In just a few hours we’ll be packing up the van to drive to Fort Kent. Our training camp continues there for the next two weeks. This is the first time we’ve had a three-week long June camp, so instead of diving headfirst into the biggest volume week of the year right away, this time the pacing is more conservative. That being said, I’m still pretty tired after finishing a week with three quality interval sessions and some level 1/2 distance workouts. I’ve really tried to maximize recovery between workouts (and on our off day, today, although we’ll be traveling for most of it) by hitting the ice bath after interval sessions and taking naps in the afternoon.

There’s nothing like doing intervals with 8 other girls to test your fitness level. While the treadmill workout on Tuesday was done solo, we did an uphill level 4 skate workout on matched DMS rollerskis on Thursday and level 3 bike intervals on the long hill from Keene to Lake Placid on Saturday. In between, we had some endurance strength/technique sessions with focus on V2, no pole, or double pole as well as a couple of easier distance sessions. The rollerloop in Lake Placid is currently being repaved so we weren’t able to train on it this week.

Over the next two weeks the volume will increase and we’ll be using the rollerloop at 10th Mountain Center almost daily. We’ll be doing a time trial later in the week and I’m anticipating a few backwoods adventures in the County. It’s been about a year since I was a member of Maine Winter Sports Center and I’m looking forward to spending some more time up there.

After I finished my final exams I packed up and went home to Lenox, MA for a few days. The time at home was just enough to drop off my school accessories and make sure I had everything I needed for summer training in Lake Placid, where I’m now a resident athlete at the OTC. I spent only a few days at home because I thought it was important to get to Lake Placid for some combo workouts before the camp started. The camp, by the way, will consist of one week in Lake Placid followed by two weeks in Fort Kent, ME.

Our three-week camp commenced yesterday with some shooting drills followed by easy combos at Mt. Van Hoevenberg. It’s the first time that I have been a part of an all-women’s biathlon training camp, which makes provides a great opportunity for all the female biathletes in the country to come together and train with one another. Aside from catching up with friends from across the country during the workout, we got to experience again what it feels like to shoot at a busy range, and take on the pressures of speed and distraction that accompany it. In the afternoon, the rain clouds descended on us as we completed a two-hour rollerski workout with 45 minute segments of double poling and skating without poles.

Today we’ve got our first interval session of the week, and it’s on the treadmill. We’ll be following the “Vancouver protocol”, which is meant to mimic the Olympic course in Whistler—lots of V2 and V2 alternate. I’m scheduled to go in just a few hours so I did my strength workout already this morning.

Tomorrow we’ll have a meeting to acquaint all of us with the selection criteria for this year’s World Cups and the Olympic games. It’s something everyone’s waiting to hear…

I’m within the second high volume week of the period. I completed 22 hours last week and will do about the same this week. I started off this week with the infamous 15sec on/15sec off hill bounding workout. It always takes some getting used to, especially for the first time of the year. Instead of going for 12 minutes straight we tried shortening the duration of each interval to 8 minutes but increased the repetitions to 3 to make it simulate a race (a sprint race has three loops). I have two more tough interval workouts to go, and this isn’t even a camp! It’s going to be much easier once I’m in Lake Placid and have a group to train with. Pacing a volume week with three interval sessions can be tricky. The spacing is such that you do intervals every other day with distance workouts and strength sessions in between. I have found that it’s especially important to keep the distance workouts within level 1 if I want to be able to do high quality intervals.

My schedule this week is packed not only with training, but also final exams. It’s not the hours that you spend training that could otherwise be spent studying that make the combination such a challenge. The hard part is resisting the urge to nap in the afternoon between training sessions, and the low level of concentration that is a result of such fatigue. Once my productivity begins to decline, I usually give in to a short “power nap”, just 45 minutes or so. What I’ve found works best for me, though, is to get as much work done in the morning before I start training and the eyes get sleepy.

