Yesterday, I raced on the Dodge Ski Boot, which is made by Dave Dodge, Peter Dodge’s (Dartmouth ski coach) brother, and Bill Doble. It’s a boot made mostly out of carbon fiber. There is some plastic keeping it together, but basically it’s entirely made of carbon fiber. Carbon isn’t temperature sensitive, it is very torsionally stiff, and is very low volume so booting out (when your boot hits the snow rather than just your edges) is almost impossible. It’s very solid in the turn and creates a great platform at the top of the turn. If you want to know more check out: http://dodgeskiboots.com.

I’ve been testing it here and there and decided to race Nor-Am Finals on it without much comparative timing. First run, the snow was very soft. I started 11th and put down a very solid run and never booted out. I won the first run by half a second over Chris Frank who started 1st. My run was not miraculous, it was good and I was up by 5 tenths with a solid field so I was pretty pumped. Second run, the organizers did a great job salting the course to firm it up. I killed the upper section of the course and then on the harder snow I took a conservative line and slid the top of the turn too much. Tommy Ford ended up taking the victory, while I was 14 hundredths behind him. He put down a great run. I scored the best result of my career an 8.83 point race. This year has been challenging to score since I’ve been on the Europa Cup and World Cup tour mostly so it was nice to get a good one yesterday. Jan Hudec finished third a hundredth behind me so I was sandwiched between two Olympians. However, it was a little painful knowing I had a more gas in me, but it was just nice to be back in a GS race. The last one was Kransjka Gora World Cup at the end of January, which was not the fondest of memories for me.

We just finished up prepping our race skis and now we’re off to the Dodge Boot headquarters in Essex, VT to hopefully get a stiffer pair before we race at Sugarbush on Thursday and Friday, then to Whiteface for Nationals to race on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, then Cochran’s on Wednesday, followed by Eastern Cup Finals the next weekend. I’m traveling with Dane Spencer and Jon Olsson these days, which is great. Dane has been a great travel buddy all season and Jon has been pulling his weight in cooking endless amounts of burritos for pretty much every meal. I’m over ground beef. Dane and I are tuning Jon’s skis since he’s not exactly a pro at it. He’s a freestyle skier that decided to come back to ski racing. He actually secured the Nor-Am GS title yesterday, which was extremely impressive since he’s only been skiing competitively for two years after an 8-year hiatus. We have a good team. Dane and I have been joking about how our team name is “Dreamin the Life” now we’re “Dreamin the Life Plus 1.” For more info on Jon you can check out: www.jon-olsson.com.

Chris Frank, who just picked up a World Cup starting right for all of next season in SG, set us up in the GMVS dorms at Sugarbush, VT so we’re regressing to dorm living. Good work Chris on the housing and the Nor-Am SG. Chris and I both graduated from college in 2005 and skied together on SRI in the 2006 season so it’s great to see things coming together for him. I’m totally psyched for you buddy!

Hope all is well, w