how's it possible that time off from work can be this hectic?

I've been on the go since I landed in Rochester last Wednesday night. It's all been good stuff, but a lot of driving and a relatively strict agenda. Had an awesome ski at Harriet Spencer today, and tomorrow should be even better as we're expecting some more snow tonight. Looking forward to the rest of the week!

Race #3

Today was our last race out here in Minnesota, shooting didn't improve much (5 penalties), but I was definitely skiing faster, and am looking forward to some xc races coming up back in NY. I think my rifle and I need a little time apart! I feel good about where my fitness level is and I think this week will really pay dividends come January.

Overall, these races were a great experience. We were able to ski and shoot every day for a week and compete in three races against the best competition in the US. There's no better measuring stick. I've always told the baseball players I've coached that they should seize every opportunity to play with and against players that are better than they are, and that being a big fish in a small pond won't make them any better. So, I guess I took my own advice, some of the guys out here are skiing on a different planet, shooting well, and shooting fast...

I'll try to write-up a list of takeaways from the week at some point. Fly home tomorrow. Here's a picture of Jason slapping some travel wax onto our skis for the trip home. Please note the use of the hotel dresser - these are the little bootleg waxing tips you learn when you hang out with HFL nordic alumni...hopefully no one from the Comfort Inn stumbles across this blog!

Off day

Today was an "official training" day here in Minnesota. Other than not racing, everything else was exactly the same as any other day we've been here. We got up, ate breakfast, loaded up the car, went to Mt. Itasca, warm-up, zero, skied/shot, cooldown, waxed skis, coffee, back to hotel. I could get used to this! I shot much better in training, which was encouraging. Tomorrow, we have another Sprint format race, then drive down to Minneapolis, and fly home Wednesday.

The good news is that it's not quite time to go back to the real world for me. I'm working a half-day Christmas Eve, then my company shuts down for the rest of the year. Other than checking e-mail a couple times a day, it should be a very relaxing week back home in Rochester with plenty of skiing and probably a few beers with family and some old friends!

Final note of the day - While the athletes not currently on the World Cup team are all here in Minnesota competing for a crack at that team, the December World Cup races finished up yesterday with a historic day for a US biathlete. Tim Burke took over the World Cup yellow jersey yesterday, worn by the overall world cup leader, which makes him the #1 biathlete in the world (this is the first time a North American has ever had that honor). There was a banquet here in MN last night for everyone competing in the trials, and the race director gave a very nice speech mentioning how huge of an accomplishment this is for Tim, and the progress that US Biathlon has made to get to this point. To top that off, he'll wear that yellow jersey at the next world cup in Oberhof, Germany, which is basically the Yankee Stadium of biathlon, there will be over a hundred thousand beer-slugging, biathlon-crazy Germans there watching an American race as the best biathlete in the world.

Race #2 - skiing better, shooting not so much

Today was a pursuit format race. Once again, my shooting was subpar. Today I felt better skiing, especially as the race went on. I'm not sure what's going on with my shooting, especially prone, the shots feel pretty good, the targets just aren't going down. If I were to guess, I would say that trying to keep up with the world class skiers that are out here is putting me a little closer to the red zone than I can reasonably recover from and I'm not relaxed enough when shooting. Or maybe I'm thinking too much, ironic that a former catcher who spent the better part of his baseball career telling idiot pitchers to stop thinking and just pitch, would suggest that, but it's a significant possibility. Either that, or I'm just not shooting straight (one of those things).

Oh yeah, and both Jason and I skied an extra penalty loop today. I remember thinking that I may have done that on my last shooting stage. I just started cranking out laps and trying to figure out how I missed so many, and wasn't sure if I'd done 2 or 3, apparently it was 3, instead I skied an extra just for good measure, so that didn't help at all. In total I skied about 2km more than the race winner today (who had 1 penalty).

Tomorrow is an off day with an official training session in the morning, then the final race is Tuesday. Hopefully I can hit some targets and put a good race together before flying home on Wednesday.

