Hello, Mariah here

This past week has been very exciting for the BSF Pro Team because we finally started the ski season in Duluth, Minnesota! The super-tour opener races took place on December 4 and 5, consisting of a skate sprint the first day and then followed by a skate 5k/10k for women/men. The courses were made on 2.1k of mostly man-made snow, which was very well constructed by the venue workers. It snowed a lot for the second day of racing which made the course a grind. I was personally stoked to get racing again, as there has been a lot of training all summer and fall and it felt great to have a bib on again! It seemed like the rest of the team felt similarly and had a good time getting back in scene.

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Winter finally decided to come on the 5th as well. This was fun as it has not been snowing a lot yet this season, and many all over the nation are waiting for snow to arrive still in December. The van that the BSF pro girls were using to get to the venue that day was not ready for winter though and we couldn’t get it out of the icy parking lot it was parked in. Luckily the huts the team stayed at were located on an alpine hill directly above the venue, so our option was to send it down the hill on our training skis with all our bags. It was kind of a fun way to arrive and also turned out to get us there in time!

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For our last night in Duluth we ended up checking out the Tour of Lights in Bentleyville. This was so pretty and also way bigger than I thought it was going to be! It took about 15 minutes to walk through the whole lights loop. I would totally recommend it to anyone considering seeing them- it’s a pretty impressive Christmas lights walk.