Just a quick update from the USST camp here in Whistler. The whole team arrived on Thursday for a 10 day camp at the Olympic venue. We are also joined by special guests Cook, leif, and Lars Flora in addition to the whole Sun Valley team and a big group of NEG junior crew.

Even though we think Vancouver is just in our back yard it actually takes me longer to get to the Olympic venue from my house than it does to get to most places in Europe. So the travel day was a little bit of a haul, but the digs here are pretty sweet. We’re staying at these sick condos at the base of Blackcomb and within walking distance of the whistler village, the skate park, and basically everything you could need.

The goal of this camp is to spend more time getting used to the Olympic venue and to roller ski on some of the courses. I think they have around 5k of paved roller ski loops at the Olympic Park. For many of us this is also the start of a shift in our training to more intensity so we’ll be focusing on lots of intervals and time trials while we are here in town.

During our first full day of camp we kept the training down to an easy distance pace, but since then we’ve been ramping it up. Yesterday the entire group did some threshold intervals which we finished with an all out 45 second double pole sprint into the finish. The intervals were taking around 5 minutes… and they were kept under control, but we used this opportunity to practice some sprint finishes too. After 5-6 intervals it ended up being a pretty hard workout and I’m definitely sore from poling so hard. Even during the easier workouts the focus is still on the Olympics here at this camp. Yesterday afternoon we all went for an easy distance run around the Olympic trails in order to memorize every k of the track. This morning’s workout was a massive speed workout with the entire crew cycling though starts, drop ins, and uphill speeds. The courses up there are awesome for roller skiing. no pics of the track yet, but here are a few of the group.

me and Cook post workout

NEG

Liz and Mo….. stoked

This past weekend was an epic one with Ryan Foster’s wedding taking place near Middlebury Vermont. Being a groomsman I had to rally up directly after an SMS junior camp workout on Friday to make it up there for the rehearsal dinner. Let’s just say it wasn’t the greatest planning on my part… but first lets talk about the camps.

The SMS Bill Koch camp and Junior camp saw some their biggest numbers ever and with kids fired up to train. The BK youth camp had over 50 participants all staying at the Stratton Campus. The youth camp is designed for young kids to get an introduction into ski training and get out on the roller skis and practice technique.  For the most part the workouts are kind of short but every year there seems to be one that gets away from us. This year it was a distance workout designed to test the kids a little bit. We started by roller skiing around the back side of Stratton and then running on a trail up to the top. It’s a work out that I grew up doing and one that really isn’t too tough as long as the gondola is running and you can catch a lift down the mountain. It just so happens that it wasn’t running on the day we did it with the youth kids, which turned the workout into a little bit of a death march for some of them. You should have seen the look of disappointment on the kids faces when we got to the top and there was no gondola for them. A lot of the kids had been sticking with my pace for most of the run/hike and were already settling in to a nice bonk. I wasn’t dogging it either…..a solid level one pace.

So we had to run down the mountain which wouldn’t be too bad for most youngsters, but in this case they had already been out for over two hours. At this point it begun to be a survival mission and the large group that we had started with split up and tried to make it down to school as quickly as possible. When we were almost back to school, the group that was still hanging with me had slimmed a little bit but I looked next to me and there, just running away, was a girl that literally came up to my waist. I asked her how old she was…. ‘Eleven!’, she said. not even sounding tired.  I looked at my watch and we had already been training for over 2.5 hours. ridiculous.

The SMS junior camp kids were equally impressive this year. I was able to train a lot more with this group and had two good roller ski sessions with them. During the first skate workout Sverre had the kids run through the ‘test’ ,which is a hill climb race that takes anywhere from 3-4 minutes for the fast guys. It’s basically sprint practice, but all uphill. So even after we had been skiing a while we had them hammer this hill as hard as they could, and then recover for 20 mins, before pairing them up in heats and having them hammer up again. I have to say it was a pretty brutal workout and everyone took it pretty well.

