In just under two weeks I will be back home in Wisconsin, and I can't describe how excited I am at the idea that I will soon get to sleep in my own bed in my own room in my own home again. I love Bozeman and it is slowly becoming a place I like to call home but when I look out my dorm window the river isn't waiting for me, and outside my dorm door isn't the little yellow hallway that leads past my brothers' bedrooms to the kitchen where I can cook whatever I want whenever my heart desires. Hopefully wisconsin will get some snow this next week and a half so I can put in some quality hours on the trails where I first fell in love with skiing once I'm back in the north woods again.
West Yellowstone has come and gone but the week with my team up on the plateau was worth every minute. The week before west I did some treadmill testing in the lab in part of their Zoot compression tights testing, I spent around two hours running on a jumbo treadmill getting my fingers pricked, anything for that lab, and I also did a upper body out put test. The upper body test simulated double pole sprint of 10 seconds and one minute, it will be interesting to see how the numbers they gathered correlated with the classic race in West.
The normal day in west looked something like this.
7:20am: morning wake up run with Dan and Eileen
7:45am: breakfast, yum.
8:30-9am: 2 hour classic ski
12:00pm: lunch
afternoon: lounge around, do homework, watch movies, occasionally avoid getting anything accomplished.
3:30pm: 1.5 hour skate ski
6:00pm: Dinner, more importantly dessert
7:30pm: Team meeting
Night time: Sleep
Repeat.
It was a week of awkward re-introductions to how skis move on snow, technique analysis (or rather my lack of technique), hours and hours on the white stuff, the consumption of large quantities of food, and of course the first two races of the season.
The races went really well, I'm "befriending" the pain, and trying to ski as relaxed as possible while attempting to kill it all at the same time. I finished 29th in the 11.5km classic and 25th in the 9-9.5 km skate, that put me second on the MSU ski team both days and the fourth junior both days. My coach asked me how I thought my races went, when I responded, "I'm happy, I think I skied relaxed, but my technique was pretty darn crappy..." her response was, "Your technique is usually pretty crappy." Just what I like to hear. So okay I have a long way to go, and it is going to be a long season, but I've got all the determination in the world and the heart to back it up. Hopefully this is just the starting point for the season and I can post some really solid results. I'm confident in our training, and I think we are prepared to lay the hammer down this winter.
Game on.
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