Greetings from the North!

Hey! You guys are kicking butt! Congratulations on the great season so far and the newest addition to the team, the trailer! This is truly the end of an era, nationals won't be the same again!

So, I just realized a lot of people on the team don't know me anymore, but I am going to post anyway. Today I completed my first competitive 30k classic... and all I have to say is OUCH! hahaha. It was a beautiful race day, 25 degrees and sunny, we waxed with purple (I think?) klister, then 4 layers of extra blue and a bit of purple from the top of the kick zone to the just under the toe. Some people hate klister, but those who know me, know that klister is definitely my friend (I LOVE to stick!)...the race went well (under 2 hours!) and my wax actually was there the whole time, despite the presence of several hairpin corners, haha. I have started this year to choose the longer race option because something I never realized is that the older you get, the longer the race options are! The Anchorage race series offers a 15k skate, 30k classic, and a 30k skate! yikes! Making the transition from 5-15k races has not been easy, it pretty much translates into hours and hours on skis, and in AK that also means a ton of time in the dark! Moose have a tendency to blend in, that makes for interesting training! Enough about my boring racing and training though!

The biggest excitement around here lately is Holly Brooks making the Olympics! This is especially exciting since I am lucky enough to be a part of the circuits group that she and her husband run. Go OIA! I think Holly has a really interesting story, she was never an all star in college, she never made NCAA nationals, and here she is, 5 years later, going to the Olympics. Not only that, she is a coach who is beating her athletes! She has a blog that might be of interest to someone, it is cool to read about her reaction to racing in the world cup for the first time and her Olympic prep, check it out! www.hollyskis.blogspot.com....

I hope everyone is healthy (The Gangl can flare up at any time!) and keep rocking!

Getting it done in the classroom!

Not only do they ski fast - they are awesome in the classroom.

Here is the list of UW Nordic Athletes who have been named to honor rolls for the fall semester!

President's Honor Roll (gpa 4.0)

• Willie
• Sarah
• Kyle
• Marie
• Binny
• Kara
  

Vice President's Honor Roll (3.5)

• Jill

Dean's (gpa 3.4) and Freshman Honor Rolls (gpa 3.25)

• John
• Jacob
• Fitz
• Catherine

YOU ROCK OUR WORLD!

The Magazine of College SnowSports Rankings!

Check out the pre-season rankings for the CSS Magazine!

It seems that the UW Men's and Women's Teams are ranked well, we only hope we can live up to the hype!

http://www.collegesnowsports.com/csspoll.htm

Utah Invitational... Tough

We knew it was going to be a tough classic waxing when we read the forecast for 30's and tons of snow. Sounded like hairy's to us so we made sure we had all the right stuff and the few waxless skis that we had in the garage and headed out.

It turned out more interesting than we imagined. Hairy's we can handle but the wind was blowing so hard that we needed hairy's in one place, hard wax in another and klister in another, not the best fun for waxing. We thought we had it nailed right before the men's race when they re-groomed the course and our men went out first. The wax was rocking and we were stoked. Almost immediately after the start the wind came up and blew fresh snow into the tracks, then the sun came out, then it went away and the pellet snow started. The skis worked alright for about 3/4 of the first lap but then were really sticky. There was no "wax of the day" some teams had no kick, some had too much and some had both! We had too much, we looked like gods going up the hills but couldn't get going down the hills. Although the skis were not near as bad as poor Melissa had at Nationals in 2007!

Despite these rough skis the men did fine, not far off where they started in the classic race last year and Willie actually had his best classic % points ever so it was kinda a wash. The men who did well in the race were using "Zeros", skis specifically designed for temperatures right around zero degrees. This might be one of the first times we've actually been beaten by our club status, we just don't have 6 pairs of Zeros to throw on our athletes!

We did have enough waxless skis for all the women except Marie (she is just too light to kick any of the skis we had) so we put them all on completely new, too long, too stiff skis for their race. On the whole it went pretty well. Gwynn couldn't kick her's very well, Morgan crashed a bunch of times with the long skis and Marie was icing but we felt the damage had been minimized, at least they got around the course and weren't miserable!

Saturday had better potential, although there had been a ton of snow, the course was groomed perfectly and it was pretty cold. The women had a 15km mass start skate and despite their fear of being lapped, not completely unfounded since there were 2 US Olympic Team Women in the race, they did great! Gwynn and Gracey just kept pulling up and catching people, Marie held on amazingly well, Shanna finished her second 15km ever on the killer trails of Soldier Hollow and Morgan not only finished the race, she wasn't even in incredible pain! It was a solid showing for the first big race of the year.

