What do skiing, mountain biking, sunburns, snowstorms, rainbows and lots of roundabouts all have in common? They can all be found in Bend, Oregon in the month of May. For the first time in recent memory, the US Biathlon team sent a group of athletes ...
I started the first training camp of the year with serious race anxiety. My stomach was in knots, I was overly jittery from consuming too much coffee, and I was just trying to stay relaxed. It felt like the World Championships and my life was on th...
We have a huge North American training group together this week in Bend. It’s a lot of fun to see so many familiar faces in the summer time and also to train with athletes who we often only see at races. Yesterday everyone did a classic spe...
Although the new training year is well underway, I’d like to take little time to look back on the month of April. For a professional ski racer, it is our vacation month, the one time of year when we can stop thinking about training or racing for more than a couple days at a [...]
Following World Championships in Germany, the biathlon circus packed onto 3 different charter planes headed for central Russian and the final World Cup competitions of the season. I was excited for the chance to see Khanty-Mansiysk after hearing so much about it, but I was also very tired from the previous [...]
I like to describe biathlon as an emotional rollercoaster. For athletes, the highs are very intense and the lows can feel devastating as we seek to have the “perfect race.” I rarely come close. Many different pieces must come together on the same day. I lucked out on a special day in [...]
Biathlon World Championships Sprint 2012 A beautiful day in Bavaria!
The past couple weeks have been a whirlwind of racing and travelling. From Russia we flew to Germany, drove to Austria for a few days of training, drove to Czech Republic for a weekend of races, drove to Poland for three more days of racing and then drove back across Czech Republic, Austria, and Germany [...]
It’s only mid February, but most of the season’s biathlon races are over. 8 World Cups are already done. Most recently, we were racing in Kontiolahti, Finland. In spite of the brutal cold, the team had some of its best results ever with a 6th place mixed relay and 5 athletes in [...]
So…once again I’m finding time to write about Craftsbury only when I’m not in Craftsbury…right now I’m in the Calgary Airport, en route to Canmore for some more IBU cup racing! But luckily for all of you blog-readers, I spent perhaps too much time when I was home for a week documenting the life of Mo, [...]
Immediately after the sprint in Moscow we had to race back to the hotel, shower, pack, eat dinner and then we climbed on a bus with the Norwegian team to drove to Rybinsk, Russia. We didn’t leave until after 8pm and I had heard rumors that it was going to be an eight hour drive [...]
I’m finally starting to feel comfortable on the World Cup. Each weekend of course still brings new venues, twists, adventures, curve balls, mistakes, stories, and all the other surprises that makes this lifestyle fun and exciting, but I have found a sense of place on the road and developed a vague idea of what might [...]
For the last week, I’ve been in Slovakia for the U-26 european championships. I had no idea what to expect of Slovakia, but it turned out to be a pretty cool place. I also didn’t really know what to expect of the racing, and I was feeling pretty apprehensive about the shooting, but that also [...]
For the last two weeks or so, I’ve been holding down the fort here in Craftsbury as my teammates travel and race all over God’s white acre. In the short span between January 19th and February 2nd, the CGRP has been represented at races in Italy, Germany, Estonia, Austria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Russia, Norway, and the western United States…AND at the Craftsbury Marathon, of course. While [...]
I was a little nervous for the Craftsbury Marathon, because I had never done a classic race longer than 30km. The four-loop course we did for this year’s marathon totaled around 44km, so I wasn’t sure how I would fare in the final third of the race. My two concerns were food and kick wax [...]
Life is good and I’m feeling very lucky! I just finished up an awesome training camp in Ramsau, Austria. A week off from the World Cup was an opportunity to increase the volume and put in a short block of training a midst a busy period of racing. I couldn’t have asked for a better location either [...]
On Saturday we raced the 5/10km classic at the Austrian National Championships. The race was held at Rettenbachalm, a little ski area in Bad Isch, Austria which was 15km up a single lane snowy road that bordered a steep drop-off into a raging brook. It was really fun to experience a different kind of National [...]
Last weekend we had a classic double header in Otepaa, Estonia. Saturday was a classic sprint and then Sunday was a 10km classic. We’ve had a lot of skate races and especially skate sprints this winter so I was excited to switch it up. Just a week and a half ago we had heard that [...]
Its funny how things work–first I didn’t make any plans for my season, hoping to qualify to race in the IBU cups. Then when I raced poorly and didn’t qualify for that, I decided that I didn’t want to set myself up for more frustration, so I made plans for the season that didn’t involve [...]
Since January 1st, the biathlon World Cup circuit has given us a tour of central Europe. We started in Oberhof, Germany, a biathlon mecca that attracts over 30,000 fans. Nove Mesto in the Czech Republic, site of the 2013 World Championships, hosted us the following week and treated us to some [...]