The Great Ski Race - The downhills the fun part
The Great Ski Race had been on my list of things to do since I moved to Tahoe in 2015. It’s a beautiful tour from Tahoe City to Truckee covering 30km of distance. I always wanted to skate ski it but skate skiing didn’t really click for me till 2018. On top of that I’m a bit of skating skiing conditions snob. I want the trails to be hard and fast. If there is any chance for sticky and slow I won’t even think about it. I feel like I got all my suffering out in my young 20s and now it’s my time for type 1 fun. That being said the past 7 years the conditions or my skill level just haven’t been right or I had some other excuse.
I wasn’t planning on doing it this year either. Usually I get a Royal Gorge ski pass since I live across the street and would be in pretty good skate skiing shape by this point in the season. However Royal Gorge “sold out” of passes in April last year and never opened up pass sales again. Since I run the website for the Donner Summit Association, live in Soda Springs, and previously worked at Sugar Bowl I reached out to operations begging them to sell me a pass. I only ski on week days and can walk to the trails so I wouldn’t even have to park in the parking lot. They responded with “you can get a job here and then get a pass”. Essentially Royal Gorge couldn’t give a shit about the local community or the people who live and work here. Needless to say my nordic season was soured by this interaction and I still would not recommend anyone coming to Tahoe to give any money to Sugar Bowl or Royal Gorge. We have so many incredibly nordic resorts in the area including Auburn Ski Club just across the street who has been incredible. And of course Tahoe City Cross Country who cares about the local community so much that they host the Great Ski Race fundraiser for the Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue. All this to say I maybe skate skied 4 times this season before the race including one mega 22 mile day out and back to Glacier Point in Yosemite with 3k feet of gain. It was during this skate ski mega adventure that I thought. Hey maybe I should do the Great Ski Race next weekend.
I immediately texted my friend Linn to see if she was doing the race. She said that her longest ski was 12 miles and thought that 16 miles was a big step up. I said I understood. I watched the weather every day that week and put a reminder on my calendar to register before the cut off but wasn’t entirely set on doing it. 3 days before the race Linn sent me a text that read something like hey maybe we should do the Great Ski Race cause YOLO. And so we registered.
We went out the day before the race to pick up our bibs and do a little skate skiing. The conditions were super sticky and I’m pretty sure I had scrapped all the wax off my skis from the icy downhill on my Glacier Point ski the previous weekend. I wasn’t super excited about the idea of slow sticky conditions for a 30km 1.6k feet of climbing ski. But hopeful that things would be better the next day. We stopped by Alpenglow to see Louis afterwards and dropped off our skis to get them waxed so that they would be fast as fuck for race day!
I didn’t really know what to expect from a nordic race. I’d never raced a ski race before and the idea of 600 people skating in close proximity at high speeds was super intimidating. I had registered for wave 4 but some how got bumped into wave 2. It seemed a little scary to think about being in a competitive fast wave. The first wave went off at 9am and 3 minutes later I was off in wave 2.
The race starts with everyone double polling until it opens up enough to skate without it being too chaotic. The man directly in front of me fell right at the start of the skating and I was able to narrowly skate around him. The first few kilometers were very chaotic. I was skating so closely behind people that if their poles lingered to long my skis would have gotten entangled. Things sort of settled in after a bit and I was no longer getting passed or passing people so I hit my stride in the pack.
The climb was relentless. 7 miles of uphill right out the gate. The angle was mellow enough that I was able to skate all of it. I stopped once at about 10k to drink some water but other than that was just skating my way up the starlet pass. I’m not going to lie it was hard work. Several times I thought about just turning around and skating back down the hill and also about how running is so much easier because you can just walk. I haven’t figured out how to walk with skate skis yet. My watch said it took my about an 1 hr and 10 minutes to make it to the Soup Station Aid Station.
I was so relieved to see the aid station because it meant that I was finally going to get to do some fun fast downhill miles. Also that I got to see my friend Ksenya! I drank 4 cups of gatorade and took a rice crispy for the road. I didn’t stay long but it felt really nice to get some fluids in and see familiar faces.
Out of the aid station the course goes downhill fast. It was a really nice relief from the relentless uphill up to that point. I pointed the skies straight and tried to go as fast as possible. The air was so cold I thought my fingers and face were going to freeze but I was definitely not going to slow down. At this point I pretty much stayed in the same position to the finished. The course had a few very short uphill sections that were practically flat and I made quick progress of them. It seemed like the finish came faster than expected. I coasted on the flats and skated on the uphills and finished in 2 hours and 13 minutes. Which I was pretty dang proud of.
I got some chili sat in the sun and waited for Linn to finish. It was a great day for a great race.