2004 April

This early season block was the results-highlight of our year. Trond and the waxers drove all over Europe (from Italy to Norway to northern Finland and back) on roads slick enough to rival the Fairbanks — Salcha commute while the athletes flew from race site to race site. The racers, coaches and waxers basically kicked ass scoring our best world cup results so far and putting Kris in the World Cup red group. The rest...

August. New Zealand. Still an hour or two out of Auckland and high over the pre-dawn South Pacific there is nothing but blue. Blue unpolluted by other color, and every tone and hue of it too. From the edge-of-space dark-blue in the high west, fading all the way down to the pale-blue horizon where it meets the deep-blue sea far, far below. Thirteen hours cramped in this winged-tube of air-born aluminum hurling through all that...

Editor's Note: We received a lot of great feedback on Pete Vordenberg's New Koch series that we ran last April. Now Pete has generously offered to do it all for us again. This is Part One in Pete Vordenberg's US Ski Team 2003-2004 Year In Review. Part One has a ton of great information about how the US Ski Team trains, particularly in the spring and summer months. I have always wanted to be an...

Frode Estil, Olympic and World Cross-Country Champion, warns ambitious young skiers against dropping their education in favor of sports. Even though there may be good money to make in Cross-Country, Frode Estil (31) is in no doubt when claiming: Cross-Country skiers should combine their skiing with education. – As a skier you have plenty of time to combine skiing and education. There is quite a risk in dropping out of school for a sport where...

This is part three in the “Road to Recovery' series. It has been many weeks since part two, and for that I apologize. But in a way, this is good news for me. After all, the fact that I have been too busy skiing to sit down and write part three means that my fractured collarbone must be healing well. That is true, but I am getting ahead of myself. Lets back up a bit…...

Editor: Dave Knoop is one of our Fasterskier training partners, and is famous in our group for his adventurous, high-speed, and “bonkable” outings. I drove up to the Strawberry Reservoir area a little late on a Sunday am, about 10 am in the morning only to find it a well preserved winter wonderland everything still frozen and white as far as the eye could see even the reservoir looked mid winter frozen. Meanwhile a few...