info@fasterskier.com. Please include the date of the photo, the location, your name and shipping address in case you win. Deadline for submissions is November 12th. Just to get you going here are a few shots from today in Western Massachusetts.
this group, which made a pretty decent video, or the two team sprinters who have been battling for positions on the World Cup, it’s a possibility that down the road they will become a regular presence on the circuit. As the largest of the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), if skiing becomes an entrenched part of the culture, it is possible that they could punch above their weight. Next season won’t be the...
“Perhaps it was the wine of the cool autumn breeze. Or perhaps as climbers sometimes we meet, we met. Rob Kiesel was an aggressive downhill racer. Perhaps it was his single-minded drive, which induced success. Nevertheless he was somewhat new to climbing and this would be no leisurely climb.” — Excerpt from Gregory Lowe’s “Half Dome in the Winter” as it appeared in The American Alpine Journal (Vol. 15, Issue 1) by the American Alpine Club. ***...
this summer (links may require translation), and then became Spanish National Champion in mountain running. The men’s team, which has long been anchored by Ruiz, Vilarrubla and Javier Gutierrez is in a bit of a decline. Ruiz has been a regular on the Spanish National Team since 1998, when he started his first World Cup. However, at 35 years old, he seems to be targeting marathon ski racing events over the World Cup. He’s still...
There were two presentations on the third day of the 2011 USST/USSA coaches education symposium held at the Center of Excellence in Park City, Utah. The first presentation was given by USST strength coach, Alex Moore, and the second was by USST doctor and physiologist, Jim Stray-Gunderson. Moore gave a short spoken presentation and a tour of the strength and testing facilities at the Center of Excellence (COE), followed by a live demonstration of stretches...
Saturday was the second day of the nordic coaching symposium put on by the USST/USSA. The speakers were Dr. Carol S. Dweck, Dr. Oyvind Sandbakk, Tara Fontenot, and Jon Arne Schjetne. Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Her scholarly book Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development was named Book of the Year by the World Education Federation. Dr. Dweck spoke at the symposium...
When racers like Therese Johaug and Ivan Babikov reach the final day of the Tour de Ski, their bodies are already exhausted from day after day of racing. Their legs are tired, are they’re not alone: a recent study found that some aspects of heart function can not only decline, but remain suppressed after several days of consecutive races. But thanks to the human body’s remarkable ability to adapt to repeated stress, Johaug, Babikov, and...
For the second year in a row, the coaches of the coaches of the US Ski Team (USST) and the United States SKi Association (USSA) have assembled a three day symposium geared toward the education of cross country ski coaches. The sixty coaches who were invited to the symposium represent a mix of high school, club, college and university coaches. The conference is being held at the Center of Excellence (COE), a new training...
The following is reprinted from the National Nordic Foundation website (www.nccsef.org). The Drive for 25 What: 4000 American cross country ski enthusiasts backing their nation’s developing skiers on a single day. When: November 15th, 2011 How: There are two ways to be involved. The most impactful involvement is to become a Drive for 25 Ambassador and get at least ten of your friends to agree to donate on November 15th. Send the email addresses of...
Last season, Dasha Gaiazova was making headlines with a strong World Cup campaign which saw her pick up her first World Cup medal, and finish 6th in the Team Sprint at World Championships in Oslo, Norway. However, she has spent much of this spring and summer in limbo due to a disagreement with Cross Country Canada (CCC) and the Canadian National Ski Team (CNST). Earlier this year, at a CNST training camp in Bend, Oregon,...
A dispute between the Finnish ski federation and members of the national team was resolved on Monday, the federation reported, meaning that all 18 members of the team have rejoined the coaching staff and are training together in the final period before World Cup competitions begin. “Now it’s finally time to focus only and exclusively on elite sport,” a group of athletes who had been training independently while embroiled in the conflict said in a...
As I approached Len Valjas for an interview during a recent junior training camp at his home club in Southern Ontario, I couldn’t help but think something was a bit off – I caught him in the middle of the buffet line, about to load up his plate with pizza. The newest member of the Canadian National Ski Team (CNST) World Cup team was wearing baggy shorts, a big t-shirt, and sunglasses perched atop his...
From January 29 to February 3, cross-country skiers and biathletes on the U.S. Paralympic Team will have the opportunity to compete in a World Cup on home turf. The U.S. Olympic Committee announced earlier in October that Telemark Resort in Cable, Wisconsin is set to host the biggest international nordic event the U.S. has seen since 2005, when the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Biathlon and Cross-Country World Championships were held in Fort Kent, ME. Central...
For a long time, Dakota Blackhorse-von Jess has known he was fast. He won a junior national championship in the sprint, won carnival races while representing Dartmouth College, qualified for a World Cup in Canada, and then transitioned into being a full-time, post-collegiate racer. But it wasn’t until this past January that the Bend Endurance Academy racer had his breakthrough, finishing fifth in the freestyle sprint at U.S. Nationals in Rumford, Maine. While Blackhorse-von Jess...
The U.S. biathlon community may be small, but one benefit of its size is that almost everyone can gather each year in October for a training camp at Soldier Hollow. This year, the senior national team is joined in Utah by the junior national team as well as biathletes from the Maine Winter Sports Center, Durango and as far as Canada. Inviting everyone brings training quality up, said national team women’s coach Jonne Kahkonen, who...
Say what you will about the Canadians, but the country with the Team Sprint World Champions aren’t resting on their laurels. A week after returning from a camp in Park City, Utah, Canadian National Ski Team (CNST) Head Coach Justin Wadsworth had the athletes packing up again and headed for Whistler, B.C. for a short intensity-filled camp before heading back to Canmore, Alberta, for Canadian Thanksgiving. While it may seem unusual that the Canadian team...
When does the season start – Thanksgiving camps? First World Cup Races? How about the when the rollerskis are swapped out for actual skis? This week we received two reports of on-snow skiing. Welcome to winter! The Auburn Ski Club enjoyed a record-setting summer – just three months without skiing. Mark Nadell filed this report. The shortest dry-land training season in recorded history ended yesterday on the Auburn Ski Club “Glacier.” Since the last day...
There have been a few changes on the U.S. Ski Team (USST) this year, to say the least. It’s bigger. It’s younger. And with two new athlete-driven social media campaigns launched this summer—the Women’s Video Contest and, more recently, the Men’s Training Challenge—it is making the effort to also be more connected with its fans. The Men’s Training Challenge, or “Man Up Week,” invited skiers across the country to virtually join in with the USST’s...
When Rossignol first hired Ryan Green back in 1998, the field sales associate felt he should hide his nordic ties a little bit – at least when dealing with alpine companies. A nordic rep as well, he had picked up the sport in college to stay fit during the cycling offseason. He developed his skill sets in both markets, and in 2006, delved further into downhill as product manager for Lange and Dynastar. “I’ve always...
Earlier this spring, Michael Meehlhause did what most nordic skiers wouldn’t think of doing on camera, let alone upload for the world to see. He rapped and submitted the video to his college’s film festival. Soon after, he posted “Bemidji State of Mind” on You Tube. Three months later in July, the 22-year-old Bemidji State University graduate accepted the position of executive director for the Minnesota Nordic Ski Association. While Meehlhause’s hip-hop tribute to the...