2012 Toboggan Nationals, Day 2

This day dawned bright, crystal clear and wicked cold.  Air temp was 11, wind chills flirting with negative numbers. 

Last night the Snow Bowl iced the chute, which had been growing slushy in the middle of the day yesterday, so it was fairly well-groomed and frozen solid.

"U.S. National Toboggan Championship Official Zamboni"

The mood on the second day is always a bit less festive, more serious - a lot of the party crowd has already gone home, and the competition gets intense.  8.30 on a Sunday morning when wind chills are below zero, well, it takes a certain type of crazy dedication to be out in that.

For the second qualifying run, the boys' strategy was to be 15 sleds back in line, to let the first teams knock the bumps down.  They practiced their luge form and argued about weight distribution and brainstormed how to gain time coming out of the gate.  Nothing riding on this but the finals.  No pressure.

That's right, 8.94 seconds - the boys broke the 9-second mark.  Maybe fast enough to send them to the finals this afternoon.  They were pretty stoked.

We're dedicated parents, but not so dedicated that we would stand around outside in those conditions for three hours waiting for the results, so we went home to monitor things in real time on line.

Technology is a wonderful thing.

And sure enough - they made the cut, one of the top 50 out of a field of more than two hundred four-man sleds.

To give you a sense of how tight the competition is at this level, the spread between the first and last of those 50 qualifying teams was eleven hundredths of a second.

So back we went at noontime for the finals.

The boys finished firmly in the middle of the pack, with a combined time of 18.12 seconds.

They hit 39 miles per hour.

This is why I drink.

Okay, one of the reasons.

It wasn't all seriousness this afternoon - the Dutch team failed to qualify but they were still there drinking beer, manning the airhorns you hear in the video clip above (they really liked our guys' team), and divesting themselves of bits of their costumes they didn't want to take back on the plane.  Thing Two is now all set for the next time Crazy Hat Day rolls around the middle school calendar.

As is T's little sister.

The boys, the sled and the moms:

Not that you can tell between the helmets and goggles and Michelin Man clothing, but Thing One and I are the two on the right.

I seem to have become very short.

Stay warm, y'all.