Gearing up: U26 Championships edition

Last week I met up with the my teammates who will be joining me for the U26 World Championships, they are Wynn Roberts, Jackob Ellingson, Brian Halligian, Paul Everett, Kelsey Dickinson, and Anna Kubek, other then Wynn they are all juniors.  After greeting them at the Munich airport we traveled to Ruhpolding, Germany where we trained for a 5 days and raced in the British Biathlon Championships, it was very slow conditions but made for a good training race. We then drove through a snow storm for 6 hours to get to Nove Mesto na Morave, Czech Republic. I have been here twice before, once in 2011 for the Junior World Championships and once in 2012 for a training camp between the U26 championships and Junior Worlds. Im not exactly sure what it is but I really like coming to Nove Mesto, it is one of my favorite places in Europe, so I am glad to be back.

The skiing is rather limited here with only 2.5km of skiing, for the races we are going to do double ski loops in between shooting. Skiing around the first day there were lots of little rocks in the snow followed by strips of p-tex ski base, hopefully I can get through without my skis getting to beat up.

My first race is Thursday January, 30th it is a 20km individual the sprint and pursuit follow on Saturday and Sunday. Live results and possibly even streaming video can be found on biathlonworld.com the race starts at 1:30 pm CET which is 4:30am Pacific and 7:30am Eastern. I am expecting all of my family and friends on the west coast to get up bright and early so that they can watch the race.

Lanny Barnes in a live interview with CNN after being named to the Olympic team

Hotel Romantika nice rooms good food and sporting both the CZE and US flags

More pictures coming so check back soon!!

Italy

It has been a while since my last blog post and so I am sure that all of my one or maybe even two readers are waiting anxiously. After racing in Minnesota I went back to Maine for Christmas. My mom/Methow Valley Biathlon coach came out to world junior trials a few days early so that she could spend Christmas with me, it was very nice to see her. I was able to watch the first two races of world junior trials for the first time which was quite fun, it is much less stressful when you aren't racing. It was also pretty awesome to see so many of my teammates qualify for world juniors. Paul Everett and Kelsey Dickinson from Methow Valley Biathlon and Maddie Phaneuf, Mikaela Paluszek, Brian Halligan, and Kamran Husain from Maine Winter Sports.

On the day of the last race of world junior trials I left for Italy, it was an uneventful easy trip. Adjusting to the time difference meant about three days of feeling kind of gross but by the time the first race came I was feeling good and ready to go. Overall the races went really well, despite not qualifying for the Olympics feel like I gained lots of valuable experience.

Some highlights of the two weeks were shooting clean in the final sprint race, the first time I have done that in an International competition. Also, probably more significant, I shaved my beard that I had been working very hard on growing for over two months but with fear of looking to clean I left the mustache.

For the upcoming month I have lots of racing to look forward to which I am very excited about! On the 21^st I will be meeting up with some fellow Americans to go to Ruhpolding, Germany to race the British Championships then to Nove Mesto, Czech Republic to race the Open European Championships. After that I will be meeting up with a different crew of Americans to go to Slovenia to race in and Alpen cup race and then to Austria to race the Austrian nationals. Then finally mid February I will return to Maine.  

For the mid week party/tour of the Ridnaun mine we all got torches to carry around.

If only I had my alpine ski...

Some nice fresh powder on a classic ski