The men didn't have it so easy. Fitz & Eliah didn't start due to illness. Less than 1 lap into the 4 lap/20km race Willie looked like he might keel over any minute so we pulled him out of the race. This left just Zhenya, John and Dan for our men. Zhenya and John spent 3 laps working together and picking off racers and Dan was struggling but hanging on, we had hopes of having a full men's team finish but it was not to be. At the end of the 3rd lap Zhenya stepped out of the race and left John to finish on his own. John did a great job catching a CU guy 30 seconds in front of him and finishing strong despite the tough trail and the mental hit when Zhenya quit. Dan also finished the race, looking tired but tough. Kinda a rough weekend when the team starts with 6 men and you can only get 2 to finish! Hopefully everyone will be well next weekend!

For the wax report. When we arrived for the women's race we realized that it was colder than predicted so we tested Fast Wax Tan and Fast Wax LF-Blue and the LF-Blue was running great so we put it on the front of their skis, they had Fast Wax LF-Red already on the skis. The women's skis seemed to be just fine and they skied really well.

We had the men wax one pair of skis with LF-Red and one pair with Swix HF-8 so they could find out which was faster on the day. They all test and chose different things. While standing up at the top of the hill, where the coaches were feeding, we rapidly discovered that it sure wasn't a wax race out there. Meaning that the wax seemed to make very little difference since teams that had men in the top 10 had on a wide range of wax from no-fluor to low-fluoro to high-fluoro to pure fluoro. The difference in the waxes was negligible, although the team with pure fluoro seemed to struggle a bit. The team that had the winning skier had on basically the exact low fluor wax that we had on one pair of skis and the team with 3 in the top 10 had on the same high-fluor wax that was on our second pair! It seemed to truly be across the board and not really matter in the long run!

It was a tough weekend of racing and we're extremely proud of the effort put out in tough conditions and tough races. We're now preparing for our first-ever trip to Grand Mesa for the Mesa State Invitational. Should be a blast!

Otepaa Video

Here is the link to watch the sprint final from Otepaa, Estonia. Zhenya's brother is bib 13.

We are talking double OG huge balla here.

enjoy

adam k

Skiers of the Week - USAFA Invitational!

Although it's been a few days since the first set of races it's still extremely important for us to recognize our athletes of the week!

This was a hard decision, first there was Zhenya, who dominated both races in grand style and Gwynn and Gracie, who traded the wins in the two days. There were also several other great finishes but in the end we had to look at athletes who seemed to have made a step up already!

Male skier of the week = Devin Oderwald
Be sure to turn your sound down, some crazy coach was a little excited!



Devin started last season struggling and worked hard but was never quite able to pull together a solid group of races. This season has already started out better. Two great races this past weekend, solid finishes, good technique, great attitude - it couldn't have been any better!

The reason that we have chosen Devin as our skier of the week is that the points for his first two races are already 11 points higher than his best 4 races last year! Wow! You can't ask for more than that, it means that he is already faster than he ever was last season! Great place to start! Now we just need to keep healthy and it should make for a stellar season!

Female skier of the week = Marie Cartwright
Once again that crazy coach was out of control!



We're not sure what to say about Marie. She had a fantastic season last year, placing 6th in the skate at USCSA Nationals and finishing 9th Overall! As a coach you hope that your athletes will continue to improve as they move through college but Marie is starting this season by blowing the lid off last season!

In just two races she has already taken 34 points off her 4 best races from last season! Seriously, that's crazy for an athletes that has shown for two years that she just gets faster as the season goes. Not only that but our killer skater is starting to look like she might do some damage in classic! Woo Hoo! It seems that she is trying to make up for Kari's graduation and so far she's doing great!

We wait in breathless anticipation to see where Marie goes this season, it looks like the sky's the limit!

New Years Camp!

Wow! We're not even 24 hours into the New Years Camp and it's been amazing!

Due to illness we only had three athletes come up on New Years Eve, we're expecting more in the coming days but for now this is what we have!

They arrived late afternoon and we all went out to the premier Mexican Food Restaurant in Leadville, Casa Blanca. After a wonderful meal we then went for the most amazing moonlight ski I have ever done. First it was on the Blue Moon on New Years Eve but mostly it was just truly beautiful with the mountains across the valley and the incredible moon shadows. We were planning for 30ish minutes and went for 1.5hours! What a great way to celebrate the new year!

