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.

the view of the city from the top of the race course.

The most interesting thing about our stay here in CZE is the hotel that the entire world cup has been staying in. It’s called the Hotel Babylon and it’s like something strait out of Las Vagas. You can see the Babylon from pretty much anywhere in Liberec because it’s painted bright yellow and takes up several city blocks complete with full size fake planted palm trees. I dont know why I don”t have any pics of it but for some reason I never got the camera out in the hotel. But this place has everything including 1000 hotel rooms, 8 restaurants/ bars, 2 casinos, an indoor mall (with everything from a grocery store to a post office), an indoor water park (aka Czech speedo land), a bowling alley, and and indoor amusement park complete with rides, bumber cars, and lazer tag. It’s intense. And it’s really crowded all the time with lots of Czech families. Even with action around every corner the hotel rooms a actually really nice and the foods been good even though they’re serving every single team on the world cup.

The 15k race that was on Saturday was an interesting event. As World Cup skiers we do get to ski in some really nice locations and on some incredible trails.. but the reality is most of the time on the world cup conditions can be worse than at any local ski race. It’s all about being the best skier you can be on that day and in those conditions. The track here was SO bad the first day that it could be considered rock skiing at it’s best.

the pics and TV don’t really even show how bad it was. Any ski was trashed within a few laps on the 1.8k loop. But the races went on and the organizers put in a lot of work and by the day of the Sprint relay conditions had improved a lot. Our teams didnt do that well in Sundays sprint relay but I think it was a good hard race for me. I feel like my fitness has been continuing to improve over the past two weeks and I’m starting to feel like I can hammer pretty hard. I’m really looking forward to the next sprint race in Stockholm.

well we fly out tomorrow from Prague on our way to Sweden. check back soon for an update.

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