With a staff of five and only two racers we got a little bit ambitious with testing this morning. Even with good tests on Friday for paraffins and powders, we decided to retest our top four powders in the morning, as well as top coats and structures. We also spent some energy testing skis for the guys in the morning. We put LF Graphite and Matrix Blue on a total of nine pairs of skis last night. This morning we started with a basewax test, and liked the feeling of the new Vauhti K-Line basewax that Seppo from Canadian Wintersports sent me recently. It was a little faster than some of our usual basewax solutions, and all were adding some kick to the Rode Violet kick wax that we started with as our testing baseline.

Our goal was to do pretty short ballpark kick wax testing on test skis, and then focus our attention on building good wax jobs on race skis for the guys. Rode violet stayed good for us, and in spite of a few minor attempts at complicating things, we ended up with race skis feeling really close on the K-line base with three layers of Rode Violet.

That took us to about 8:30AM, with a 9:00 start. And this is when Eric Pepper got really nervous. I didn't want to powder nine pairs of skis, so we held off on putting fluoro powders on until we had the race skis nearly ready to go. So, at 8:30 we had a brief pre-race frenzy, running race skis about 1km from the stadium back to the trailer in the parking lot to put on powder and optimizer. Our morning test confirmed the powder call from yesterday, with Holmenkol Mid 02 and a Ski*Go test powder running equally well. The Ski*Go is easier to work with, so that's what I put on the race skis, mostly in consideration of the short time-line. We also put on Ski*Go C55/99 fluid which won our optimizer test. It was a toss-up between Mid 08 block which was best in the dryer snow and at lower speed, and the 55/99 fluid which was best in the glazing snow and at high speed. The call to go with 55/99 was taking into consideration the good durability of the Ski*Go liquids. Also, Kris and Noah are strong enough to keep up striding and double-poling, and we figured that the waxers would look better if they had really fast skis when they were tucking. (That last part was a joke, but Pepper was concerned that some people might not get it.)

While I was powdering and top-coating skis, Eric was chasing a few kick wax options to find a little more speed or a little more kick. The guys had both picked medium-stiff skis - coincidentally, both were the same pairs that they used at the World Champs in Oslo in the 15K. So we had a little bit of room to work with for adding wax. Eric found that a layer of Guru Hallgeir Extreme gave a little extra speed to the skis without stealing any kick. The Hallgeir is usual a wax for older snow, but we've had great luck with it in new snow - especially for finding good speed. So, we added one more layer of violet, and then a thin shell of hallgeir before sending the guys to the start.

That was about it. For tomorrow's 30K the forecast is very similar. We're going to take the skis further tonight, going with LF Graphite / Matrix Blue / Mid 02 tonight. We'll probably also put the K-line basewax on tonight as well. Our next full test will be on the training day on Monday. Eric and I are really happy to have Tom Troutner, Nate Brown and Mike Vigers here helping out. The extra hands makes it possible to do a little extra. After the race Kris mentioned that he liked the way the crew was working - that's high praise from a guy accustomed to World Cup service! So - thanks guys. Lots more 5AM mornings coming...