On a different note, our RNR teammates back in upstate NY had a really good weekend. Yesterday was the Osceola Christmas race (or the "pie" race) - Chad won the open division for the third year in a row and Frenchy won his class as well, both took home pies and pottery. Today, apparently Frenchy beat everyone in all classes for the overall win in a sprint biathlon race (also in Osceola), so it looks as though he's carried some of that triathlon fitness over to the winter despite disappearing from weekend training sessions for the entire fall. He must have been doing some stealth training!

Race #1 - there's always tomorrow...

So, our first race out in Minnesota could have gone better. I didn't shoot well, and felt a little out of whack skiing, although I felt relatively good aerobically. The course here is never flat and has a lot of turns and transitions, where you can really lose a lot of time if you don't ski those efficiently. Today, I did not ski these sections well at all, probably a combination of it being the first race of the season and having only skied the course a couple times the day before. Everyone other than Jason and I have been here for the last 10 days and could probably ski this blindfolded by now. I also had another racer step on my pole from behind during a steep uphill and somehow I spun around backwards and ended up sliding part of the way back down the hill, so that cost me some time...but, like we used to say in baseball, the good part about a bad day is that you get to show up tomorrow and give it another go. That's not always the case in biathlon, but it is in this case as we race again tomorrow morning, pursuit format (4 shooting stages), so shooting better will be critical tomorrow.

Here are a few pictures from the youth mens race (17-18 years old), who raced after us.

Grand Rapids, MN

Yesterday was a 15 hour journey to get from Rochester to Grand Rapids, Minnesota. I left my house at 430am. As soon as we got to the airport, we were informed that our flight was cancelled and we were rebooked on a flight that didn't leave Rochester until 7pm, getting to Minneapolis at 11pm, which would have gotten us into Grand Rapids around 230am. After some minor begging and pleading, they found a different route for us through Hartford, CT. We ended up landing in Minneapolis around 2pm (as opposed to our planned arrival of 11am), so not too bad. We then got all of our luggage and loaded up the rental car for the drive up to Grand Rapids. About 30 miles outside of GR, I got pulled over for speeding. Thankfully, the Minnesota State Trooper took mercy on us and let me off with a written warning. Following that, we were back on our way and got to the hotel around 630pm local time. Remarkably, everything made it out in one piece, and the only thing we missed out on was getting on snow yesterday.

We were able to get in a light run around town last night. The town of GR reminds me of Watertown, NY. Apparently the Mississippi River cuts right through town as well. It didn't look quite as mighty as I'd imagined, so it must be a tributary or something. Either that or Mark Twain was full of cr*p!

Today was "official training", which is basically an opportunity to ski and shoot on the range. We skied the course a few times, did some shooting and tried to work some of the kinks out from the long travel day yesterday. The course is a roller coaster - lots of short ups and downs and hardly any flat sections. The manmade snow on the course is in very good shape, and should be fun to race on. It's also warmed up to the mid-teens (they had highs in the low single digits earlier in the week), so the next few days should be ideal for racing.

Tomorrow, the races kick off with a 10km sprint. The only remaining logistical item that Jason and I have to figure out is the USBA "same wax" protocol. Which is a new on on me at a ski race, but it's supposed to make things easier on the athletes. I think that also assumes that athletes have coaches at these trials to pay attention to stuff like this though, which we do not. So, that might be an adventure.

Don't sleep on Byrncliff

Typically the first day on snow in western new york is on rock skis, skiing on thin-at-best snow. We drove out to Byrncliff today, which is a golf course about an hour west of Rochester. Byrncliff seems to always be forgotten among Rochester nordic folks (I even received an e-mail late Friday night that people were going to drive to Tug Hill in the middle of a blizzard, instead of the easy 1 hr drive to Byrncliff). However, they have a piston pully groomer, which knocked down the foot of lake effect snow they've gotten over the past two days. Conditions were awesome, 27F, sun and no wind, absolutely awesome day! The trails were in pretty good shape and they had almost all of their trail system groomed. Jason, Chad, Frenchy and I were out there at 845am (first cars in the parking lot). We skate skied for about an hour and forty minutes, then chad and frenchy had to leave, but jason and I got in another hour and twenty minutes classic skiing. I'm not much of a classic skier (though trying to improve), but anytime you can unequivocally guarantee that swix extra blue will be the kick wax of the day without even bringing a backup wax from the car, is definitely a good day to get some classic work in. By the time we left, the parking lot was full, and we saw a wide range of skiers out there enjoying the day.

