Fox Trail Marathon at Les Mosses

This year in Les Mosses took place a first edition of a marathon Fox Trail. 42 km with a rather hard ski track. Two laps of 15km and one of 12km. Well, my GPS-navigator showed 38km :)

We went to this race with Sean and Remi. Eric was also planning to go but he couldn't make it.
The level of the race turned out to be very high. Olympic participants from France Jonnier Emmanuel, Cyril Miranda joined the race. Alexander Rousselet (from French national ski team) was also there.
Switzerland was also represented by their very strong skiers (at least three of them were in 100 at Engadin)

Misha came all the way from Paris to do this race. Great-great respect to him for this!!!

The conditions were quite warm - +6+8, sometimes with a small rain. It is more or less clear from all my previous races, that I have some problems with skis :). I am sure that it is either skis or their structure, because when my friends had the same wax as me, I was still loosing to them in ski glide.

In this race I decided to make an experiment, that I was planning to do for a long time already. I didn't put any wax on my skis. I used a Kuzmin "plus" scraper to get the warm structure on skis. Then I applied toko riller for wet conditions. When we started the race, my skis (as usual) were much slower than those of elite guys. At some point everybody overpassed me, but then I noticed that my skis became faster, which goes along with Kuzmin's theory that skis without wax don't take dirt and can be better than skis with wax at a later stage of the race even though they loose at the beginning. This is exactly what happened: on the second lap I was able to ski downhill just behind a person who went much faster than me on the first lap.
Of course, I can't be 100% sure, maybe he didn't push strongly enough or something else on the second lap, but I had a feeling, that his skis became slower and mine stayed the same.

To sum up my ski glide conclusions.
1) My skis are slow normally not because of the wax but because of structure on ski surface or because of skis themselves (still to find out)
2) The wax does take dirt and becomes slower, though integral influence on the speed in a race is unclear.

Concerning the race results, Jonnier won the 42 km race.
Our results:

1 101 Jonnier Emmanuel 1975  01:41:44.5 00:00.0
5 106 Bogdanov Evgeny 1983  01:52:21.4 10:36.9
11 108 Laurent Remi 1982  02:14:55.8 33:11.3
12 111 Thompson Sean 1988  02:15:36.7 33:52.2

in a different category
31 224 Velikanov Mikhail 1969  02:42:21.4

All results can be found here

Next year the Fox Trail will host Swiss Championship in long distances.

For the majority of skiers the ski season is closed now.
Thanks a lot for your passion and participation!
Cycling, Running, Triathlons, Rollerskiing is next in the menu!