Waxing at the US National Sprints

Fri, Jan  11, 2008 - By Ian Harvey

Waxing 

We had anticipated warmer temperatures and more moisture in the snow.  The MTU trails in Houghton glaze up really easy normally, but today seemed out of the ordinary.  The snow was colder then I had expected and also did not glaze like I figured it would.  An interesting thing was though that despite this, the wax that I had anticipated going with went well.  The HelX Warm ran well all day - from the first qualifying run in the morning to the A Final.  JetStream High Speed was also going well, but the HelX seemed to go a little better on the glaze and also felt a little better on the climb. 

My thinking was that as the day went on, the HelX was only going to get better relative to the other top layers.  It felt about as good out of the tracks skating and in the speed trap (glazed tracks) the HelX outperformed the JetStream High Speed, so this was only logical.  Feedback from other teams was that a good portion of them went with HelX.  Our skis were good in any case.  The Rossignol team for example qualified 3/3 women and 5/6 men which is a pretty good percentage for such a competitive field.  Overall in the men's we (Toko wax) had 4 out of the top 12 and in the women's 5 out of the top 12, which is pretty good considering that there are a lot of fast sprinting unaffiliated collegiate skiers.

Despite the snow not glazing up, structure was necessary for good skis today.  A universal type structure ran better than a cold one.