We woke up this morning and found the first stage of the Tour de Ski streaming live and watched that while we ate breakfast. Go Majdic and Northug!

After breakfast we did a great classic hill climb time-trial. It was a wonderful course and everyone had a fantastic time. We videoed in 3 places, for technique work, so we'll have those up on our YouTube Channel soon, youtube.com/uwski . We're now getting ready for lunch, video analysis and some afternoon yoga and swimming. We may go out for another ski this evening, just to take advantage of the amazing moon!

Come on up and join us!

Long time- no write!

It's been a long time since anyone has updated the blog so I'm going to do a quick overview of December and what's coming up!

Early in December we hosted the Laramie High School race and it was a huge success, see blog post below.

After that we were all hit with taking and grading finals, not good but normal!

The week of finals we had our second Wednesday Night Race, 5km classic. The UW and the LHS coaches will be running a Wednesday Night Race Series to help raise money for a new timing system, our old one is still working but is no longer being developed and we feel there is a limited time that it will continue working. If you'd like to donate to the cause email uwski@yahoo.com! The results can be found at: http://mbna.pbworks.com/Results_Classic_12_16

After that everyone went home and started doing some good training, we hope!

Last weekend Zheyna, Fitz, Kyle and Sara did the New Year's Relay in Steamboat and despite Fitz not feeling well they all did great!

We are now getting ready for the New Years Camp in Leadville. The snow isn't as good as Laramie but there is some in the forecast and the Mineral Belt Trail is really great! We're planning lots of technique, some speed and a lot of fun!

After that we'll head back to Laramie to prepare for the beginning of the semester and then for the Air Force Invitational, the first USCSA National Qualifier, at Snow Mountain Ranch and Devil's Thumb Ranch.

Good fun for all!

High School Races!

UW Nordic hosted the Laramie High School Nordic races this weekend and it was great!

We want to thank all the volunteers, UW ski team members, parents, coaches and athletes for a great time!

Results can be found at: http://www.uwyo.edu/ski/highschool/results.htm

We also took a bunch of videos so if you were racing check these out!
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F678E30BC2D4FED7

Thanksgiving Ski Camp

The team just got back from a darn good training camp in Granby. We left Wyoming for Granby wednesday afternoon and got there in time for a nice ski at Snow Mountain Ranch (SMR). Then we convoyed up to our digs for the rest of the week...SICK! Christi and Rachel did a great job of finding some ritzy places, hot tubs and everything. More on the hut tubs later. Thanksgiving morning we had a nice, long ski. Bluebird skies and good snow. That evening we gathered for Thanksgiving feast, and boy was it a good one. Food galore! Smoked turkeys, potatoes, yams, stuffing, green beans, pies...the list goes on and on. Needless to say we didn't have to cook any food Friday night. Friday night also was a hot tub night. The coaches took a dip in their tub prior to dinner and just after food was all taken care off starting feeling pretty goofy. Awful...unfortunately they ended their camp to come home and dominate the illness. As for the rest of us kids, we kept on trucking. Saturday we did some technique work and a few took part in a time trial. DU skiers there thought we were crazy for going down the huge icy hill, but we're from Wyoming and thats how we roll. Saturday night was a little last night of camp hoo rah with some time skiing at Sol Vista in the dark and before they were open. Not the best skiing but fun none the less. The skiing was followed by ice cream and the OC, every teenage girl's dream.

As for my self I spent the better part of November skiing without poles due to a fractured thumb. Yeah, just can't take care of myself. Good news is that its healing and I got a smaller splint that allows my thumb to fit in my gloves, so now I can finally do some real skiing

Well Happy Jack is looking stellar see you out there!

Adam K

P.S. I beat Marie in the last 5@5, she had poles and I didn't, that'll teach her to talk smack!

Hats are here!

Our team hats are in!

They can be purchased for $15 for ski team athletes and $18 for others.

Races!

So I completely dropped the ball on updating the blog on the races this week. I guess it's better to be late than never!

5@5
Wednesday was the first 5@5 of the season and it was great!

We had a great turn-out for this early in the season, 23 people! Only 21 show up on the results because our Law Student and Laramie native, lead some of our Freshmen astray and they got lost. A couple finished the race anyway but two didn't really make it back.

