We decided to go to Spring Series this year to focus on fun a little more than business. We had a ton of fun, but not the kind of fun you might think of when you hear about Spring Series. We were waxing for some good athletes, including Kris Freeman and Noah Hoffman, and when you’ve got skiers taking the racing seriously, you tend to respond in kind. We ended up working 15 hour days on average. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked at a race series when I didn’t have my grinder there to keep me distracted.

It seems a little odd that Spring Series would involve more service work than, say, the Tour de Ski. But the combination of Spring weather at altitude, 9:00 AM starts, and a classic-heavy schedule means that you need to be prepared for a lot of different possibilities each day, and you won’t have time to decide which skis to start testing in the morning. For the 15K classic race, for example, we had nine pairs of skis ready with race paraffin and basewax for Kris and Noah alone. Four of those never even saw the snow, but we didn’t know what we’d be waking up to, and had to be prepared.

Leaving options open for morning ski selection means more work in the morning in more ways than one. First, we need to select skis (obviously). But we can’t afford to put fluoro powder on all those options – half of which won’t even be pulled out of the bag – so we need to build-in time to powder the skis after they’ve been selected. Under the circumstances it makes sense to test fluoro powders in the morning, along with skis, kick wax, top coats and structure. Good thing there were four or five of us working every day!

The other complicating factor at Spring Series compared with the Tour de Ski or World Championships is that at Spring Series we’re there working for everybody. We’re making wax recommendations, and talking to a ton of people about what we’re testing, and what we expect to have running well the next day. On the World Cup we can afford to focus only on our work, but in domestic racing we show up to provide the best skis we can to the people we’re waxing for, but also to provide neutral support to the entire field. That means we spend a lot of time talking to people. Fortunately, they’re all good friends, and that’s a huge part of the fun of the trip.

We also had a bit of a side project going on in Sun Valley this past week. Nate Brown is a polymer chemist based in Boulder, and he’s been working with us on some glide wax ideas this winter. I had some of his wax in Oslo at World Championships, and it won a couple of tests, but we didn’t have enough experience and confidence to put it into races there. Nate decided to come to Sun Valley with us to get some real-world race service experience. He didn’t know exactly what he was getting himself into, and he ended up getting a lot of exercise, between doing the normal service work, and testing his own stuff. We turned Rick Knoebel’s garage into part waxing chaos, and part chemistry lab, as Nate was testing in the afternoons, and then coming back to make wax and test ideas. We remained cautious about using new and unproven materials, but by the last two races we were convinced that Nate had some interesting stuff, and so we put the prototype waxes into the races in both the sprint and the hill climb.

Here are some day by day highlights:

50K – Kris Freeman wins, Noah Hoffman ends up fifth after getting stomach cramps. Skis were quite OK – both Kris and Noah went on the same skis they used in the World Championship 15K with Rode Violet hardwax  over Vauhti K-base. Glide was Matrix Blue with Mid 02 powder. Actually, for the guys I put on a Ski*Go test powder because it was running the same as the Mid 02 and it was easier to get on the ski in the short time we had. We covered with Ski*Go 55/99 liquid because we liked the top-end speed. The other option was Mid 08 block which was good at low speed. Anyway, nothing too special.

30K – We worked on a ski project with Morgan Arritola at the start of the series, and  in order to learn some about Morgan’s skis we had five pairs ready for testing the morning of the race. She ended up going on a pair of Fischer S-Tracks from our BNS inventory that I pulled and ground the day before we packed to leave. Morgan ended up fourth – third American in National Championship 30K – after a season of frustrating results, and clearly not in possession of her top racing gear. But she was tough and persistent, and she had fast skis and adequate kick. That was one of the real high points of the trip for me. For kick wax we used Ski*Go HF red covered with XC Orange. Glide was the same

Prologue – We had a rest day before this one, which meant time for full speed-trap testing of paraffins and powders. Conditions remained cool. In order to complicate an otherwise simple day we spent a little time testing wedges. While some people felt that the skis with wedges were more slippery, almost everybody we worked with elected not to use the wedges. I was testing with Morgan on for this one, and the skis with wedges felt clunky and tippy rolling onto edge. So we pulled the wedges out from under her Salomon bindings on the morning of the race. Once again, we raced on Matrix Blue and Mid 02 (correction, we were on HP05, which I forgot when I wrote this earlier). For top coats we didn’t like the 55/99 as much, but stuck with liquids. We ran on some combination of C105 liquid and C44/7 liquid. I don’t remember clearly. What I do remember is that immediately after the race we tested one of Nates waxes and it KILLED our race skis. We did fine – the skis were good for the racers – but we were left with a “what-if” feeling.