It’s at about this point in the year when we work on the technical aspects of skiing and shooting that are put to the side during the competition season. We do our best throughout the season to keep on top of it, don’t get me wrong, with video analysis of every race and slowfire sessions during our “off” weeks. But if you consider the fatigue of constant travel and racing, the unpredictability of our schedule, and freezing cold temperatures that make shooting 5 rounds per minute torturous, spring is obviously a better time of year to work on all the fine details. And from a different angle, it’s better to take care of these things early in the year in order not to build on bad habits.

Training is just starting to pick up to full swing. I just finished an “easy week” leading up to two high volume weeks. “Easy” translates as low hours, but there is still a predetermined proportion of intensity and strength incorporated into the week. Right now the focus is both on high intensity intervals (level 4 and 5) of up to 6 minutes and longer threshold intervals of up to 10 minutes. The interval sessions last month were a mix of running, skating, and classic, but as there is much ski (biathlon)-specificity to our training, they are now almost all skating. Yesterday I did my first combos of the year, which just so happened to be combined with a level 3 intensity session. As I’ve been doing a fair amount of precision work each week, the shooting seems to have picked right up where I left off at the end of the season. It will take a little bit of time, though, to get used to matching my breathing pattern with my shooting rhythm.

School has taken up a fair amount of my time over the past two months. I have two more weeks until the end of the term and I know I will be missing it, as I won’t be returning until next March. The structure of a class schedule and the alternative mental stimulation was an important change of pace for me after the season, which left me physically and mentally taxed. Besides, it’s great to be here studying something I’m passionate about and I really can’t imagine forgoing school for anything, even biathlon. Luckily, I’m able to have a balance of both throughout the course of each year.

I arrived in Squamish, B.C. just a few days before the Individual race of World Cup 7.  To be honest, I felt like I hadn’t completely recovered from the prior week of training.  The overall training load wasn’t high but the combination of months of constant travel and busy race schedules seemed to be taking its toll.  I did some speed the day before the race to get to know the transitions on the course and warm up my legs.  The course at Whistler is different from most of the courses I have raced this year.  It lacks the steep climbs and technical descents characteristic of many older biathlon courses.  Instead it has a lot of gradual climbs, a long flat V2 section, important transitions, and downhills that require lots of footwork to make corners rather than providing a chance to rest.  The result is that by the end of a race my lower back is uncomfortably tight and I’m wheezing from the lack of recovery.  It’s a tough course that doesn’t suit me well but I will spend the next 11 months learning to like it and ski the terrain efficiently.

Placing tenth in the relay in Korea was a satisfying way to finish up World Championships. Overall, Korea was a positive experience for me. My 58th place in the sprint was rewarding because I qualified for the pursuit and was finally able to experience the heightened mental pressures of a pursuit format race. I didn’t shoot well at all in this race and realized that the first time you start is when you find out just exactly who and what you’re up against. The second time you start a pursuit you can go in with a strategy. But you always have to start somewhere. In a sense, the relay was even more exciting than the pursuit because all four of my teammates pulled off great races to keep us in the mix with teams such as the Czech Republic, Romania, and Norway throughout the entire race. When I started as the third leg, our team was in about 12th place. I was so excited that I experienced an adrenalin rush such that I didn’t feel any lactic acid building in my legs up the first climb. The course essentially consisted of one long climb out of the range (split into two long hills), a short downhill followed by a short steep climb, then a level section before the long downhill into the range. Facing gusty winds for my prone stage I used two extra rounds, but only one in standing under calm conditions. On each lap I passed one to two skiers, which was necessary because I used a little more time on the range, as I do even in normal races. The important thing to me right now is to hit targets and allow the speed to come naturally. On the last lap I left the range right behind Solveig Rogstad of Norway and passed her midway up the long climb. She managed to pass me back right before the range approach but I maintained close enough contact to allow Tracy Barnes to pass Tora Berger of Norway on the last leg. Individually, the four of us don’t often beat the Norwegian women, but as a team we proved that with good shooting we can all compete at a high level. This is extremely promising for us.

