For the past week I’ve been putting ‘money in the bank’… and its got nothing to do with cash. This is a term we athletes use to describe some of the rebuilding phases of our training.

Stratton Mt. School

I’ve been training in Vermont for about a week now. After traveling from Russia to Munich last Sunday after the race, we then flew home from Munich last Monday. I came home to some perfect winter conditions and some powdery tracks.

YEAH!!! what a weekend! congrats to kikkan! this is a huge step forward for the US XC Ski team.

Dec. 11 2007

Dec.8 2007
PIC: wax tech. Peter and I laugh off a tough day

Yeah… that wasn’t the distance world cup debut I was looking for. It was a rough day for me as well as a lot of the field because of the weather. Because of our less than stellar FIS distance points, Cook and I were the first ones out of the gate after the 4 nations group guys which proved to be a weather disaster for us.

Even though we’ve escaped the darkness of northern Scandinavia it has been a tough couple days for me here in Switzerland. The hack I picked up after the sprint in Kuusamo turned into a head cold that has been pretty hard to get rid of. My energy level hasn’t suffered too much but my nose has been clogged up, which for an athlete can be very frustrating. After taking an off day I went out skating yesterday to try to get the blood moving and to get a feel of how the sickness has affected my body. I didn’t feel great, whether from the cold or the new training altitude, so I kept it short and easy. This morning I went out for a skate ski again and was feeling a little better so I put in a few speeds in the stadium. Right now it’s hard to tell if I will be able to get any starts in this weekend but I’m taking it one day at a time and keeping it optimistic.

That was a false alarm for me on the Kuusamo 15k. I woke up in the morning with some serious lung burn from the sprint the day before so I had to call it. But Freeman killed it! Hell yeah! That was rad. Even though it was on the cold side, like -16c, it was perfect classic skiing with hard tracks and really fair waxing. Freeman skied a smart race and eased into his first 5k and then kept stepping it up for the next 10. It was pretty cool to watch the splits pop up on the TV and to see Bird ahead of all the top dogs.

It was an exciting day today at the Kuusamo drag race! This course is pretty sick. The first half consists of the straight away out of the start gate and a screaming down hill with some gnarly corners. The second half is all up hill into the stadium with a massive steep hill known as the Kuusamo drag. Its known as a drag race because the hill is such a force to be reckoned with that the race is basically won or lost depending on how fast you can stride the hill. So if you were looking to watch a thrilling sprint race with crashes, power striding, and close finishes today was your day.