XC Skiing (CNYO Snowgaine) 7:25:00 [3]
(injured)
Day 2. See Bash's log for great pics.
A perfect sunny day with fresh powder everywhere. We had to start 33 minutes late due to penalty. I was limping to the car, and couldn't run a step so we took waxless skis today, even though many roads were now plowed and sanded.
Skiing started out OK on the flats, but as soon as we started breaking trail my knee hurt so much I was ready to hurl. Bash broke trail and I staggered behind. We were paying more attention to a bailout plan than nav, and had a couple of very messy controls with dumb errors, more in tourist mode. I found I could double pole along well on the snowmobile trail, and after a while could do an old-man shuffle ski with straight legs up hills so we decided to try a few more. After a few hours and a ton of advil the pain was less, and I could get ahead of Bash instead of schlepping behind. Every few minutes I'd kneel in the snow to ice the knee.
Even injured, the skiing was faster than snowshoeing/jogging, and we started knocking off controls pretty well on a plan B route. We saw that the Bobkittens were having a great day on skis over an hour ahead of us, and the skiing was absolutely fantastic despite the knee, in bright sun, no wind and snow-covered trees.
We made it down to a road and walked in the last 2km, only to find that RF had finished ages ago and won overall! They had used snowshoes and no poles- amazing. The mighty Bobkittens were 2nd, we were 4th and Salomon 5th. Not a bad showing from Canada.
Despite all the suffering, it was still a lot of fun, and a good road trip with our buddies.