordic Center to set up for Fast and Female!

This was my second Fast and Female event of the year, and I’m incredibly grateful to get to be an ambassador for such an amazing organization. We had all the big hitters there including Chandra Crawford and Kikkan Randall. Watching 120 girls in total awe is pretty incredible. Heck I was so into the little Q&A sesh that when one of the organizers was handing out posters to all the girls she handed me one before realizing I was in fact not 12… oops!

We were there to celebrate girls in sports, and inspire these young athletes to keep going… because well… skiing is fun!

One of my favorite quotes was one of the ambassadors explaining to the girls why they were so lucky… she said, “We didn’t have Fast and Female when I was your age. You guys get to celebrate my three favorite things… Pink, Skiing, and Dancing!!!! How cool is that!?” I couldn’t agree more!

We shared our own stories about how skiing came into our lives, we got in (effectively) our last ski of the year, and danced and danced some more! And then… we finally called it a day. Naps were in our futures, that and journeys to our separate parts of the country.

It was an incredible weekend, and an incredible way to end the season… Thanks to everyone in Vermont for letting me come and close the season off right! It was an absolute blast!

April 5, 2012