A small contingent of the club (Derrek, Hayden, and Missy) headed west last week to race Nationals at Mt. Itasca, MN. It was a whirlwind tour, leave at noon on Thursday, drive 24 hrs, race Saturday and Sunday, and drive 24 hours home. The drive out featured Bryan Shultz taking a marathon turn at the wheel while I was knocked cold from some sort of plague type illness. Despite two long border stops, including an interesting stop in Sault Ste Marie where we waited outside for 25 minutes in an unheated tool shack at 2AM (along with some green-clad college students returning home from a night of St. Patty's day revelry) while border patrol agents scanned our vehicles with some sort of radio active scanner, we made it to Grand Rapids safely at noon on Friday. Somewhere along the way we heard of Missy's excellent result in the Sprint race, 4th in youth women.After a quick ski Friday afternoon where Derrek and Hayden got a tour of the 2k loop from US biathlon athlete development director, Piotr Bednarski, we were ready to race. You never know how the body is going to react to 24 hours sitting in a car. In this case, Hayden felt great on the skis, but had trouble hitting targets, and Derrek was the opposite, hitting a few more targets but feeling sluggish on the skis. Despite neither having perfect races, the results were quite respectable. Hayden finished 7th in both the pursuit on Saturday and the mass start on Sunday. Derrek was a few seconds behind both days finishing 9th and 10th. Missy was feeling tired from a packed winter of racing and couldn't repeat her 4th, finishing 6th on Saturday and 5th on Sunday.
After Sunday's race, we loaded up the van with 3 racers, 3 rifles, many pairs of skis, and headed east. We ran into a bit of a storm in Canada, but I had timed it perfectly so that it was on Bryan's shift, and we made it home safely by noon on Monday. Despite the quick nature of the trip, it was great to have an EABC presence at Nationals.