Tomorrow we're headed back there for more of the same. Then, Jason and I have to pack up a whole bunch of stuff and get ready to join a whole mess of other US biathletes out in Minnesota for what should be a super-competitive series of races.

Creative workouts

The roads are currently too messy to roller ski (due to a nice mixture of rain, ice, snow, sleet, and a whole lot of wind) and there still isn't enough snow to ski. However, my gym has a machine that simulates running up stairs. Not exactly the same as hill bounding or as specific as roller skiing, but you play the cards your dealt. Today, I was able to do 6 x 3 minute intervals with the machine totally max-ed out, all on my lunch break. I was pretty cooked at the end. Incidentally, the rest of my department went to Sticky Lips BBQ for lunch (right next door to my gym).

Now I'm planning to do a couple light workouts the rest of the week and hopefully ski this weekend - it sounds like there's some sort of gnarly winter storm coming our way over the next few days, which might also produce some lake effect snow. With any luck, the roller skis might go away for good!

Andy's back!

The upcoming week is our annual mid-year sales conference. It's one of two times a year that all of our sales folks (who live all over the world) are in Rochester. It's a great chance for me to catch up with the sales people I work with on a daily basis but don't get a lot of face to face time with. The headline this year is that our direct account manager (Andrzej "Andy" Mazur) for Poland was able to make the trip. Andy's a retired Lt. Colonel from the Polish Air Force. He and I have developed a great relationship over the last few years and has really taught me a lot about the Polish culture and has given me insight into how to build solid business relationships in Central and Eastern Europe.

19 months ago I was in Warsaw for work. Andy picked me up on a Monday morning to go to a meeting and (as I understood later) Andy was suffering the beginning stages of a stroke throughout the morning. Andy's English has always been a little rough around the edges, but this particular day, he wasn't speaking at all and as we were driving from the meeting back to the Warsaw office he kept pointing at his throat. Being naive and unaware of what the warning signs of a stroke were (a mistake I will never make again), I figured he had laryngitis or had simply drank too much vodka over the weekend, I was wrong. When we got back to the office, I asked our engineer in Poland (Sylwek) to speak with him in Polish, and Sylwek immediately realized that Andy wasn't processing anything and something was wrong. To make matters worse, Andy (being a proud and stubborn dude) would get frustrated and go out an smoke cigarettes during this whole ordeal. Sylwek and I finally convinced Andy to go to the doctor and it turned out he suffered a stroke. After some really tough therapy he is almost 100% recovered. After 12 months he was back working and he was just recently cleared to travel, so he's in Rochester for the meeting.

I could care less if he ever sells a radio in Poland again, it's great to have my friend rocking and rolling! One of the blessings in disguise was that throughout the recovery process, Andy had to re-learn almost everything - one of the things he didn't relearn was how to smoke. Even though he couldn't partake, we did a "crazy dog" (shot of vodka with raspberry syrup and Tabasco, which layers like the Polish Flag) to celebrate his recovery this afternoon!

Andy's the one on the right below (Sylwek's on the left).

Apparently I did something terrible to Mother Nature in a previous lifetime

It took until my junior year of playing college baseball in the Northeast in snow, sleet and rain, before I finally realized that it doesn't do any good to worry about what mother nature's going to throw your way. It's much better just to adapt to whatever the weather is and move on. We still don't have any snow here, but today we made the best of it. Chad, Jason and I hammered out a time trial on roller skis this morning. It was good to get a full-gas 25 minute effort in some cold temps (I've been hacking up a lung all afternoon, but that's what I usually do driving home from the first race of the season, so that's out of my system now!). We did 1.5 laps of the GVCC Rush road course, which is one of the hillier bike courses we do during the Thursday night GVCC race series in the summer. It has two gradual climbs and one steep climb - I felt pretty good on the uphills, but didn't feel superfast on the flats and gradual downhills, overall though, it was tough and exactly what I needed, too bad it wasn't on snow, but still a good day. I think all three of us were pretty happy with the workout as a whole, and hopefully all three of us are getting faster!