BM: Here are my observations:1: The snow was indeed quite slow. The river took me about 36 minutes to do starting and about 42 finishing. I have done the same stretch in 31 and 34 in faster conditions. I knew it was going to be a grind by the fact that I did very little double poling on the river. Normally that is about all I do starting, this year I diagonaled pretty much the whole river. I did very little double poling coming back because I was so tired from the rest of the race. Thankfully my back held up and I was able to shuffle along in decent fashion.

2: My wax setup worked beautifully, I was even able to keep about 90% of the wax at the end on skis notorious for stripping. I ironed in a light layer of Chola binder and then while the bases were hot put on a liberal amount of Toko Blue kick. I let them fully cool and then added 3 layers of Toko green over.  I had very solid kick all the way to the finish. The limiting factor was my fatigue rather than loss of kick wax. For glide I opted for Start HF8. I decided not to go with Swix wax because the snow was so dry and had been so cold with no time to warmup before the race. Typically I wax for the finish but this year I felt that it would not warm up as fast and the cold snow would buy time to complete more of the race before I was out of  temp range. I felt that it worked. I had dry spots in the usual spots behind my heels and a little ahead of the kick zone.

3: The tracks were sublime but slow. I love a firm track, it really gives confidence on the descents. The trouble was that they were decidedly slow. Two areas stand out as having outstanding track speed: The lower section of the Black Cross that was not groomed and had old tracks (blistering fast) and the sweetest section of the whole day belonged to the descent on the blue loop. Rocket fast and I was able to glide all the way to the corner as you start to climb back up. It was refreshing to have that familiar rush of acceleration going down that hill (something missing from several hills that should have matched or exceeded that speed). The common denominator for both of these sections was that they were set 48 hours ahead rather than 24.  I think what was telling was that after the comp loops I started to get out of the tracks more and more to not only go best line through turns but also to pick up more speed in the skate lane than the tracks had to offer. This option is somewhat limited by the nature of the trails but it was telling that I was going that route to try and glean more speed from the trail.

JJ: Used two pairs of skiis   The stiffer camber pair to prevent loss of kickwax on the way out. The lighter camber for the last half hoping to have as little kickwax as possible when returning on River.

My initial pair had took green binder with the first of three layers of rode multigrade b/g ironed in.  Cover for the outbound trip was One layer of Nordic.  Great kick all the way to the stadium. Changed out skis before warmup loop. Good kick for the duration with same kickwax as first pair except for the Nordic cover layer