I’d completely forgotten how much fun relays are. I do sprint relays all the time now but there’s something special about the 4-person distance relay. Even more so when you’re racing it at the World Championships. Kikkan scrambled for us, but Virpi Kuitenen decided to go from the gun. And this girl can move fast when she wants to. So she had a gap on the field by 100m and totally gapped everyone by the first hill. Um, wow. So the field got stretched out quickly because everyone tried to keep up with her. Kikkan skied her leg in the second pack and tagged off to me in 9th place. I settled quickly into a trio with two other girls, and skied the entire 5km with them. I had a little bit of a struggle to keep up with them on the climbs but on the flat and downhills I didn’t have any problems. I’ve been kind of disillusioned with the women racers here. I didn’t expect them to be snowplowing on the downhills, but many of them did. Kikkan and I were joking about how much time we could make up on the downhills today. Now I need to keep improving my uphill skills.

After two 2.5km laps I got to hand off to Compton. It was fun to get to hand off to her in a relay at World Champs! Then Sarah Konrad took the anchor leg. We ended up in 14th and the Finnish team won with a nice margin. Germany overtook Norway in the stadium right before the finish- pretty exciting stuff. If you look at the times you’ll notice that Finland only won by 12 seconds but that was because she was pausing to wave and pick up a Finnish flag and not rushing.

The US is not fielding a men’s relay team tomorrow. Compton races the 30km classic on Saturday and Southam, Flora, Freeman are racing the 50km classic on Sunday.