SkiErg World Sprints: A Review from the Midwest

I hope many rowers have had the chance to try the SkiErg, especially now that the World Championships has come and gone. Good work to anyone who participated in the SkiErg World Sprints — it’s a hard 1000 meters!

Myself and a fellow midwestern teammate, Matt Liebsch, used the SkiErg World Sprints as an opportunity to fundraise for our upcoming season. We stationed two SkiErgs at GearWest and one at The Fix Studio, and encouraged either the 1000m test or a 30-second max wattage test.

Competing for max watts is a fun challenge because it’s short and based on power output, allowing anyone who is strong to excel. Matt led the competition at 575 watts, and I was around 465. As for my 1000m time, I wasn’t on my A game by any means. I wanted to get into the 3:45ish range, however I was sick the whole week leading up to the Sprints. To top it off, I didn’t even beat my time from last year!

That will have to change. It was still really exciting to see that my time placed me first for women overall.

Now it’s time to ski! My team just got to West Yellowstone, Montana, and we are finally getting in some time on snow. I say “finally” because our first races are already next week! I was getting pretty sick of rollerskiing.

This is phase one of my race season. After two weeks here, my team, CXC, travels to Bozeman to race, then up to Silverstar and Rossland, Canada.

After Christmas in the East, I head to Nationals in Maine, a series of SuperTours in the midwest, possibly Canadian Nationals, and definitely Spring Series in March at the one and only Craftsbury, Vermont. Let’s see how my double poling has improved this year, shall we?