Scandinaviabr /Greetings from Sweden. I’m in Piteå, a city about 800 kilometers north of Stockholm, on the Baltic Sea. I came over here with a group led by Pete Phillips, the head coach at Burke. The group consists of three older athletes from Canmore, Alberta and a junior from New Zealand who also lives in Canmore. These four athletes are over here to gain FIS points in order to improve their chances of making the Canadian and New Zealand Olympic Teams for 2010. I’m simply here for the experience and to ski a bit more. I’m extremely grateful to Pete for helping me make this trip possible and allowing me the opportunity to continue my season for a few more weeks.br / Sweden is awesome. We raced in the InterSport / Vattenfall Cup over the weekend. Saturday was a 5k freestyle and Sunday was a 15k classic pursuit, based off the 5k prologue. The courses wound their way through many bridges and part-way up a small alpine area, which made for exciting and tough racing. I didn’t have any expectations for Saturday; we had several long travel days on the way to Piteå and I was simply excited at the opportunity to race.br / Sunday was tougher. I skied on a pair of skis that is made for hard track klister conditions and the snow was sugary and soft, but still warranted klister. My skis were a bit draggy and iced up at times. But the bigger problem was my back: my back starting hurting on the first lap, but I know what I need to do technically to fix my back issue.br / We’re headed up to Finland for a weekend of racing and then to Bruksvallarna, a town in Western Sweden for some more races. Many of the members of the Norwegian and Swedish National Teams will be in Bruksvallarna. These are the last races of the season and all the skiers out here look forward to because the races are competitive and everyone comes together for one last time before the spring and has a good time.br / I hope everyone is enjoying some time off back home and enjoying a mental break before the start of the new training year.div class=”blogger-post-footer”img width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/1847564486460994594-8346177559687886156?l=gmvsxc.blogspot.com’//div
