First Training Camps of the Year

It's been a super busy beginning of the training season and I have already gone on two different training camps! After my much needed time off traveling and relaxing I dove right back into training! It was a bit busy at first but nice to get back into a routine of training. Spring in Park City is quite fun for training as the snow stays up in the mountains for a while so we can continue to ski, which some of my teammates and I took advantage of. Down in town it warms up and the snow melts so we are able to start biking, roller skiing and running, essentially we have lots of options for workouts which makes it quite fun! 

Scouting peaks in the Wasatch

Our first training camp of the year was an endurance focused camp up in Oregon. We started the camp off in Bend, a town that we came to for the first time last year. The main reason we come to Bend is the fact that we can cross country ski on snow up at Mt. Bachelor. It is really beneficial to spend a good amount of time on snow to start the training season off, and Bend/Bachelor is the perfect place for that! On a typical day we would start early and ski in the morning before it got to hot, then go on a bike ride or go to the gym in the afternoon, it was a hard but fun week of training! My team and I also decided on some mandatory team bonding with a great deal of encouragement from Fast Big Dog (Jon Schafer). After a discussion during our first ski on snow Fast Big Dog made some calls and we were in the local hair saloon getting our hair dyed later that day. After some changes to the team this off-season it was a great way to start the year and establish ourselves. For the rest of the week we were known as Team Skittles and easily spotted ripping around the trails with our vibrant hair colors. After our week in Bend we traveled to Hood River, OR for the second half of our trip. Thanks to one of our team doctors (Jerod Cottrill) we had a place to stay and some local intel for some amazing mountain biking while we were in Hood River. It was another packed week of training, biking, and recovering! We also traveled to Portland, OR for a team fundraiser one of the evenings, it was a great event and super fun to spread the love of Nordic Combined to a different town and community! Overall we had a blast in Oregon and it was a very productive camp, below are some photos from the camp!

After our training camp up in Oregon it was back to Park City for a little while, which was a nice break from traveling. It was great weather in Park City making for some more fun training. We finished up a bigger endurance block and then spent some time in the gym with our coaches to work on our jump training! It was very productive and fun to start working on jump training again. Below is a short little video of a mountain bike ride that a few of us did during our time in Park City!

Our most recent camp was a new one for me, we traveled to Minnesota with the entire USA Nordic Team, that includes Nordic Combined Men and Women & Ski Jumping Men and Women from National team all the way down to our Junior team, we had almost 40 athletes in total! We started the camp in Minneapolis at the Mayo Clinic for several different types of testing including body scans, blood work, and field testing! We then traveled to Grand Rapids where we spent the rest of the week. We took our first jumps of the summer this week and I didn't quite realize how much I missed it until we started jumping again. Although it was a smaller hill, I had lots of fun as we were back jumping! We were also able to get some quality training on the cross country side of things and explore some new places, always making the hours go by much quicker! It was a great camp and super fun to spend time with the entire team!

Field Testing at the Mayo Clinic

Hanging on the lake!