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Archive for February, 2008

Stockholm Sprint

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

I don’t have a whole lot to add about today’s sprint. It was gray out and the snow was dirty but there were tons of spectators and it was as great day for a sprint. I went down on some ice on the first corner and missed qualification. I guess it’s bound to happen to a sprinter at least once in their career… so I guess I’m glad I fell here and not at world champs or something.  The course was pretty flat but everyone was still going with klister because of the uphill finish. It wasn’t a great day for the US Ski Team but our confidence is still high going into Lahti for the weekend. We’re fired up and hungry and want it more than ever. Saturday’s sprint in freestyle and it should be a good day for us.

here are a few pictures from the day.

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World Cup Update

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

The racing is done with in Falun Sweden and even though there wasn’t a sprint here this weekend it was a lot of fun. We’ve had warm sunny skiing conditions basically all weekend and with an exception of a few places on the course the tracks stayed firm.
Falun is notorious for close finishes during the 30k. The stadium is huge and there’s a really long gradual downhill leading into it so it always seams like there’s a huge pack of dudes hammering to the line at once. Saturday’s duathlon was a close one as always but the pack was broken up a little bit by Anders Soedergren’s big move up the massive hill with 1.5 k to go.

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Liberec World Cups

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

It has been kind of a short trip to Czech but for sure an interesting one. We’re in Liberec which is where the World Champs will be held next year for xc, ski jumping, and nordic combined. Liberec is a pretty big city and there’s a lot going on here. It’s only about 100 k from Prague and after heading out on a short jog our first day here we realized it’s a fairly big…. dirty city with a lot of crazy drivers. We almost got hit several times during our 45 min run.
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the view of the city from the top of the race course.

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Otepaa Sprint w/ PICS

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

The rain was coming down hard today here in Otepaa making it a tough, wet, battle of a sprint race. I felt good today. Better than I did two weeks ago in Canmore but unfortunately I couldn’t bring home any results to prove that. I felt like I got my snappy sprint legs back, which seamed to be the thing lacking for me during the Canmore races.
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tech. Relay VIDEO

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

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Kickin it in the E-block

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

The past few days in Otepaa have been better than I expected. There’s not much snow here… in fact anything other than the race trails just has a dusting of wet snow from the other day. But the skiing is still perfect with some firm klister skiing and fast skating. We’ve moved out of the bunker and into a smaller but newer hotel across the street from the stadium. Yesterday was an interval training day so the coaches had us run a mock sprint relay against each other. Cook, Torin, and I started by racing the first round of 3 laps using double pole only. We weren’t prepared to d-pole in Canmore and we definitely don’t want that happening again. After the first round we had 20 minutes to get ready for another 3 laps striding. It was a really hard work out and it was good practice for the races to be rubbing shoulders with the other guys. Today we had the afternoon off from training to Cook, Andy (our PT) and I went into Tartu for the after noon.newellincar.jpg

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Otepaa and J1 video

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

It took just about 30 hours, but we made it to Otepaa in one piece. We flew from Canmore to Chicago where we met up with Justin, Pete, and Kris for the flight over to Stockholm. As usual Chicago was a complete sh^%t show so we ended up sitting on the plane for over an hour while they de-iced and plowed the runways. Because of our delayed departure from Chicago we had to run to our gate in Stockholm but inevitably missed our flight to Estonia. It was only 8:30 in the morning and the next flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until after 2 in the afternoon. With several hours to kill…. and to try to stay awake… we took the train from the airport to downtown. It’s a pretty sick set up they have there in Stockholm. All you have to do is walk down some stairs from the terminal, hop on a train, and you can be in downtown Stockholm in 20 minutes.0.jpg

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