In the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed some long ski trips in the mountains surrounding Lillehammer and my sunburned face is proof of it! You can find some pictures of these ski trip in my photo album. In other words the skiing isn’t quite finished yet in the Lillehammer region of Norway, but longer and longer drives are needed to find snow. Officially, the Norwegian season isn’t over until the end of April, but for some teams (including the US biathlon team) “the season is in motion again.”

Perfect crust skiing conditions

One of the last hurrahs of the Norwegians season took place yesterday with over 14,000 skiers participating in Skarverennet, which is a 38km freestyle race that starts in Finse and finishes in Ustaoset. The race is the final race on the ski calendar and is also one of the biggest races in the world. Many of Norway’s top athletes take part in the race including Petter Northug, Ole Einar Bjørndalen, and even the speed skater Håvard Bøkko. Click here to find the results from the race.  Unfortunately, I was too late to register for the race and thus couldn’t participate, but it is something I hope to be part of in the future.

Since my last post, I’ve also been working on a new training log for biathletes and is accessible to anyone.  The log is in Microsoft Excel and is based on the training log used by the Norwegian biathlon association. The log is geared towards biathletes, but can be used by cross-country skiers. If your interested, the log is free to download from the US biathlon website.

Last Saturday I participated in a 3×5km relay race with members of Team Statkraft Lillehammer. The race was kind of a spur of the moment decision and turned out to be great fun. The weather was about 45 degrees F and sunny, which made it a bit interesting for our first leg classic skier. I was the third leg and was a bit surprised to get tagged off to in third, but I managed to hold my own and gave my team a top three finish!

Teammate Magnus Hals and Henrik L’Abeé-Lund

In other news my results from this past season in Norway and at the IBU Cups have been good enough to make the national B team in biathlon. This is a step forward and should give me some great training opportunities for this coming season.

It’s hard to believe that I only have a little over a month left here in skier’s paradise, but in the time I have left I will participate in two more races on skis. One is a triathlon that is similar to the Pepsi Challenge in Minnesota and includes 12km of classic skiing, 30km of mountain biking, and 10km of running. The second race is a duathlon that includes a road bike hill climb followed by a skate ski of roughly 10km. Should make the month of May interesting!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2009 at 10:56 am and is filed under Norway, Transitions. 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.