The end of the season draws near here in Norway, but before we can pack it in there is still one more big race series to be had. Remembering back to the start of the season during the second week of November, I can confidently say that this has been the longest and most competitive season ever! Tomorrow starts the Norwegian Biathlon Championships here in Lillehammer, and the only question left to ask is, “are you ready?”

The last biathlon races I had were up in Folldal—the same small town where I began my adventures here in Norway—at the final Norwegian Cup/Vital Cup. The races had some low points and some high ones, but overall I’m fairly satisfied with my performance. The weekend started out with a 10km sprint race on Friday in which I managed to hit all ten targets—perfect shooting! This marks the first time this year with perfect shooting and the third time in my life. Unfortunately, my skiing speed was fairly poor and I had some equipment difficulties on the range, which cost about a minute. So I still ended up four minutes back from Stian Eckhoff, a famous Norwegian who has won a World Cup.

The 12.5km Pursuit race the next day didn’t go all that much better. My skiing remained sluggish and the shooting wasn’t where it should have been. Anyway, I missed a total of 5 targets and had a time on the day 3 min back from Stian.

Zeroing before the race

At this point of the race series I was a bit disappointed, but things took a dramatic swing in the relay race, which was the last race of the series. I found a team that I could join from the region of Hordaland—western Norway—that was quite fitting for me. The genealogical records that I found indicates that my great-great-grandfather came from Voss, a town in the region of Hordaland. Even better though was that my coach for the day was Raphael Poiree, the retired rival to Ole Einar Bjørndalen–really cool guy, but kind of a crazy driver.

Before the start of the relay I felt pretty tired after the two days of racing, and simply hoped that I would find some energy on course. I was chosen to be the first leg in the relay team of four. At the start I worked my way up into seventh place and simply tried to relax for the remainder of the loop. In the first shooting I missed one target, but managed to hit it with my first relay round. As I left the range I found myself in third position and tucked in behind second place for the second loop. In the standing shooting, I somehow managed to quickly hit all five targets without relay rounds and came out in second position, right behind the leader. Again, I simply tucked in behind the skier in front of me and followed him around the final loop. In the last 200 meters before the finishI put the hammer down and broke away! After two days of fairly disappointing races, I managed to put something together!

Leading the way to the first tag…

After the race was all said and done I turned out to have the fastest leg time of all the racers (including both juniors and senior competitors) ahead of Stian Eckhoff and Henrik L’Abbe’Lund, both senior national team members. My team from Hordaland ended up in 6th position. Even Raphael Poiree congratulated me on a good race, and I’m sure that is hard to come by!

Well, now it’s time to test myself again against the Norwegians, but this time it will be the whole crew including Ole Einar Bjørndalen, Emil Svendsen, and the rest… wish me luck

Talking with the coach after the race

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Norway, Racing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.