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.
Otepaa is a wicked small town. I actually don’t think there would even be a town here if it wasn’t for the ski stadium, but a 30 min drive to Tartu and you’re in a happinin little place with a cool downtown and a university. We didn’t really need to pick up anything in town… so we just walked around. Even though Estonia is an Eastern European country there aren’t as many beat up old buildings as you would think. There are a lot of big brick buildings left over from the Russian days but the down town in Tartu had a lot of new architecture… but we did find this old cool looking crooked building in the old town.
And a weird ass statue of a giant baby holding a man’s hand.
We will be getting back into the training tomorrow and also get started on testing some skis for this coming weekend. The distance race will be on Saturday and the classic sprint on Sunday.
Tags: , Andrew Newell, Andy Newell, cross country skiing
