Being home is always nice.  I can’t complain.  Asides from a little wind and cold when I first arrived back in the midwest its been beautiful.  We’ve gotten sunshine and temperatures in the mid 20s all week and the Birkie trail is immaculate right now.   The trail is hard packed and fast.  The classic tracks are solid and I’ve had some of the best classic skis of the season this past week!  (I really think my classic form is coming together nicely)

Maybe it was the perfect tracks or the combination of kickgoop and pine needles on the bases of my skis…what ever it was it was working, and I have been loving it.  Normally classic skiing and I only get along when its pretty darn cold out.  You know when it gets so cold skate skiing is impossible.  That is when classic skiing and I get along.  As an old coach of mine would say, “Its so cold today even Corrine get kick!”  Yep.  but let me tell you its been in the 20s all week here and I have been kicking with ease.  With such ease I remembered how much I really do enjoy classic skiing.  Remembered what it was like to not “classic shuffle” and what it was like to really stride with a little umpff and pop.  Its been really enjoyable.

The other day I was skiing along when I looked up and this entire flock of skiers was coming down the trail towards me.  I thought, “Wow they look they are having a good time!”  And then I realized it was the Burger Family!  The entire gaggle of them minus the youngest Craig (skiing is apparently his 104th favorite sport, but thats a different story) and I couldn’t be happier to see them.  The Burger family pretty much adopted me when I first got into skiing.  I was good friends and team mates with their oldest daughter Molly.  They’ve been around since the very beginning of my ski career and Mr. Burger can vouch for how ridiculous it was at the very start.

We spent the ski reminiscing skis from years ago.  How we went skiing up the UP one weekend and how I cried because I couldn’t stride without poles up this hill.  To be honest it wasn’t even a hill, the incline was so little we might as well call it a flat.  But never the less I could not stride up it and so I cried right there in the tracks.  We remembered how our coach wasn’t going to be there one day and he had asked us to ski with Bill’s group instead…. at that point Molly and I were still terrified of Bill and so instead we hid in the woods until his group left and then went skiing on our own.  What rebels right?

Thinking about all those ski trips, races, camps, and practices brought back a lot of memories.  It makes you take a step back and go woah.  It allows us to acknowledge how far we’ve come.  How much things have changed.  To remember the days when I first fell in love with the sport and to think back and realize I could have never guessed where I’d be today!

Other than that I’ve been spending lots of time creating things in my kitchen!  Speaking of which there is dough rising in the oven right now that needs to get punched down!

Corrine