When I was doing a little bit of L4 work this morning around tomorrow's sprint course Pat Casey suddenly stepped into my vision waving a hat at me. Pat Casey's a hard dude to not notice, even when you're doing some focused, very serious pace work and to top it off the hat he was waving at me was Glenn Randall Orange. (Don't worry, I already told Glenn I was naming a color after him.) Casey ran up alongside of me and said, "it's good practice for feeds." So I grabbed the hat, without missing a stride, thank-you-very-much, and skied a few strides holding it before putting it on. I figured at some point in my career I might need to put on a hat while skiing at race pace so it was good to practice a hat feed.

The eerie part of this was that I hadn't seen Pat since the Bozeman race and I never saw him the remaining two hours I was at the venue. He just showed up for one lap brandishing a neon orange hat and then disappeared.