After working on some classic technique with the kids on Friday I hurried back to school so I could make it up to Ryan’ s rehearsal dinner. Since I was in the wedding party I already had a tux waiting up there for me, and Jess was also flying into burlington, so there wasn’t really anything holding me back from driving up on my pride and joy, the 1970 triumph. Except for some massive thunder storms. When I was scrabbling  out the door it also seemed like a good idea to not bring any clothes with me. Why not, right? Tux is up there, and I’m going to the rehearsal dinner, so I’ll just ride up in my nice clothes. So I proceeded to tie my tie, put my nice pants and shoes on and rally down the road on the bike. I really thought I was going to make it… and I made it really far… up until about the last 20 minutes of a 2 hour ride until I got hammered with a big storm and pouring rain. It wasn’t looking small either so I didn’t really have a choice to let it pass. So I just went rocking though until I got the wedding site. I did manage to leave enough time for something like this to happen though and was able to dry everything out before the dinner.

Basically the wedding was awesome. Most of our crew spent the weekend camping in a field down the road from the reception site. It became knows as ‘camper-ville’ because of all the trucks, tents, dirty old motorcycles, and of course Ethan’s 1985 unbelievable shitty winnebago that made the scene look so awesome. The fires and the beer cans didn’t help either. But despite camper-ville, which was kept hidden down the dirt road, the wedding was really classy and went down smoothly. They got hitched in a classic white church built in the 1800’s just outside of Middlebury, and the reception was held in the field looking over kate’s (Ryans wife) family’s land. Basically just a vermont paradise. I probably have some good stories but they’ll just have to wait for a sauna one day. here are some pics.

How many red necks does it take to put on a tux? Gus, Ethan, and I getting some help

Ryan and Kate getting off of the  horse carriage at the reception site

Dance time. For those of you that don’t know. thats a VT flag, American flag, and a VT Republic flag (Green Mt. Boys)
there was a good Vermont scene at the wedding.

Jess and I. It was about 100 percent humidity and outside, which made the dance floor an awesome, sweaty place.
it was a great time!

I’m back in VT! Sorry it’s taken me a while to get an update in… I’ve made my way from New Zealand to Vermont and this past week has been crazy busy. There always seems to be a ton of stuff to get done after you’ve been on the road so long, and since I haven’t been home since the middle of June this past weeks has been intense.

After the long travel from New Zealand to the states I was pretty stoked to make it back home. For the past few years I’ve been splitting up the travel by having a stop in Utah on the way back form camp. It’s a good way to avoid spending two nights in a row on an airplane, and I get to hang out with Jess for a night or two in Park City. Once I made it back to the Green Mountains I chilled and trained at home for 2 days before heading up north to the Kingdom for the NENSA GG clinic.

90 degrees and sunny in the Kingdom is pretty epic so we had some great weather for the clinic and a few days of training. We held the clinic at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center and I was impressed with the situation they have going on there. I can’t remember ever staying there in the Summer until last weekend, but it’s awesome. Pepa and the Green team have a solid program going, and rollerskiing and running terrain kick ass. During the weekend I was able to train with the Green team one morning and ski twice with the coaches that were in town for the GG clinic so I think it was a pretty productive weekend despite the 100 percent humidity that made us jump in the lake several times a day.

Now I’m back in the SoVT and I got a chance to train at Stratton this morning and hammer out some level 4 intervals. Again the heat was brutal but it felt good to go hard at sea level. There are about 50 BKYSL youngsters staying at SMS right now for summer camps so there is XC action going on everywhere. I was stoked this morning because I was doing intervals up the hill that the school is on and a bunch of the kids came to the side of the road to cheer as I came by for an interval. That was really cool.  Later in the day I had a little talk with kids and ran through some of the drills that everyone does on roller skis. That was the big theme of the day…. even world cup skiers have to do drills on roller skis. it’s true I’ve seen it. Tomorrow we’re meeting back up at SMS with BKLeaguers for an OD roller ski around Stratton and a run back over the top. With the heat we might see a few bonks from the little guys.

I left my camera cord in Utah so I haven’t been able to take any pictures off my camera, so I’ll post this one instead. Because it’s an awesome picture and cavedave is my hero. Seriously

Video update from the Snowfarm in New Zealand.