The weekend in Houghton was originally going to be a skate distance and a classic sprint race. Houghton has unfortunately not had a great start to the year for them and snow levels ended up being too low to set tracks. The Sunday classic sprint got changed to a skate sprint. It made the weekend quite a bit easier to wax and prepare for because I didn’t really need to think about kick waxing at all.
December 17th – Skate Distance
Houghton had an older base of snow with a fresh dusting that happened Friday night. The conditions were really variable through the entire course. I ended up doing the majority of my testing in the stadium area where the snow was a bit cleaner, but took the final test down lower on the course to see if there was any major changes to the top options. It was ~25 degrees and new snow ended up falling for the later races which really slowed things down a bit.
1. Star Beta Mid Block
2. Rex N-Kinetic Cold Liquid
3. Rex G21g
4. Swix TS6 Liquid
5. Star Next Mid Liquid
Out of the initial testing Star Beta Mid Block was the clear winner in the stadium area, with everything else feeling about the same. I ended up taking both the G21g and N-Kinetic cold down lower right away to get an idea of which felt like the better option for the majority of the course. Down lower it was quite a bit more transformed and icy which probably lead to N-Kinetic cold moving ahead. In the end, I still had the Star Beta Mid Block feel better so I was happy to use this as the race wax for the day. Throughout the day, I put a couple more waxes out on the snow to see how they stacked up. I tried to cover Star Beta Mid Block with Rex G21g, and Ulla Violet and neither made an improvement on the original decision. For structure we ended up using the Red Creek 0/-6 tool.
December 18th – Skate Sprint
There was an additional 2-3 inches of new snow overnight for the skate sprint which made the conditions really good. The climb was a little on the soft side, but coverage on the sprint course was perfect. I pre-waxed all of the skis with Rex G21G due to the new snow, and planned to cover based on test results from the morning tests.
1. Star Beta Cold Block
2. Star Beta Mid Block
3. Rex N-Kinetic Cold
4. Rex G21G
5. Star Next Mid Liquid
6. Rode Mid Liquid
Test results were pretty consistent from the day before. I decided to add in the Star Beta Cold Block because temperatures dropped just a little bit. In the morning the cold block felt better, but as the day went on it transitioned back to the warm block. We ended up not using any structure on Sunday and just left what we had on from the day prior.
