The “Engadiner”, is the largest cross-country skiing event in Switzerland and the second largest worldwide. It is a meeting point for the world’s elite and this is the 51styear. There will be 14,200 skiers skiing from Maloja to S-Chanf, a total of 42 kms. There are 27 Canadians of which 10 are from Ottawa/Gatineau and 3 of the 27 are women. Girls where are you? We start at 1800m and end up at 1670m and ski along some large lakes. It’s primarily flat with some short climbs and one very tricky downhill into Pontresina that winds through the Staz forest. The trees are all padded with orange foam. You are allowed to walk down along the marked footpath if you wish. We are super excited!! All of our clothes are laid out and we’re getting up at 5:30, breakfast at 6:15 and on the bus to the start at 6:45!!
The fastest time for the 42 kms. is 1:23:44 h set in 1998!Start at the top, on the lakes, through St.Moritz and along the valley floor to S-Chanf (bottom left corner).
It’s going to be so much fun!! Hopefully we can get back to our hotel with lots of time to enjoy the amazing co-ed sauna/steam bath spa! P.s. No one wears clothes- it’s a very revealing experience!!
We spent the day skiing around St. Moritz and went to Pontresina and back to practise the big hill in daylight! It wasn’t as tricky as it was at night which is good but there will be 13,000 more skiers skiing it tomorrow so we’ll see.
The trails are wide with beautiful views, lots of skiers and the sun was shining!
The shops are incredible! So expensive! Lots of bling!We went to the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz. The alpine paintings were spectacular but just too few of them for our 20 euros entry fee. Nothing is inexpensive here!
Then we drove 10 kms. up the Engadine valley to our new hotel in Sils Maria.
The Scenery in Sils Maria/The Engadine Valley is just spectacular! Here are some photos from this morning.
We are going to wax our skis now for the big race tomorrow. The forecast is for around 0 degrees with rain in the afternoon. Hopefully we’ll be done before the rain starts!! Getting nervous and excited! Once again!! We just love it here!
The night of Thursday March, 7thwe raced the Night Race! It was 17 kms from Sils Maria to Pontresina. It was an unbelievably cool experience. We took the bus that was filled with skiers from St. Moritz to the start in Sils Maria. The snow was coming down like crazy and I used one of Ross’s O.R. coats to stay dry while standing in the start block. The course was lit with huge candles and we had to wear headlamps. There were 810 skiers with six different live bands along the way and so many spectators standing around fires cheering us on. It was so cool looking ahead and seeing the line of headlamps in the distance. About half way the snow stopped and you could see the stars; which was really nice as the downhills were super glazed and fast. The downhill slalom course through the trees was very hairy but I managed to stay upright. It’ll be super crazy on Sunday’s race. We both went pretty hard! Ross finished in 55 minutes (38thin his age group) and I did it on one hour 13 minutes (26thin my age group). We both loved the experience and were very happy with our results. p.s. We waxed our own skis and they were perfect.Now we have another Worldloppet short course stamp for our passport.
On our way to the start. We were there super early!
Well we decided to sign up for the Engadine Night race, a 17 km race on Thursday, March 7th.It’s only a 17 km skate ski starting at 7 pm and it will give us a great chance to ski a section before the big Engadine race on Sunday, March 10th. We have to have a headlamp and there are 5 different bands playing along the candlelight course! Last night we went over to visit with our new Canadian friends and had cake with them as it was Emily’s birthday. She is also doing the Engadin so we will meet up with her again in St. Moritz. Today we did some more sight seeing in Stockholm.
We flew from Stockholm to Zurich and then drove about 3 and half hours to St. Moritz, Switzerland
The Vasa Museum
The Ship Vasa was a Swedish war ship built by King Adolphus Gustav. It sunk on it’s maiden voyage in Stockholm harbour in 1628. It lay on the sea floor in the harbour for 300 years and it was preserved by the low oxygen content in the water secondary to the city dumping all of their garbage into the sea for hundreds of years. It was raised in 1959 and for 17 years they sprayed it with polyethylene glycol to preserve the wood.
Before she sank!
Now it is sitting in the Vasa Museum 98% original. It’s huge. Here are some pictures of it now.
The museum is filled with very interesting artifacts recovered from the ship and we learnt a lot about the people and life on board.
Forgot to include this picture below of our new Canadian friends. One couple was going on to the World Masters in Norway, one couple to Lappland and the other couple to the Norwegian Birkiebeiner.The birthday girl we’ll try to hook up with tomorrow.
Emily has the purple top on!
Next we walked to the Fotografika Museum of Photography. It had two exhibits. The first was interesting as the photos were on display and went with the song, She Could Have Been A Cowboy being played.
The second one was really cool! It was called “The Truth is Dead”by Allison Jackson. Her work is about voyeurism, our need to believe and simulation. She cleverly uses actors or look-a-likes of celebrities and public figures to produce convincingly paparazzi or documentary style photographs of the intimate, often salacious, imagined lives of many of the world’s most famous or well-known individuals. Here are a few we found entertaining!
So long Sweden! We’ll be back for sure!
