Casey Smith Biathlete: 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.