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After a lot of skiing last week, this weekend was the day to test my classic skiing abilities.
Needing slightly more than 2 hours I am quite satisfied with my performance, although it could have been a bit better.

The last 3 days one of my daily trainings was always some kind of skiing-duathlon. Living in Borlänge, but having no car I always started my skiing sessions with a 15 to 20 minutes run to the skiing track. My skiing boots in the backpack, skis in one and my poles in the other hand I managed my way to the track in Mellsta, where the Maserloppet took place. By the way, those skis and poles can get quite heavy if you have to run with them in your hands.

I always did some 2 hours of skiing to get familiar with the course and also to test if the skis were prepared the right way. After my training, of course, I had to run back to my home.

Today I felt quite good, although I was a bit nervous because I have never been running 42km in competition speed before.
Because I haven't been at the Maserloppet before, I had to start somewhere from line 6 or 7, and already lost the leading pack at the beginning (neverthless they would have been to fast for me anyway). After a start loop of 4,5km the first running groups started to form and in the 2nd loop (12,5km) somewhere in the flat area I realized that my group was to slow for me and overtook. Some kilometers later I had to realize again, that although the group was to slow for me, I wasn't fast enough to get away from the group.
One loop later, another runner might have had the same idea to get away from the group and started an attack. Some kilometers later we had a small gap to the runners behind. At the end of the 3rd loop during a longer uphillsection I recognized that the grip of my skis began to cease (or my arms didn't have the power to compensate my bad wax-decision anymore). The next slope I lost one place and from there consequently lost some meters to the runners in front of me. From that point it was one more lap with 12,5km to go. Beeing alone the entire last loop I could run my speed, but compared to the runners I was together with before I lost about 3 minutes on that loop.
After exactly 2:00:32 I finally crossed the finish-line in 8th place. The winner of the race had a time of 1:50:17.
Aslo David Andersson was at the start and he performed pretty good. With 1:53:29 he took the 5th place only one place behind former SKI-O champion Tomas Löfgren.

As the days before, also this time I had to get home to my accomodation, but this time I decided to walk the way.

From wednesday next week I will be in Portugal, for two weeks, to concentrate on orienteering again and hopefully to get "only t-shirt" training conditions.

Link: Results Maserloppet 2011 (pdf)