When we arrived in Zurich it was 10 degrees with green grass everywhere! However, we were given chains for our car rental!
The drive from Zurich to St. Moritz was really beautiful- fun on the autobahn and then up through a couple of passes (2250m) with switch backs and lots of snow! Would be very fun to ride on!
In St. Moritz now!
Well we’ve spent the day picking up our race kits, perusing the Sports Market( the toy shop), waxing our skis, talking to lots of fellow Canadians, getting ready for the Night race and of course blogging! It has been snowing a very wet heavy snow all day and it’s right around zero. Want a great way to meet fellow Canadians at a world event? Wear a Canada hat around as you meet so many new people! Today we met a group of 4 that have been travelling the world doing the WorldLoppets for 20 years! The one guy, Robert Palliser from Stirling, Ontario has 21 Gold Worldloppet Masters and is working on his 21nd. ( In other words he has done 210 Worldloppet races in at least 10 different countries. )He’s invited us to stay with him for the Marcia Longa Loppet in Italy next year!
Ross will be rilling the skis for tonight!
Better go! Time to get dressed and to the bus stop for the start of the Engadine Nachtlauf/Night Race!!
We had a very early start to the day- woke up at 2:15 am and drove to Mora! Really excited and nervous! We boarded the coach bus to Salen which was a two hour bus ride on back country windy roads. It was snowing and blowing with a temperature of about -3 C.
Once we got to the huge stadium we went inside to stay dry and warm for an hour before putting our skis out in our wave. The stadium was a crazy place- 10’s of thousands of people, a jumbotron, and the trucks and bins for the luggage were the biggest I’ve ever seen at any event. We split up and went into our waves and waited for the start at 8 am. It was an incredible site!! Here are some pictures from the start area:
By 7:45 am 15,800 racers were in line to all start at 8 am! The line went on forever in the distance!Looking and feeling a little tired before the start!
At 8am sharp we started to move as a huge mass!
We would go quite quickly and then stop all of a sudden. You had to keep your poles in super tight or they’d get broken! It was so exciting! An adrenalin rush! We kept going like this until we reached the bottom of the first hill and what a sight it was! See the picture below. It was slow going as we funnelled from about 40 lanes into the width of 10 lanes!!
The hill was very slow going and so squished that I had to keep my poles between my legs so they wouldn’t get broken. However, I had incredible grip so I could walk straight up while most skiers had to herring bone. (This was a sign of something to come!) It took one hour to go 1.75 kms! Finally we reached the top of the hill. On the way up there were so many broken poles, glasses and water bottles. Once it flattened out everyone started double poling and they were flying past me-I felt like my skis had sandpaper on the bottom. The scenery was beautiful and the snow was coming down along with a strong wind. It felt like the Canadian Ski Marathon! The tracks were almost non-existent. At this point I came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with my wax- too grippy and that it was going to be a long day and it wasn’t going to be easy! I wished I had written the checkpoint cut off times on my poles!! This was indeed going to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done! I had to maintain my determination and not stop too long at the checkpoints; there were 7 of them and you had to be at Checkpoint 7 (Eldris) at 81 kms. by 7 pm.
So I happily skied along doing more and more double poling, trying to improve my technique by watching fellow competitors ski past me. It was really the perfect terrain for double poling and the top racers double pole the whole distance, along with the sitz ski racers. Ross saw two of them in his wave. I stopped at each checkpoint and had something to drink (tried the famous blueberry soup) and a bun but mostly ate my food that I brought in my fanny pack-cashews, dried mango, granola bars and a few gels).
There were many spectators along the way cheering heja heja ( go go in swedish)and some had bonfires going. At about the 3rdcheckpoint I asked a guy how we were doing for time and he replied, “ keep a steady pace”. So I pushed on. It was not easy skiing-the tracks were not good at all and quite a few times a big groomer would come by so we’d all jump in the tracks. They would disappear very shortly after and the snow was really accumulating on top of the ice. I talked to a man along the way at a power bar station and he said that this was a very tough Vasa year and that the last time it was this tough was in 1972. That made me want to conquer it even more. Many spectators would say Heya Heya Canada as I had my Canada hat on! It was very encouraging, especially since I was one of 49 Canadians in the race. At Checkpoint number 5 (Oxberg) I asked a guy what time it was and I now knew that if I kept up my pace I could make the next 2 checkpoints with lots of time! I was doing a lot more double poling. By this point I had stopped twice to try and fix the wax situation but I really didn’t know what to do and didn’t want to take the time to go over to the waxing station as there were too many people there.
With about 40 kms. to go the wax seemed to get better which made double poling a bit easier but my back was feeling it-had to take advil and tylenol along with a pepcid. Finally, I was at checkpoint 7 ( Eldris) with 9 kms to go to the finish line! The trail lights came on and it was a beautiful night ski now! I could hear the announcer and music from the finish line! I was so excited!!! I was so so happy to cross the finish line and to achieve my goal of finishing. It wasn’t fast but I finished in just under 11 hours. Of course Ross was there to watch me cross the line as he had finished in 8 hours 47 minutes!! We were both so so happy! It was an amazing ski to be apart of-tough but magical in so many ways! We had just skied the longest, oldest and largest ski race in the world!!!!
