Notes
4th time snowshoeing, longest yet, and boy was I shown how different it is than running. The scene: A fresh layer of snow from the night before, only about 15 competitors in the 10k but I know 5+ of them are damn good, the route is 2 laps of 5k. I start out in a group of 8 or so, thinking this is a manageable pace. I'm sitting in 7th (singletrack trails for the most part) and I probably should have been thinking about how passing would be difficult and needed to be careful to not get dropped, but that's what happened. The guy in front of me (Luke Demmel) dropped off the pace and I didn't/couldn't easily pass him. Granted, it would have been quite foolish of me to continue at that pace but I was getting fairly comfortable drafting and decided to pass him probably 2 miles in (Time in racing gets a bit confusing when you're going >7min pace instead of closer to 5min pace, so basically I made a move probably 15 minutes in which I was <1/3 of the race when in a normal 10k I'd be thinking I'm close to 1/2 done).
And this mistake soon became apparent as we hit the hilly section and I was going quickly into oxygen debt, wondering how I could be so tired, and when the heck will I finish even 5k. Thankfully I was beginning to catch a guy (Daniel Sevcik) and that gave me some motivation after I hit 5k (~24min). I was recovering on the flats and got within ~10m of him with maybe 2 miles to go when he either saw me and started picking up the pace, or I started falling back. I hung on, knew I wasn't going to get passed, and hoped my time wouldn't be horrible. Somehow I was pretty close to even splitting (maybe even negative), and knew I'd worked damn hard.
The depressing part was learning I'd lost by 7 minutes, with my only consolation being they've been doing this for years while I just started, our equipment might have been a factor too. Cool to have so easily qualified for a national championship, but I won't be traveling to Vermont. Probably try this again next year, but it's obvious now that there is some snowshoe specific training that I should have done, mainly deepsnow and uphills (downhills are incredibly fun btw).