Lucikly, I had no trouble adjusting to the time difference once I returned home from Korea. With fresh snow at Notchview I couldn’t resist using some of my off days to explore the trails where I competed in my first Bill Koch Festival, and eight years later another one was just about to take place. After a refreshing four days at home I returned to Lake Placid to begin training for the Vancouver World Cup. We started with a few days of distance skiing and strength, skiing up to 2.5 hours at a time. In previous years I recall doing less and less training as the season progressed and would have viewed a 2.5-hour ski at this point in the season outrageous. Now I recognize it as necessary for maintaining a high level of fitness throughout the year and as hours in the tank for next year. Toward the end of the week we started doing intensity combos, which are important not only for fitness and speed but also for maintaining sharpness on the range in race situations. The first set was 6 times 10 minutes at threshold, followed two days later by 6 times 7 minutes at race pace. At this point in the year, spending 60 minutes at threshold is far less daunting than it would have been two years ago. This tolerance has only been gained by building in small gradual steps year after year. It takes persistence and patience more than anything to become a successful ski racer, a reality I become acquainted with more and more each year.

Ahh…hard work pays off.  I qualified for the pursuit at world champs in 58^th place.  It is the first pursuit that I’ve qualified for on the World Cup and I’m pleased and excited to have a go at this different race format.  It was a decent way to end the day after all the tumult of the morning and previous night.

We touched down in sunny Seoul, South Korea on Sunday around midday after a 9.5-hour flight from Amsterdam.  I really appreciate the fact that we were able to stay in Europe during the two-week break proceeding World Championships because the flight from the US would have been much more taxing on our acclimation abilities.  This year the IBU volunteers from Korea who met us at the airport led us straight to customs with our rifles and everything seemed to go many times more smoothly than last year when South Korea welcomed their first biathlon world cup event.  We then took a 3.5-hour bus ride through some more low-lying but hilly fields that still didn’t show any promise of snow.  At the very end of our journey we began to ascend toward the Yong Pygong alpine resort, a relatively upscale village of condominiums and high-rise hotels by the side of the alpine ski hill. 

We arrived in Ruhpolding, Germany yesterday to kick off our pre-World Championships training camp.  This is a first for me, since I spent this time last year competing at Junior World Championships, also in Ruhpolding, so I missed the majority of the pre-World Champs camp.  Before we got here, however, we had a short break after the last world cup in Antholz, Italy.  Some members of our team went to Ridnaun, a cross-country ski resort town in northern Italy.  While we still logged quite a few hours of easy training at altitude, we were able to enjoy the spa, good food, and more lenient training schedule (we were, for once, without coaches). 

So, upon leaving Ridnaun, I had spent about 1.5 weeks training and racing at altitude.  The toughest part was the sprint race in Antholz.  We arrived there only two days before the first race without any time to acclimate.  To make things tougher, the range approach is uphill and you have to expend enough energy to get up the hill without coming in too hard for shooting.  I learned the hard way just how slow I really ought to approach the range:  during the sprint race I had a good prone stage, missing only one, but when attempting to make the same approach for standing, I came in with what I was thought was a relaxed body but my breathing rate was still elevated due to the effects of altitude and I missed.  Two days later I had a chance to give it another shot.  We had a 4-stage mass start time trial during training and in absence of the stress and excitement of a race situation I was able to force myself to slow down and only missed 2 shots the entire race.  I’d like to say I’ve learned my lesson.  Luckily, I’ve been told that the race course in Korea has a downhill range approach, similar to the one in Ruhpolding where we are training.

While the course in Ruhpolding may have a downhill range approach, the rest of the tracks are anything but easy.  Ruhpolding is famous for its “wall”, the last climb before the range.  Since last year the wall has been heightened by at least one meter, making it even steeper; it is now hardly possible to glide while skiing up it.  Yesterday morning we started off with threshold combos, six repetitions of about nine minutes a-piece.  I felt pretty fresh after returning from altitude and had to remind myself to reign in the pace at times in order to maintain a good feeling throughout an entire hour of threshold.  After this workout, we had a relay competition against the men’s team, doing an “impulse”, or sprint, into the range before shooting and then another one out of the range to the tag zone.  There are a few other teams training here as well, as Ruhpolding is home base for many biathletes from different countries.  The rest of the week will include some more highly specific combo workouts and a time trial as well as volume and technique training before we begin to taper for world champs.