The final push of the season

The past few weeks I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do with my life. I have not been feeling very motivated to train hard and become a better athlete. This season has had lots of ups and downs with both training and racing. I have seen success with qualifying for the IBU Cup in January and having pretty good consistent shooting throughout the year. I contribute almost all of this to the hours I have put in over the years practicing shooting and training mentally to be disciplined and focused. My training has also been successful in ways. I have come back from being in the hospital and unable to sit up in bed to training at an internationally high level. 

I have been struggling this season with my motivation to train and my ski speed. In basically every race I have done I have felt like I have been stuck in 3rd gear and just don't have the ability to go hard and fast and really push it on the skis. This has forced me to question my motivation even more and has made training tough. Training and motivation are pretty closely linked, the more motivated you are the better you train, and as you train better and more you become a faster skier. 

This makes me ask myself what can I do to motivate myself to train more, better, and harder if I want to continue racing? I have also been asking myself is lack of motivation and therefor training entirely the problem with my lack of ski speed? Last spring in my crash I punctured my lung and even though it is now healed it is hard to say if it is or will ever be back to a race performance capacity. 

There is three weeks left in the season and the good news is that I found some, at least, short term motivation by going to Canada and watching three days of World Cup ski racing. Myself and three Craftsbury teammates went to Montreal and Quebec City to cheer on two of our other teammates who were racing. Our teammates racing were Kaitlynn Miller and Ida Sargent, we also enjoyed cheering on the rest of team USA. Overall it was a great event with plenty of excitement and it was tons of fun!

I now have 10 days of training in Craftsbury before I travel back to Quebec City for the Canadian Nationals and then finish the season with the US Nationals in Fort Kent, Maine. My plan is to train and race the best I can through US Nationals.  Then I will travel home to enjoy Spring, my favorite time of the year, and try to figure out what to do with my life and biathlon racing career. 

The Sun set view from our 14th story hotel room in Quebec City

We staked out a place right next to the wall around to city to watch, cheer, and grill for the Sprint day

GRP teammate Kaitlynn Miller racing the sprint qualifier 

One of the women's heats with GRP teammate Ida Sargent

Our spot for the skate pursuit race

Therese Johaug and Hedi Weng two of the best skiers in the world at the front of the race

The home crowd cheering on Canadian Alex Harvey and the Norwegian yellow bib holder Martin Sundby.

IBU Cups 4 & 5

I am have almost been in Europe for two weeks now and it has been quite an exciting trip so far. We arrived in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic 4 days before the first race just a couple days short of enough time to get adjusted to the time difference but I tired to make the most of it and forced my body at get adapted. This was going well until the night before the first race when I was awake all night with stomach pains feeling like I was going to puke. Despite feeling pretty terrible I decided to race because I figured that I didn't have a whole lot to loose if I placed badly and if nothing else racing while feeling like I was going to puke would just make to tougher. Not surprisingly the first race, a 10km sprint, didn't go that well. I felt pretty terrible skiing but my shooting was solid only 1 miss in prone and I cleaned my standing. The night after the race and the next morning I spent lots of time on the toilet. The next day I raced again and had an almost identical race, good shooting with only 1 miss but slow terrible feeling skiing.

After Nove Mesto we drove to Ridnaun, Italy for the second weekend of racing. It was a 10 hour drive and feeling totally sick didn't make it go by any faster. The first three days in Italy I felt sick to my stomach and spent almost all my time on the toilet. Finally the day before the first race I drove into town and got some stomach medicine which really helped a lot. With the stomach medicine fully kicked in I felt like I was pretty much able to race at 100% and placed 55th in the sprint race with clean shooting (no misses). My goal for the day was to place in the top 60 so that I would qualify for the next days pursuit race, I was really happy to have snuck in to that top 60.  For the pursuit race I was feeling much better and overall had a decent race that I was happy with. I moved up to 49th place with 3 misses. Two of my misses were my last two shots of the race, I was unable to keep my focus through the final shooting stage and did not execute the shots properly which caused the misses. Even though my skiing was not super fast it was consistent and good shooting in the first three stages made for a fun race. There was a pack of several guys that I was going back and forth with for the whole race which made the skiing quite fun.

Tomorrow is the final race in Italy which will be a mixed relay with two girls and two boys. Relays are always fun races and I am looking forward to it.

On the drive from Munich to Nove Mesto we ran out of gas but coasted to within 300 meters of the gas station. Through the windshield you can see Vlad (our coach) running back with a gas can.

Driving the drive from Nove Mesto to Ridnaun we had to go over the Brenner pass where it started snowing very hard. We were stopped on the road for about 45 minutes and had to put chains on our van to get over the pass. 

Wynn and I putting on the chains

Wynn in the wax room with all of our skis and the wax bench

The town of Ridnaun where the races are held is in the snow covered mountains in the distance.

After my accident I am into seeing if the venue has a good rescue sled set up, in Ridnaun they do!

The sunrising from the deck of our hotel room in Italy