We’ve been in Finland for three days now. The travel over was pretty uneventful. From my house in Vermont I have to fly from Albany NY to Washington Dulles, and then across the pond to Frankfurt. In order to get to Vuokatti Finland we needed to fly from Frankfurt to Helsinki and then take a smaller plane to Kajaani. Kajaani is not such a big town…the airport consisted of one small building, one gate, and one baggage claim. Because it is such a small town there weren’t many flights a day so we had about 7 hours to kill in Helsinki. Finland is a cool place… they’re into neon lights, fast food, and shopping malls. Ok, that might be a generalization, but there sure are a lot of them around here. Torin and I arrived in Helsinki before everyone else so we cruised over to this huge shopping center next to the airport. Didn’t really find much, we were more just walking around to stay awake, but I did score this rad piece of bling with a set of head phones hanging off of it. (see the pic). Its not the kind of thing I would wear around so I got it mostly for Cook… he’s a lot more thug life than me. They were well worth the four bucks I paid for them.

Once in Kajaani it wasn’t a far drive to Vuokatti. We’re staying at this huge sports complex. They have everything from hockey rinks and ski tunnels to swimming pools here. There’s a main Hotel building, but we are staying in one of the small cabins around the Vuokatin Sports Center. The cabin is small but I think it’s a lot nicer than staying in a hotel room. There are a few tiny rooms each with an incredibly small bed. We call them ‘sleep chambers’. Along with a small kitchen and even a Sauna. Joining Torin, Cook, and I in the cabin are Justin, our Sport Science dude, and Oleg, our new waxer from Estonia.

One of Justin’s main duties while he’s here is to help monitor our morning recovery markers. We’re still in a period of solid training and along with the travel over to Europe it can be very east to get sick. This is why each morning Justin helps us record our morning heart rate, lactic acid, hemoglobin, glucose, and USG (urine specific gravity). Recording an AM heart rate gives us an idea of the overall stress on the body. If it’s five beats above our normal range it usually means no intensity for that day. Testing for lactic acid in the morning lets us know if there is any acid left in the muscles from the day before, and glucose gives us an indication of how well we refueled the previous day; Especially the night before. Hemoglobin and the USG are basically both used to measure how well we are staying hydrated.

For the past three days the training has been kept pretty easy. We had an easy skate distance in the morning and strength in the afternoon on the first day, and a classic specific strength and general strength yesterday. Today it was raining pretty hard but we were still able to get in some good speed training. We did a total of 1:45 with 10 ‘drop in’ speeds side by side with each other. I think its good to practice the speeds side by side this time of year to help simulate the final stretch of a sprint race. And it adds some friendly competition among the team. We’re planning on going out for an easy classic distance this afternoon and it’s pretty much dark out by four so I might need to bust out the headlamp.

We’re planning on hammering out a sprint TT this weekend with some of the Finns and maybe some Canadians so check back for an update on that.

Showing off our ‘bling’ in the helsinki airport…. we were bored.

Cook getting his morning blood taken

Its not cold enough for the ‘mask’ yet, but im sure it will be.

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