Goodbye Canadian Rockies…. hello northern Wisconsin!

After a long day of travel yesterday and giving delta all of my foreseeable food money I finally made it home.  Phew.  I was greeted by snow on the ground but with another day of warmer weather skiing is looking grim.  …However, I’ve got my fingers crossed that the cold will miss us and come back and hopefully even bring more snow with it. (a girls got to dream right?)

The last few days we spent in Canmore were incredible.  The frigid arctic temperatures were finally pushed out of the valley.  It was such a relief to be able to glide again!  Heck, better yet I could feel all my fingers and toes!

A huge kudos goes out to the trail crew at the canmore nordic center, they were out there nonstop trying to give us more and more trail to train on each day!

On friday we joined up with a good mix of the canadian biathletes for a little joint time trial.  It was conducted like a normal race, zero times, bibs, penalty loops, the works.  It was great!  I was the very last women to head out on course for the sprint which was cool because I never get to go last… and we all know how I love getting to play chase!  I had my best shooting race to date, cleaning my prone stage!  I’ve never cleaned a stage in a race before so I was practically euphoric.  Skiing past our coach who was monitoring the penalty loop I let out a squeal and gave him a big frantic thumbs up.  I think he was pretty jazzed/amazed to see me not skiing into the penalty loop for once!  Standing was a little trickier.  I’ve been struggling more than usual with shooting standing.   Something about doing it on slippery skis has definitely been a challenge over the last few weeks.  I ended up missing three but I skied my penalty loops and tried to get back out on course fast.  All and all I was pretty happy.  My skiing still has a ways to go and I know I still haven’t found my race gear yet but its there and is only a matter of time before I can really use it.

Saturday morning treated us to one of our best skis in Canmore.  The sun was shining, the nordies were time trialing, it was a balmy 15 degrees, and best yet they opened up the cross country trails!  You honestly couldn’t ask for much more.   Because I don’t have a skiable range at home I made sure to get everything I could out of our last day in Canmore.  and it was excellent.

I was sad to leave Canmore but I know coming home as we move into the next phase of the year is important.  Its execution time.  We’ve done all the hard work, we’ve put in the days and the hours and now all we can do is perform.  We’ve got a long season in front of us, but I can’t wait to really get started!