Winter must almost be here because it’s time for the annual Jans Winter Welcome in Park City. Winter sports athletes from all over come together to help raise money for the Youth Winter Sports Alliance. It was a hell of a night.

Andy Newell and Jessica Jerome

Billy Demon, Jeremy Teela, Andy Newell, Lowell Bailey, Tim Burke

 Ashley Battersby and Jessica Jerome

Billy D, and Katie Koczynski

Clint Jones, Andy Newell, and Brant Moles

Since Lake Placid I have been out in Park City for my final high altitude training block of the year. The first week has been awesome with sunny skies every single day and cool mornings for training. When I left the house yesterday for Soldier Hollow it as 19 degrees out, but was skiing without a shirt on by the end of the session.

After a recovery week from our intensity camp in LP it’s time for me to put in a few weeks of volume rebuilding. The intensity will still be pretty high with Level 4 and threshold intervals every week, but this is also a good time to get in some distance training before we head to Europe and hit it hard for a few weeks. After all we don’t want to peak too early.

There is a good group of skiers in town. Over the past week the whole US biathlon team has been in Midway for a camp making my workouts at Soho a little more exciting and this morning I went our for a 2 hour skate with Zack Simons. During the next two weeks I’ll be sleeping up at 8,500 feet to get the most out of the altitude and then driving down to Soldier Hollow for most sessions to keep them fast. Heber just put in a sick new skate park so that should keep things interesting too, and change things up from my usual Park City sessions.

cold nights and snow in the mountains around Park City

With only one more day left in our Lake Placid camp, we went out and hit Whiteface again for some level 4 bounding intervals. Bounding up Whiteface is a work out that I have been doing here since I was a junior skier at NENSA camp, so it’s always something I look forward to here in LP. My legs were definitely starting to feel the hard training we have done so far this camp, especially the sprint TT workout we did on Thursday, but it made it easier to control the level 4 intervals today and keep it in the right zone. With the help of some other athletes, including Burke and GMVS, we hammered out 5×4 minutes up the ‘medalist’ trail. good way to keep motivated. We will end the camp tomorrow with an OD skate work out. here are some pics from the day….

hello from Lake Placid NY!

it’s has been a great start to our annual intensity camp here in LP. our first two days started out easy, then we stepped it up with a speed session on Friday and some hard double pole intervals today. check out the hammering in the video. check back for some female video and an update on the Whiteface hill climb.