Waxing with North Pole. Photo borrowed from Team Fast blog: http://blogs.fasterskier.com/fast/

Yesteday's stint as one day assistant coach and wax tech for North Pole High School was fun, and tiring (maybe exhausting). I arrived on the scene at about 10:30 and promptly waxed up my skis and tested them. It was about 18-20 and snowing lightly. We compared a couple waxes and found that the tar blue (20-28 F) worked the best. So I set to wax up skis for 2 boys and 6 girls. The boys started at about 1:15 and the girls at 2:30. As race time approached it started warming up some and the snow kept falling, so we added a short 'sticker' of the next warmer tar (27-32 F).

Things were going well, but just a few minutes before the start the boys came back in and said that their wax was slipping, but without time to test anything new we just lengthened the top layer and sent them out. They had a tough day.

With some time to test and adjust, the girls had better wax (some flouro on top of the tar layers), but it looked like most everyone, not just North Pole, was struggling some out there. Still the girls put in a fine effort.

After being on my feet for five hours, then back to work for a couple hours, I headed head back out to Birch Hill to coach the middle schoolers for 10K of skiing in 3" of new snow. Phew! I'm whupped. I could run for 20-30 min at noon today, but maybe a day off would do some good.