Yesterday’s relay was a bit of a a mixed bag of nuts.  Some really good things happened and some things just didn’t really workout.  The tracks were super fast since the weather man was very very wrong and not a single snowflake fell yesterday at all.  Actually there wasn’t even a cloud in the sky!

By the time the junior’s mixed relay started the entire course was in the shade and the track was glazed and slick.  Not super ideal conditions for me but you have to make do with what you have I suppose.  Our skis were fantastic and the wind stayed down so there wouldn’t be any tricky changes and decisions to make on the range!

Grace led off as our scrambling leg.  Someday I’ll get to scramble, but until then I’ll let other people deal with the crazy elbow rubbing, jostling madness, cluster mush of leading off.  Grace with a few spares got out of the range with no penalties and tagged off to me.  We were off the back by a little bit but I tried to chase hard once I settled myself down into the rhythm of skiing.  I came into shoot prone and cleaned!  With no spare rounds, that was a pretty incredible feeling.  The second lap was a little tricky because I like racing and chasing down people…but I’ve been shooting standing rather poorly and we decided it would be a good idea to ski the second loop threshold to try to get out of the range with no penalties.

I slowed way up and felt that I was under control when I came into shoot standing.  I took my time, I gathered myself… and things just didn’t work out again…  Targets didn’t go down.  I was high.  even with spare rounds I garnered three penalties in standing!  UGH!  I was pissed when I left the range…which worked out alright since Vlad told me however much I slowed down in my second loop I should take back in the final loop.

I skied my penalties, screamed at a Belrussian coach for being in the center of the trail (still not sure what the dude was thinking on that one), and took off onto course.  I had let two teams pass me with my errors in shooting and I was going to do whatever I could to get them back.  I suffered out there on course and came into to the tag zone with one of the two teams a little down on the other.  It wasn’t pretty, it was far from perfect, I had the nastiest bit of slobber hanging off my face but I was done….I had done my job to the best of my ability for that given day and it was up to the boys now.

Our tag went unhindered, I tagged off to ethan…he’s 6’5…lets just say it would be a hard tag to mess up.  I quite literally just sort of ran into him?

Ethan had a great day on the range, cleaning with no spares and thus earning one of the best range and shooting times of the day!  Pretty spectacular!  He tagged off to raleigh.  Raleigh had a hiccup in prone which left us with another three penalties, but he charged back out onto to course to try and spare us from being lapped by the incredible russian team!  Although our team was not physically lapped because Raleigh didn’t make it through the second range check point before the russian anchor finished we were pulled… So it wasn’t a perfect day for team US…  but all in all we all learned something from the race, good or bad, and left the day with a little more experience than we had before.

So ideally…if I shoot more than 40% standing ever again this season things will be looking up?

Its sunny and snowing here now and two days of racing are still ahead of us!  We race the sprint here tomorrow afternoon and then a pursuit on Sunday before heading off to munich to fly back state side.  I’ll let you know how the race goes tomorrow, stay tuned!!