10K/15K – This was a hectic day. The snow had transformed and there were a TON of waxes that were in the game. We had test skis with binder and hard wax, klister covered, and straight klister. All were workable. Durability was a concern as the snow was aggressive, and there was one high speed sliding corner that would really challenge the durability of any wax job. We prepped skis the night before the races with Swix K20 spray base klister (tough as nails, and sprays on in a really thin coat) covered with a thin layer of Rode Special Blue ironed in. We let that freeze overnight. For the race we ended up putting that Vauhti K-base back on, and covering it with more Rode Violet, and then some M3R – a mix we make in the shop. For the women it warmed up and we went on M3R and a mix of Guru Yellow and Ski*Go HF Yellow. Glide was Matrix Blue for the guys and Matrix Red for the women. We used C22 powder for the men, with a liquid from Nate. For the women we went straight to the liquid.

Sprints – Holy cow, what a day! It started badly with Kris taking a spill in qualifying. But Evelyn Dong from XC Oregon qualified, against all expectation, and Sylvan Ellefson and Noah both moved on. The tracks were hard and icy in the morning, and we were on a thickly cushioned combination of Guru 39 Extreme and Swix K22 klister. Very shortly after the qualifier the snow broke and got wet. The Sun was shining and it was getting hot fast. When the snow breaks and gets wet you can get screwed really quickly if you’re on a thick cushion of klister – no matter how hard it is, it tends to get slow. So we cleaned all the skis and got back to testing. The course was closed to the athletes, so Eric and Tom skied lap after lap, until they also got booted off the course. Evelyn went into her quarter final on Zeros because they felt faster than her klister, but she didn’t have enough kick and got eliminated. We ended up on an odd combination of Start Special Zero klister with Start MFW Yellow on the same (pretty stiff, high) klister skis as the morning. We also went with Nate’s liquid on top of a Swix 2.0/1.0 super riller combo. We had no idea how thing were going to go as we got ready for the heats. Both Sylvan and Noah were in the same quarter final, ranked third and fifth, so we figured it was likely that our day was almost over. The course was flat and gradual climbing until one last jammer of an uphill and a descent to the stadium. Noah started out at the front, and then obliterated the field on the climb (holy ****!?!?!?!?!). Then he hit the downhill and his skis looked OK, but there was nobody near him. Meanwhile, Sylvan was struggling in fifth, and not moving up on the climb. Then he hit the downhill and absolutely destroyed the rest of the field in his tuck, finishing an easy second. Oh my. Thank you Nate! Sylvan came back laughing, and we fielded questions for a few minutes on what the HELL we had done. Anyway, both Sylv and Noah got pretty tired by the end. Noah ended up fifth in the final after weathering a fall in his Semi thanks to a later fall by the guys who were ahead of him. Sylvan made the B final and used his fifth to second trick again to pick up a few spots. All in all it was a day with its share of disappointment, but also some really exciting success.

Final Climb – We were tired, the athletes were tired, and it thankfully didn’t rain (as it was forecast to). We went on Nate’s wax again. It wasn’t the home-run we had hoped for, but it was mostly a non-factor on tough climbing course. We had Kris and Noah starting first and fourth, and both had a shot to win. To be honest, they were solid picks for first and second. As it turned out, Noah was simply exhausted. He had made a commitment to himself to go all out at a certain point on the course. He hit that point in fourth place, with Tad Elliot coming up behind him fast, and with his head hanging and his energy completely blown. And then… he went all out, just like he told himself he would. It was impressive, and a little bit sad – like the last fight of a gazelle who’s being taken down by a pack of hyenas. This might be the only time in history that Noah has been compared to a gazelle, by the way. Anyway, he mostly avoided the hyenas (Tad), and got past Drew Goldsack. Everybody was suffering at the top, and Noah actually came with four seconds of catching Simi Hamilton who skied a truly impressive race to hang on to his second spot. Meanwhile, Kris had broken everybody early on the climb and made a point of breaking their will to chase him before nearly breaking his own will to keep going. Kris was seventh in the final climb at the Tour de Ski, and even though this race up Dollar mountain was only 12 or 13 minutes long, he said it was almost harder, because it was totally unbroken once it started. He ended up double-poling for a little while. So, first and third in the overall mini-tour for the athletes we were waxing. Very satisfactory. As I mentioned after the 50K, success in waxing is mostly about picking the right athletes. Thanks to all of our skiers for helping to make us look good.

Finally, thanks to the BNS crew in Sun Valley. Eric Pepper and I planned to do this for fun because I wanted to see Kris and Noah race. Tom Troutner is my stalwart service partner at BNS, and we abuse his willingness to work long hours all season long. What happens when his season is over? He decides to come volunteer for another 100+ hours of service work at Spring Series. Thanks Tom! Nate Brown appears to be a glutton for punishment, just like the rest of us in this game. It was truly impressive to watch him reason through his test results and concoct waxes on the fly. We ended up racing with great success on both paraffins and top coats that he had made. Nate also came on his own dime, and he ran our race-day glide testing all week. That includes powder testing, top-coat testing, and structure testing. There’s no way we would have been able to do the work we did without him. Mike Vigers came up to race the mini-tour, but he came up early with us and ended up spending the first three days on our schedule, as a full member of the service staff. Finally, a huge thanks to Rick Knoebel who welcomed us into his home. I had told him it would probably just be me and Eric, and we landed on him with the full crew. We had a great set-up