After a rather long weekend, I'm finally back home digging into a big bowl of pasta, watching the ladies alpine world cup in Aspen on the tube, and throwing some scribbles on the blog.
The skiing was good in Hochfilzen this weekend, so it seemed. Spent this weekend off the boards, trying to shake off the remains of a chest and head cold combined with the resurgence of wisdom tooth misery. I'm not really pumped about looking into tooth removal here, but we'll see. At least this must mean that I'm becoming quite sage.
Today was a rough one for Jay, Lowell, Timmy and Jeremy on the tracks, after a tough round of first leg shooting (2 prone, 3 standing penalties...) left Team America behind the Chinese. Nonetheless, all the boys threw it all on the line on a super snowy ultra slog 7,5k track.
Kudos to Timmy for putting it all in today, his description of constant fatigue reminded me of my troubles from last season. Whereas I think that my strife with illness, erratic training and academic stress were mostly to blame, it sounds like Tim has to do some real work over the Christmas holiday to diagnose his fatigue. Cross country is just really hard on the body, physically and mentally. Dealing with a motor that just won't turn over is one of the toughest things to deal with as an athlete; it stresses the importance of simply listening to your body and knowing limits.
Anyhow, check out Tim's blog for an uncontaminated report straight from His Dudeness: http://timburke.us/
Here are some pretty bad pics from the race. It was snowing harder than I've ever seen with flakes as big as a US quarter, so no Vordenberg quality images this time. I did, however, learn some pretty cool stuff from this event:
- Ole Einar Bjørndalen is my height (179cm) and weighs 147 pounds. He is tiny. Size doesn't mean speed in this sport.
- I was expecting to see a V2 out of him that slightly resembled the Undertaker's powerslam on repeat. Instead I saw the lightest, most conservative V2 I'd ever seen. No wasted power, no extra torso heaving, only an almost ballet-like V2 that ground up the steepest hills on the course.
- He lives on the border of Austria/Italy, in South Tirol.
- These boys know how to make it hurt.
Der König des Biathlons. All 147 pounds of him.
Halvard Hanevold. Big dude, getting into a seriously low V1.
Weak photo of a strong Timmy Burke, churning up the toughest climb of the course.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyXPp1P8rBYKeep up the strong work.
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1 comment:
gotta love jay hakkinen looking at timmy all confused from the sidelines.
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