It was a phenomenal day for our women's team on the first day of US National Championships in Rumford, Maine. Teammate Holly Brooks came home with her first National Championship title and Morgan Smyth, Sadie Bjornsen, and myself were the next three Americans! As training buddies and very close friends, we were all ecstatic to get to excel together at a high level.
Morgan Smyth, Holly Brooks, Katie Ronsse, and Sadie Bjornsen right after the A-final of the 1.3k Classic Sprint (A Flying Point Road photo). Those are some truly happy smiles.
Ronsse, Brooks, Bjornsen, Smyth. Eliska Hajkova of CU actually finished 2nd, however since she is from the Czech Republic and since its a US National Championship race, they did two medal ceremonies, one in which Morgan and Sadie were awarded the silver and bronze medals. I just missed medaling as the 4th American (5th overall), but was happy to contribute to the 1-4 APU sweep!
Morgan Smyth and I giving a congratulatory hug post race (Flying Point Road photo).
Teammates Kate Fitzgerald and Becca Rorabaugh lunging for the line in the Women's B final (Andy Canniff photo).
Other members of our team had some great results as well-- both on the men's and women's side-- and results can be found at the Chisholm Ski Club's website.
APU Ladies Women's elite team: Kate Fitzgerald, Becca Rorabaugh, Katie Ronsse, Holly Brooks, Sadie Bjornsen, Morgan Smyth. We took 6 of the top 11 spots! Kikkan Randall (also an APU athlete), is the lone American woman representing the US at the Tour de Ski World Cup series right now so she couldn't be here...but she surely would've added to the teams dominant performance.
Ronsse, Brooks, Bjornsen, Smyth
It was a very rewarding day of racing, and a day I felt very fortunate to be able to share "high-fives", hear cheering, and get messages/emails from so many close friends. For example, Jan Buron and Ben Arians who coached me from age 10-20 on the Alaska Winter Stars team were out there cheering (in between supporting their current athletes), as well as my former college coaches, Dave Stewart and Hennie Kashiwa of DU. Throughout my years of training and racing, there have been a great number of people who have supported me, so I felt lucky to get to share one of the more memorable days of my skiing career with many of those people in addition to my current team.
Erik Flora (my coach) with Casey Fagerquist, Carl Schauer, Eric Strabel, Mike Matteson... a world class waxing squad. They keep very busy preparing and testing fleets of skis for each of our 26 APU athletes racing here at Nationals. I couldn't ask for better waxing support. I am also fortunate to get to choose from a rocket fast fleet of Atomic skis.
The next race has been postponed until Wednesday, as the weather is getting colder and the race organizers are expecting to be able to make snow. The organizers have done a lot of work to battle the warm temperatures and rain, which has included bringing truck loads of snow. The course wasn't exactly pristine and white, but they did a great job at making it suitable for race skis and putting in solid tracks.
Here's what the sprint course afternoon before the sprint race (fasterskier photo). This was after truck loads of snow were dumped on it, and they did A LOT of work after this as well to make the tracks race-able. I can only imagine how much work goes into putting on a high profile race such as this one. Thanks to every volunteer who is making it possible for us to race!
Here's our team having fun doing a little shoveling.
Thanks for reading,
Katie
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