The Yeti Snowshoe race- Whistler

This blog is a bit over due but here goes!

The Congo line near the end of the first lap

 On March 2nd, I drove down to the Callaghan XC Ski area, with 2 lovely ladies. The 3 of us work for MEC and we are the title sponsor of the series and wanted to represent, set up a both, and hand out some warm hot chocolate for finishers. I also decided I would run too!

It's been many years since I have snowshoed let alone snowshoe raced. In fact, one of my first ever trail races was on snowshoes. I remember it well. I was signed up for the 10km and didn't realize it was 2 loops of 5km so when I went through the first loop around 45 minutes I was excited to stop! However I was a bit shocked when the announcer congratulated me on finishing my first loop and wished me good luck for round 2. Needless to say, I was done and stopped at 5km! Yup, got that dreaded DNF out of the way pretty early on in my career :)

Top 3 ladies overall

For some reason though I was excited to be back on snowshoes. The 3 of us finally found our location up in the Callaghan and set up our booth. With 10 minutes before the start I hurriedly changed into racing clothes and put on my snowshoes. It was a rather intimate crowd as there were only about 50 people there. The gun went off and we darted off the line. Immediately I was reminded how hard it is to run on showshoes. The reason I never do it anymore is because most of the time you can get away with yak trax and it just feels way more natural for me. I embraced it though and just worked hard. The weather was awful and cold but that made me work all the harder so I could stay warm.

Me and the Yeti. Thanks for the Piggy Back!

At some point towards the end of the first lap I found myself in a congo line with the leaders. I guess they were slowed by all trail breaking they had to do. It was nice being at the end of the congo line :)

The 12km course has been shortened to 9 so te 4.5km loops went by pretty fast. There were a few girl about a minute back from me but they finished their day off at the 4.5km mark. By the middle mark of the second loop I knew I had this one in the bag and just aimed at getting my butt to the finish as fast as I could so I could go get warm and drink hot chocolate :)

All in all it was a ton of fun. The only sad thing though was that the yeti was not out for us to chase. Apparently he fears the rain! Thanks Yeti series for a great day and for all the schwag!