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Back to the land of the Midnight Sun!

By July 17, 2013 No Comments

Well, here we go again…the annual moose count is on (I’m at 6, but one might have actually been a bear). Oh, and I guess we’re training pretty hard too! I’m back up in Anchorage for our women’s NAWTA camp – North American Woman’s Training Alliance. We started the NAWTA thing a couple years ago when we began training a lot with the Canadian National team. Now we’ve expanded and started training camps with people from many other countries – Sweden and Finland last summer, and now Norway! Astrid Jacobsen, a super good skier on the Norwegian National Team, came to train with us for our glacier camp and it’s been so much fun getting to know her and training with her. I think we have a lot to learn from each other, so it’s great to share training ideas and interval sessions.

The group!

The group!

We’ve had some great interval sessions – for proof, check out this video/article: http://fasterskier.com/article/wednesday-workout-nawtas-pace-development-threshold-intervals/

Team dinner

Team dinner

As usual, we also had some fabulous Alaskan salmon and moose burgers. YUM!

I made Kikkan pose with her poster :)

I made Kikkan pose with her poster 🙂

I’m staying at the ski house of APU – Rosie, Sadie, Erik and Kinsey live here. I totally love how they’ve decked out the house with ski posters from all over the US and Europe!

The ski wall

Part of the ski wall

The only sad thing about glacier camp is every time I come up here, I am reminded again how the glaciers won’t be here much longer. Not much longer at all! Check out this photo I took in the airport of a glacier exhibit showing how much has melted. For more info on how to help stop climate change, check out http://350.org/. Their mission is to build awareness and help combat global climate change.

Receding glacier in Alaska

Receding glacier in Alaska

A couple weeks ago, I was on a fun run with the two Annies of SMS (Hart and Pokorny) and we were doing “psych analysis”. And Annie Hart asked us if we either liked to win, or hated to lose. I blurted out “I like to TRAIN”! I don’t get motivated by the idea of competing against others nearly as much as I like beating myself – my past time trial times, my weights in strength a week ago, my technique from a day ago. So whenever coaches tell me “try to beat so-and-so”, or “try to drop so-and-so”…that does nothing for me. Nothing. What I love is the feeling of getting stronger and better than past versions of myself. I like being able to win every day – because if your definition of winning is going out to train with a focused goal and meeting that goal, then you’re on the right track.

This summer I’m so happy with how training has been going. I think I’ve trained well in the past but usually trained a little too much without enough rest, or trained without enough focus, or without enough strength or technique. But this year a few more of those little pieces are falling into place, and I’m excited with the results. I’m feeling stronger, healthier and happier while getting better results in my testing and time trials, and I think a ton of this has to do with just being happy with my job, my teammates and coaches.

Hopefully this awesome summer of training just keeps rolling! Starting with the rest of this dryland week, and then a week of skiing up on Eagle Glacier, which I’m so excited about!

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