For those of us racing domestically or internationally Christmas time offers up a great little break after the start of the season.   And although my season has infact hardly started I was grateful for the opportunity to catch my breath.  Mostly I needed some time to quite my mind.  To relax.  To gather and then quickly dismiss my thoughts.  And it was pretty perfect.

Its a rare thing to have the Malcolm Siblings all in the same place, and having all three of us home was both exciting and maybe overwhelming for our parents.  But its been alot of fun.  I haven’t seen any of them for more than 7months.  And although living far from my family is no new gig for me its always a little hard (that never really goes away).

Another great thing about being home is getting to ski with all my old team mates.  These girls are pretty awesome.  And although we all were in different grades going through school it dawned on me this morning how much our lives over lapped.  Soccer, Logrolling, Figure skating, Music, Running, and finally… (magically?) we all settled on skiing.  We are all, in our ways, clawing tooth and nail to scrap our ways onto the international circuits in cross country skiing and/or biathlon.  Our high school coach much just be ecstatic right?  I’ll answer this one for him. Yes. obviously.

We’ve been training altogether the past week here in Hayward (our old stomping grounds, the town’s darlings who could do no wrong).  And even though we are working with a meager 3 inches of snow here in the northland the trail coverage is impressive.  The trail still needs to fill in and level out a bit, but aside from that its some grade A rock skiing.  The groomers are working it!

The sun joined us for a wonderful ski on Christmas eve as we covered the freshly groomed Birkie trail.  Goodness I’m spoiled.

(L to R: Coach Pierce, Erica, Jenny, Me, Molly, Elizabeth, Emily, Jon, Mrs. Pierce)