Today is my last day in Utah for a while… Tomorrow extremely early in the morning I am flying to Minnesota and will spend the night at my mom’s house. Then I will get up bright and early the next day to catch a flight out to New York for the training camp at the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center. Its a 2 week long camp and skiers from all across the country will be there. The training is going to be hard, but thats how we are going to get faster!

After a couple workouts on the double pole machine, my leg has been feeling much better. It just needed a few days to heal up, and now its doing great!
It has been absolutely beautiful here the last several days… warm, sunny, the trees are starting to change colors… so on Friday morning when I woke up, I decided to go for a nice easy hour and a half mountain bike ride. I started biking down the trail that connects me to some nice easy trails I have biked several times before, but a side trail caught my eye. I felt like a little exploring would be fun, so I took it. It was a beautiful trail that lead me to another trail, that lead me to a loop that I have run before. So my plan was to bike the loop and then go back home the way I came. It was going to be a perfect hour and a half ride… BUT I did the loop and I missed the trail that I had come in on, so I turned around and headed back. This time being extra alert for the trail that had gotten me there. It must be some crazy disappering super secret trail or something because I could not find it at all! But I did find another trail that headed in the same direction as my mystery trail, so I figured I could just take that one. So I took that trail down. It was a super fun trail, all downhill with some nice switchbacks, and it popped me out onto a road. Sweet! Now all I had to do was follow the road down the mountain to my apartment! I biked in the direction of home, and thought I was in for a nice coast down the mountain for the rest of my ride. But I was wrong. I could see where I wanted to be… WAY down the mountain, and I was climbing again, and then a switchback later heading in the wrong direction. So I climbed for a while, passed some workers in someones yard, and then I started heading back down the mountain… then back up and past the workers again, and again! Since I was obviously going in circles, I stopped to ask the workers that I passed several times for directions OFF the top of the mountain. They were very nice and told me how to get home. It involved me going down the mountain on the opposite side that I wanted to be on, but at least it would get me into town and I could find my way back home from there! So by the time I biked back to my place I had been out for over 3 hours and 10 minutes. NICE.

Sometimes you have great days. Sometimes you have days that could have been better. And then there are those days where you wonder what you did to piss off your guardian angel. Today was one of those days…

It started with a early morning trip down to the hospital in Salt Lake City with Liz Stevens to get our blood drawn (to make sure our iron stores are high going into the racing season). And for those of you who don’t know, I have a major phobia about getting my blood drawn. I have trouble sleeping the night before a blood test, and then at the hospital I shake and cry when its my turn to give up the goods. I am suprised I didn’t break Liz’s hand as she was holding mine, because I could hear the nurse saying she was having trouble sucking the life out of my body. So after that stressful start to the morning we ate our breakfast in the car while driving back up the mountain to Park City to meet up with coach Pat, Noah Hoffman, and Evelyn Dong for a sprinting workout.
So once we got up there we headed out on our rollerski to do some sprints on a nice road that doesn’t have much traffic on it… only to be stopped by a security guard telling us it was a private road and we had to get off immediately. So we turned around and rollerskied over to a different neighborhood, and after half an hour we found a side road that would work well for our sprints. I was ready to get right into the sprinting, so I stepped up to the imaginary start line and had Noah start me. Ready, Set, Go! And I made about 3 quick strides before my quad felt like it had been struck by lightning. My coach said it was like watching a big track meet, when you see a sprinter explode out of the blocks and then immediatley grab their leg in pain and grimace in pain as they limp off the track.
My coach drove me to the US Ski Team’s Center of Excellence and I had the Physical Therapist check out my leg. I pulled my quad, and I am not supposed to use my legs for a few days to make sure it heals quickly. The good news is that its not a terrible pull. I didn’t lose any strength or mobility in the muscle, it just hurts. So for the next few days I will be using the double pole machine (maybe I’ll get to do some workouts with Morgan Smyth, who is recovering from her compartment syndrome surgery and has been the double pole machine master the last several weeks). I will also be doing some quality resting, icing, and compressing!!!

If you are looking for a good time, and you happen to be in Park City… take a trip down the alpine coaster! My dad was in town last week for buisness, and we took a ride down the alpine coaster. Its a combination of an alpine slide and a roller coaster, and it was a blast!

The Whistler Training camp is now over, and it finished up just as great as it started. We finished our stay in Whister with a 10 kilometer time trial up the access road to the Olympic Park. It was definatley a hard workout to wrap up a hard training camp!

Then we headed to Tofino, on Vancouver Island to do some more training and enjoy the beach. The 3 hour run we did while we were there was absolutely amazing! We started off running through the rainforest (passing warning signs about the cougars in the area), then we ran along a beach for a while, went back into the rainforest and ran on a 2 mile long boardwalk, then finished up running on the beach for the last hour!

After a hard rollerski interval session… I thought I was going to puke, but I just had some serious dry heaves. Now THATS a hard workout!

We have been in Whistler for a week now, and its flown by!
On Monday we did an extremely hard rollerski sprint race around the Olympic course. Between the rounds I closed my eyes and pictured snow, packed stadiums, racers from all over the world, and I could feel the Olympic fever burning inside me! Then I opened my eyes, lined up on the start line and hammered around the course with a world champion (Kikkan Randall), awesome teammate Liz Stevens, and an impressive junior skier Sadie Bjornson.

This morning we faced the rain and turned up the intensity with about 45 minutes of 30 second sprints followed by a couple longer threshold intervals. I’m feeling pretty tough now!!! This afternoon we will be heading over to the gym to do some strength training!