As we understand it, the trails here were designed by Gunde Svan. We had some sort of miscommunication at a gas pump which took about 20 minutes to sort out, but we got up to the course about 90 minutes before our races began.

Ninety minutes, however, was after the first J5-6 races began, and as we understood it, the course was closed except to people who had started racing and coaching. Thus, the kids raced blind. [In retrospect, they could have gotten out there and pleaded ignorance -- especially since there were all sorts of people on course who weren't racing or coaching.] However, Matt and Gary had made their way up yesterday and tested wax, and explained the course as well as possible.

The kids warmed up while the coaches finished up the skis and enjoyed the race atmosphere. The club organizers had thoughtfully flown a US flag among the Swedish ones, two-year-olds took their first steps on snow and a million little kids cranked around the courses. We talked to a few coaches and checked out their folding ski benches, which were pretty cool. There are some really good, sturdy ones made in Mora that I covet.

Despite having not foreran the race trails, the kids took off and dropped hammers.

On the girls' 5km skate, we placed all six in the top eight -- Elise Moody 1st (16:12), Ase Carlson 2nd (16:15), Jamie Woelk 3rd (16:17), Kate Dolan 6th (16:52) and Jennie Bender and Rosie Brennan tied for 7th (16:56).

For the boys' 10km, we had seven of the top eight -- Tad Elliott a.k.a. "Ted Elliot" blowing the race apart in 1st (27:53), Alex Howe 2nd (28:56), Patrick Johnson 3rd (29:04), Ben Fick – who celebrated his 18^th birthday yesterday with some Swedish cake -- 5th (29:21) , Reid Pletcher 6th (29:30), Noah Hoffman 7th (29:33) and Ian Havlick 8th (30:01).

This was an excellent race for us. It was good to come over and get into an event with good skis, on a tough course, against a bunch of Swedes, and come out on top. The kids were, for the most part, happy with their results, especially since we've been in Sweden for only four days and are still adjusting to the time difference.

There was one slight mishap to go though – we were standing around taking pictures while the racers were cooling down and began to notice kids lining up for a pursuit start. In classic skis. Utterly confused, we tried to figure out what was going on while simultaneously trying to figure out how we were going to break the news to the kids that they were going to have to double-pole the course on skate skis. Finally, we found someone who spoke enough English to tell up that the “jaktstart” was only for the 15-16 year old class.

After the event, there was a short awards ceremony. Here, the top 30% get prizes, so we walked away with a bunch of little gold-cup trophies and -- even better -- two huge boxes of cracker bread which Elise and Tad got for winning. The tradition here is to give four "hurrahs" to the people on the podium; we were pretty terrible the first time around, but got the hang of it.

Once we collected our stuff, packed up the vans and ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, we headed back to Falun, where we are now. Tomorrow we'll ski in Falun for a couple of hours; Monday we pack up and drive up to Umea, where we'll catch the ferry to Vasa, Finland.

I spent a lot time brushing skis this morning and doing splits -- I was in a place where I could give most of the boys four updates -- so no pictures that I took here. Hopefully I'll be getting some from kids, including a photo of me putting some structure in Tad's ski. Look forward to that.

It's now dinner time, so we're heading for that.