Hey everyone and welcome to my blog!! I was stoked when the guys at Fasterskier.com asked me to come on board for this project. Not only did it give me an excuse to finally buy a digital camera, but it’s also a great way to show people what it is like out on the World Cup. On this blog you’ll get a little bit of training talk, a small amount of racing recap, but mostly you’ll get glimpse behind the scenes as we travel to different world cup races and a look at what it’s like to be an international ski racer. I will be sending in updates any way I can via computer and cell phone, and whenever possible posting photos and video clips. So stay tuned!!

Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation (SVSEF) is proud to join the FasterSkier Blog Team. Based in Sun Valley, Idaho, SVSEF provides training and coaching in four disciplines: Nordic, Alpine, and Freestyle skiing, and Snowboarding. All programs offer a team structure to provide training to athletes competing at both developmental and nationally competitive levels. The Nordic program consists of four different teams: the Olympic Development Team (ODT), the Competition (Comp) Team, the Prep Team, and the Devo Team. Athletes from the ODT and Comp Team will contribute to this blog as they train, race, travel, and live the life of an elite ski racer. Hopefully this will help to spread the ‘All In’ attitude across the country… Read On!

Hello ski fans! Welcome to my Fasterskier Blog! I am very excited to have this opportunity to share my experiences as an international ski racer and bring everyone along for the ride. Through this blog I hope to provide a female perspective, covering a variety of topics including random thoughts from the trails and racing details, as well as photos and videos. It’s sure to be a wild ride so check back often. Cheers!

Welcome to my blog. I skied my first race at the age of six. I have had a burning desire to ski fast ever since. I will be posting updates on my heavy training load and world cup race schedule on this blog. My website www.krisfreeman.net will continue as a more physiological examination of my performances. I will also post a few diabetes specific articles on my personal site.

I'm Nat Herz, and I'm a collegiate skier at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, in midcoast Maine. Fasterskier.com decided to trust me with a blog, so I'll use this site to bring you updates on training, racing, and hopefully some other exciting things, like epic weekend hiking excursions.

I love cross country skiing for it's dynamic and health-oriented nature, and find learning technique and how to use it both meditative and gratifying. I'm really excited to have a place to post my adventures and training experiences here on FasterSkier.com. Skiing fast is all about living well and maintaining a high level of coolness in your life, so I will be writing about Nordic skiing, backcountry skiing, mountain running, camping, traveling, all with a training and racing lifestyle twist because that's how it should be.

We, the Callaghan Valley Training Centre (CVTC), are very excited to launch a blog on the FasterSkier website. We are a Canadian National Athlete Development Centre based out of Whistler Olympic Park, site of the 2010 Olympic Nordic Venue. This is our first year as an official Cross Country Canada Training Centre, and thus far it has been great. We are all excited to be living in the beautiful West Coast of British Columbia and excited to see all of the energy and excitement surrounding the upcoming Olympics.

The University of Utah Ski Team is psyched to start a blog on FasterSkier.com. Tune in here for the latest updates on our training, racing, and happenings from the Beehive State.

With three individual NCAA national champions and over 15 NCAA All Americans in the past five seasons, the University of Alaska Fairbanks has established itself as one of the top Nordic ski programs in the country. Recent graduates now compete professionally in the US as well as on the World Cup circuit. This blog will give fasterskier.com readers a look inside Alaska Nanooks' training, racing, and studies with written reports, photos, and video. The blog might also dispel some of the myths about Fairbanks ("It's too cold in Fairbanks to get fast", "They train indoors all winter", "Those kids never go to school"). We hope you enjoy it.

Well here goes nothing… I was honored when the guys at FasterSkier asked me to write about my unique situation in this blog. While yes I am a Nordic skier, I am probably best known in the athletic community as one of those strange runner freaks. You see for the past few years I have been going against what most people and coaches have advised and have been juggling both running and skiing at Dartmouth College. This year I decided to take time off from school to really get after it –both in skiing and track. This blog will take you through the first ski season in which I have ever trained specifically for skiing and continue on as I go through the collegiate track season culminating at the Olympic trials and hopefully a ticket to Beijing. So stay with me, as this year will surely be one crazy adventure…

I am really excited to share my stories about life on the World Cup, and even more so the road to getting there. I’ve been racing Nordic since I was 5 and loving every day on skis since. The great part about Nordic skiing is that we get to train in such a variety of ways, from the weightroom and XC trails to epic hikes and torturous bike adventures. Makes for great stories and fast races come December! So check back to find out Nordic Combined skiers take on X-training and life on the road.