Still double poling across the line!
Ross swears that the wax job we had done by the Loppet people cost us an hour and half or two. We will definitely do our own waxing for the next ones! After skiing 90 kms. We still had lots of grip wax on. A lesson well learned-they had put too too much grip wax on. As it turns out everyone we talked too was complaining about the wax job too so we weren’t alone.
It took us a while to collect our bags which were all organized together. They sure have a perfect system! We were so happy! We had a bite to eat in the stadium, got our worldloppet passports stamped and drove back to Orsa where we ordered a pizza to bring back to our hotel. We were very tired but were contemplating signing up for the Engadine Night race! Decision to be made the next day…
As I finally post this we are registered for the Engadine Night Race on Thursday night in St. Moritz, Switzerland. We’ve had a great day in Stockholm visiting the Vasa Museum and the Fotografika Museum. ( Pictures to follow ) Tomorrow we fly to Zurich and drive to St. Moritz.
It’s here at last and I’m not nervous at all! If you believe that you believe in Leprechauns! Anxious, nervous, jumpy and really excited all at the same time-that’s me!
We’ve spent the last two days preparing, being tourists and skiing the track. We went to the factory to where they make the genuine Dala horse. These decorated toy horses were being sold from some of the villages around Mora as early as the first half of the 19th century by the Olsson family.
We ate a variety of new foods like Spanish waffles (in Sweden) and moose schnitzel along with a Lindenberry and chanterelles appetizer-delish!
This morning we dropped our skis off to get to get waxed by the Swix professionals then headed to Oxberg Kontroll/checkpoint station to ski on the race course. It was surprisingly hilly and quite fast. However, this might change tonight as there is 5 to 10 cm of snow in the forecast. Hence, we’ve decided to go with wax skis as opposed to skin skis.
After our ski we picked up our freshly waxed skis and Ross says that they are a work of art! We have packed all of our bags, laid out all of our clothes, had a great dinner, made our breakfast wraps and have set our alarm for 2 am to drive to Mora. We have to be there to catch the bus to the start in Salen where we line up in our pens at 5:30am for the 8 am start. We are ready- we hope! We can not imagine lining up at the start with 16,798 other participants! ( let alone skiing with them!) Good night!
p.s. you can watch us on Vasaloppet T.V.
Might bring some of this to St. Moritz and Lillehammer!
Today we drove up to Mora to pick our bibs up and check everything out! There wasn’t much snow on the drive north even in the forests of birch and fir trees. Finally about 80 kms. South of Mora there was snow on the ground and on the hillsides! It’s a beehive of activity-so amazing to be a part of such an incredible event. We picked up our race kit and we’re able to get seeded according to our Gatineau Loppet results-phew! Ross is in the 4th wave and I am in the 7th. After a little shopping at the Trade fair we drove up to our Hotel at Orsa which is only about 30 minutes from Mora. We have a very cosy room with a private bathroom luckily, at Trunna Vandrarhem Hostel and Conference center where it just so happens that 8 other Canadians from Chelsea Quebec are staying! It’s a small world. We are here for 5 nights.
Once we got unpacked we quickly drove about 20 minutes north to the “Orsa Gronklitt Ski Center” where they have about 300 kms of groomed trails for both classic and skate. We got in a 15 km ski on the icy trails but it was beautiful! Great to be on skis again! Later we went into Orsa for dinner where there aren’t too many “Restaurangs”. We ended up at the Acropolis which turned out, despite it’s decor to have very good fresh food so we made a reservation for Saturday night dinner at 5 pm!! It’ll be an early night on Saturday as we are having the 3 am breakfast at the main house before we board the 4 am bus to Salen (the start).
Mora and Orsa are in the Dalarnas Region which is famous for the red painted wooden horses, a symbol of Sweden.
The current record time is 3:38.41! 14 percent are women and 46 countries are represented.Just a little crowded- it will eventually from 40 tracks to 10!The trail which everyones says is 90 kms. of double poling! I don’t think I’ll be doing that;I’ll be using some diagonal striding too!
The start of the 18,500 racers in the 90 Kim classic Vasaloppet, from Salen to Mora.
The Vasaloppet started in 1922, but really it is much older than that. The first Vasalopp was carried out as early as 1521 by Gustav Eriksson. During his flight from the Danish king he stopped in Sälen and returned to Mora to lead the uprising against the occupation forces. Gustav Eriksson eventually united the realm and became Sweden’s first king, better known under the name Gustav Vasa. In other words, Sälen is not only the starting point for the world’s largest and oldest cross-country ski race; it is also the starting point for the history of Sweden.
After watching the sunrise over London our flight arrived on time and our new skitube with our six pairs of skis made it ,we drove to our hotel downtown and headed to Gamla Stran, the old historic centre of Stockholm. It’s a beautiful area lined with tall narrow buildings of bright reddish/ orange colouring and cobblestone streets.
The gorgeous sunrise!
The Royal Palace
Everyone appears to live in apartments so these are perfect!
A Nordic Skiing World Loppet Tour 