We are finally on the road and happy to be here!  After an amazingly smooth travel day, we arrived in West Yellowstone to excellent skiing and more snow on the way.  It’s always exciting to get the season underway, and traveling with APU is as good as it gets.  We flew into Bozeman, leaving pretty darn early from Anchorage:

We made one stop at Costco in Bozeman for food, and left with 8 carts of goodies, then headed straight to West.

Skiing the next day was beautiful.  The great thing about West Yellowstone, other than the races, people, and event, is the chance to really get your skis figured out.  We have spent the last few skis organizing, testing, and prepping skis for the season.

We have a lot of skis!  Our coaches and tech work really hard, testing all day yesterday and today, trying every single pair that every single athlete has.  They are extremely good at waxing and ski testing, so it’s an awesome resource for us as athletes.  It’s good to know that your coach is going the extra mile to make sure that come race day, your skis will help rather than hinder your performance.  As an APU athlete, I have never had a problem with wax during a race.

Other exciting things:

New Uniforms!

We look really good this year, thanks to functional and fashionable uniforms from Swix.

Thanksgiving dinner, which is usually a team affair, was held on Sunday because of races before and after Thursday.  Making the whole dinner is a great teamwork opportunity, and this year it was superb.  It’s always nice to share that with great teammates and coaches.

We are really looking forward to racing tomorrow!

If you see us on the trails or are in the neighborhood, don’t hesitate to stop by and chat.  We love to talk to people, and are more than willing to answer questions about APU.

We are psyched about the upcoming racing season…

Throughout the year we train our bodies to cover a race course as quickly as possible, and skis are what we count on to carry us from start to finish.

As our program has developed, we have created a system of ski management.  We have 20 athletes, each with a fleet of skis designed to accommodate all the variable conditions we encounter.

We employ a wax tech/fleet manager year round to help each of our athletes continually develop, maintain and test their fleets. During the summer months we are fortunate to be able to test skis at the Thomas Training Center on Eagle Glacier.   In the fall, we ski at Hatcher Pass on early season snow, where we refine our fleets before the race season.

During the  season we take advantage of each race venue and their unique conditions to test wax, grinds, structure and all of our skis.  Last year we had 47 testing days while on the road.  We tested 5 different complete lines of kick wax, 5 different lines of glide wax, 50 grinds and over 300 pairs of skis.  We tested the effects of different binding placements, different ways to mark kick zones, and different ways to make hairies.

Using the data we have gathered, we have been able to fine tune our system.  Each athlete now has a fleet of skis that consists of 10-15 pairs of skis all picked for different conditions.  All of our bindings are mounted based on each skis characteristics, and every pair of classic skis has kick zones based on weight, body proportions.

Last year we found Swix waxes to consistently be amongst the fastest waxes we tested.  For that reason, we will be racing on Swix exclusively this year.

Today was our official start to the race season! Today our women’s team leader Kikkan Randall, kicked off a great start in Beitostolen with a seventh place in the qualifier and ninth overall. Training and preparations are on track with Kikkan’s skiing strong and making good developments over the training year.

Here at home we have had a good start to the season with a good balance of on snow training and dry land. In the last two weeks, we have had 2 sprint time trails for our Sprint Team and our Distance team completed a good 10/15km classic and 21/28km skate time trials. Fun to see the improvements over the training year.

Today we hit a solid interval training with repeats on our favorite loop. Depending on the athletes goals and body type work outs were designed from L3,L4,L5, and L6. Video is included. Conditions were sweet with 20 deg F and Swix LF7 as the choice of the day.

Here is the video and some pictures:

This is a double pole session. Glenn Alps has been really sweet. I think this is some of the best early season terrain with gradual rolling terrain. It is inspiring to ski at Glenn Alps with the mountain right at your side!

Brent Knight shaking it out before a hard charge

Happy after laying down some mean times…It looks fun to go that fast!

Holly Brooks ripping up the first climb…One fast coach!

APU Women's Team enjoying their cool down

Yeah…That was sweet!

A little team fun…

Look forward to seeing everyone in West Yellowstone!

Erik