I started out as a Nordic skier but after one summer biathlon camp in 2002 and the few more months it took for snow to arrive I was determined to be a biathlete. I spent the 2007/2008 season preparing myself to enter into the biathlon world as a senior. The MWSC biathlon program under Gary Colliander in Fort Kent, Maine gave me the boost I needed to make it to the national team. I have the unique situation of attending classes at Dartmouth College during the spring and summer where I’ve figured out how to delicately balance academics with a hefty summer training load. Through this blog I’m hoping to set a good example on how to progress as an athlete while living an intensely academic lifestyle and hopefully be a model to young athletes who are unsure of which path to take when faced with similar options. I’m also hoping to provide a picture of the biathlon circuit and inspire any of you who have considered what fun it would be to combine shooting and skiing to give it a shot! I hope I can prove to everyone out there that you really can do it all.

Justin Freeman made his first trip on skis at the age of about 30 hours. He has been self powered on skis since 27 months, and has been racing continuously since he was seven years old. While Justin is still in retirement denial, he became a father in October of 2006, and lives with his wife and daughter at New Hampton School in New Hampton, NH, where he teaches mathematics and physics and coaches cycling. His primary goal this season is to win his second significant ski marathon (and first since 1999).

I have been racing my cross country skis since I was seven. Now I am thirty one with no end in sight. With this blog I will try to keep you updated on what keeps me at this sport.

Hi there, my name is Brooke Gosling. I am very honored to be a part of the Fasterskier blogs and I hope that I can provide some interesting insight into the cross country ski world in Canada, if at anytime it gets too cheesy or boring, please let me know! For the last 3 years I have raced for x-c.com, however they have decided to not run a racing program for the 2008/2009 season. This year I will be racing under the Alberta World Cup Academy and I look forward to continuing my pursuit towards the 2010 Olympics and the 2009 World Championships under the direction of the AWCA.

Burke Mountain Academy’s Nordic Team is signing onto the FasterSkier Blog Squad, and is looking forward to sharing experiences and ideas with skiers from all over the ski world. Burke Mountain is located in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and provides an opportunity to train for Nordic or Alpine skiing, and to continue with high level secondary academics. At Burke the Athletic and Academic programs mesh and cooperate. Goals of Burke’s Nordic program are to help athletes to an understanding of a lot of the “why’s” of training, and to develop training intelligence and independence. Our Nordic team is small, but busy. We travel a lot and are eager to share trips and camps with other teams. We are developing a post grad program for focused skiers looking to put in a training year after high school, and before or during the college experience. We’ll do our best to keep you up to date on our doings, and look forward to hearing from you.

My name is Ian Nesbitt, I am a senior Nordic captain at Holderness School in New Hampshire. I was really psyched when FasterSkier offered me a chance to have a blog. It certainly is an upgrade from my previous half-serious training blog. Through this blog, I will document my day-by-day training throughout the summer and into the running and ski seasons as a way for other young skiers to be inspired. I will also post GPS/heart rate training analysis of these two sports through the MotionBased.com training website.

Hello cross country skiing! As a former basketball, soccer, and softball player, I played lacrosse at DII St. Thomas Aquinas college in NY. After graduating I moved out to Wisconsin to live and work at Camp Gray (a Catholic summer camp and year-round retreat center). I was worried that, without a team to be a part of and nothing to train for, I would go out to lunch (apparently that's a synonym for crazy). Fortunately, a couple friends started telling me about skiing. Almost instantly, I began training. Even before the first snow fell, skiing had taken over my life. six months,over a hundred inches of snow, and two races later, I am now at the beginning of my first full year of training and racing. Though I am new to this sport, have no sponsors, little money and a full-time job outside of skiing, I still have dreams as big as any elite athlete. If all goes will I will soon be an elite skier, winning races and dreaming of the Olympics. Until then I will be sharing all of it here on my blog: training, work, elaborate schemes to elicit sponsorships, crazy dreams, and more! In my life, everything relates to skiing.