Lindsay Van gold, Jessica Jerome 6th place

lindsay is the first ever women’s ski jumping world champ

kris Freeman 4th. 1.3 seconds from the podium

Todd Lodwick gold, Billy D 5th. Our second gold medal for the USA! 

Yesterday was the last day of training this season. Not literally, but in a way it was. We’ve been hitting the training pretty hard here for the past 5 days finishing off the week with a sprint relay time trail on Saturday and a 3 hour OD yesterday. Although I’ll have many more days of skiing distance and intervals this season we say this is the end of the ‘training season’ because from here on out it’s all about racing and feeling good. If you haven’t put in the hard work yet this year it’s not going to help you now. From here on out it’s all about finding our peak and maintaining that fitness through the end of the race season.

After this amazing week of training here in Austria we’re all loading up the vans on wednesday and driving over to Bormio Italy where we will compete in this weekends world cups. There will be a skate sprint on Friday and a 15k classic on Saturday. We’ll have a few more skiers on this world cup weekend including Liz, Morgan A, and Morgan S, here straight from U23’s. Along with Leif and Kuzzy gearing up for World Champs. Expectations are definitely high going into Italy, but what really matters is how we can peak for our races two weekends from now in Czech, because it’s all about bringing home the hardware. lets get it on.

Andy Fecteau Photo

We traveled yesterday from Russia to Ramsau Austria, flying into Munich on the FIS charter flight. The charter flights are a weird thing. FIS rents out these big planes from Airlines and they’re all set up just like a normal flight with attendants and everything accept the whole plane is filled with world cup skiers, coaches, and waxers. The amount of gear they have to load on these planes is ridiculous so it ends up taking a long time, but the good news is they’re usually not very full because of all the weight. You’re not allowed to take any pictures on the charter flights so I don’t have any to show you.

Russia was cold, but it was a good experience. My finish didn’t turn out as well as I was hoping when I was standing at the start line of the final, but I can’t complain since it’s my top result of the season. It was cold the sprint day, but nothing compared to what it was like the next day. Cook and I were gearing up for our first world cup duathlon and we were fired up to start. it was sunny out, but the night before the race the temps plunged down to somewhere around -30 c. it warmed up a bunch in the morning the in the end they had to call the race because it wasn’t going to get above the legal limit. it was a bummer. Most of the world cup skiers were out training anyway. When it’s that cold training is fine but it can be really dangerous on the lungs if they were to have the race. So we ended up getting in a good training day instead. check out some pictures from Russia:

check out that cement picture of the dude looking over town. weird

girls love boots in russia

you can pretty much buy anything… cheap.

a lot of people living on top of other people

With  break in the world cup racing this coming weekend. this is the time when teams put in their pre worlds training camps. We’re settled in here in Ramsau so we can put in a good 10 days of hard training before we start to taper off and try to peak for World Champs. it’s just the 6 of us here now, but the rest of the World Champs team will be heading over in a few days to join us here. today was amazing… sunny and warm enough to chill outside on the deck. a pretty big change from what we had in Russia yesterday. So I’m stoked to get in some training on all the k’s of trails here and get in the last bit of hard intervals and strength before we dive into the Championships and the rest of the world cup season.

the view from our new hotel in Austria