Other than that the field was pretty strong lead by Zhenya, Levin and John followed closely by Sarah. It wasn't a very cold night so good fun was had by all!
Results: http://mbna.pbworks.com/Results-5%405

Classic Sprint
We had a slightly smaller turnout on Sunday for the classic sprints with 18 but it was still a great field! A few people showed up with skate gear and we let everyone race!

It was a great time with 3 full rounds of racing and some interesting finishes.

The conditions were amazing and we'd like to thank our friendly grooming crew of Luke and Randy for putting tracks in just for our little race!

Results: http://mbna.pbworks.com/Results%3A-Classic-Sprint

You can see video of the sprint race on our YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/uwski

This week we're off to Snow Mountain Ranch for our annual Thanksgiving Camp. They don't currently have as much snow as we have in Laramie but with any luck they'll get some more as the week progresses.

First race Wednesday!

Due to the amazing snow we received, which supplemented the snow we already had, we will be having our first race this Wednesday night at 5:00pm.

We have done these in the past but haven't had enough snow for the last few years. It's a 5km freestyle race in the dark and it's a great time!

It's an open/free race for anyone who wants to race but you need to pre-register by emailing christib@rocketmail.com

Don't forget your headlamp!

http://mbna.pbworks.com/5%405

UW Nordic In the News!

Just a quick note on recent UW Nordic Articles:

The Top Prof awards featured our own Coach, Rachel Watson for the 4th time!
UW Senior Honor Society Names Top Professors for 2009

One of the Branding Iron, school newspaper, sports editors chose UW Nordic's double national championship as his favorite sport memory. The Branding Iron’s favorite sports memories

Not bad considering we haven't even started racing this year yet!

Winter is coming, we think!

Wow! What a fantastic Volume week we had!

We knew at the beginning of the week that the massive snowfall we had wasn't going to last the season. No we wouldn't be skiing daily straight through but we also had hopes that we could do an on-snow volume camp last week. That may have sounded crazy when looking at the forecast of 60+ all week but Happy Jack is a magical place and for some unknown reason manages to hold snow amazingly well.

We started the week with a 1:30 LSD skate/technique workout on Monday. Strength & Yoga on Tuesday, 1:30LSD Classic on Wednesday, strength and Yoga again on Thursday, 1:30LSD skate on Friday and a 2:15LSD skate on Sunday!

All of this was done on groomed trails and most of our top athletes did way more skiing than that. We believe Fitz has the record for the week with 15 hours of skiing! Sunday was a little sketchy getting up to the good skiing and some people chose to run but once you were through the meadow the skiing was actually fantastic and it was fairly easy to get in the 2:15. It technically should have been a longer workout but with the great volume we did all week it wasn't necessary.

This week is recovery and despite the fact that we can probably still ski in areas we will be taking a break and doing just a few light workouts. If things pan out for the week as we hope we may be skiing for practice at Happy Jack again on Sunday. If not then we'll probably head up to Snowy Range and beat around a little. It appears that there is quite a bit of snow up there. We're just spoiled because we've been skiing 10min from town and Snowy Range is 30!

I took some video on Sunday that I'll be posting to the YouTube Channel, when I can remember to do it!

Fall is almost over, keep doing that snow dance!

Skiing!

Wow! What a great weekend!


After all the snow during the week the road finally opened on Saturday morning (yes that was Halloween!) and we were skiing that afternoon on groomed trails!

Since it was Halloween and our first ski at Happy Jack we had a hunt for the 3 Great Pumpkins that were hidden on the trails. Once they were found each team member had to "brand" themselves and receive the "sign of the spider".

Once they got branded and spider marked from all three Great Pumpkins they raced back to the meeting place and had to do a trick for their treats. You can see most of the tricks at http://www.youtube.com/uwski There were 6 groups and you'll notice that you only see 5 tricks. One group had a questionable trick, questionable because it didn't take any skill, but it was also definitely not PG enough to post online!

There is probably 1 foot of packed snow on most of the trails and all the trails were groomed but the forecast for this week will be less than favorable for keeping the snow (temperatures in the 50's). With that in mind we are going to take advantage of this week to have an early season, on-snow, volume camp. We believe we'll be able to ski up at Happy Jack through Sunday, even with the warm temperatures predicted, so we will be skiing every day, except for Tuesday & Thursday. After that we'll hope for more favorable temperatures to hold the snow we have and maybe even add a little!

Not a bad season so far by the beginning of November some of us will have already skied 7 times!

It doesn't get any better than that!

Yoga & Meditation

As I was reviewing the recent blog posts on my Google Reader I came across and article about meditation by Patrick Stinson (http://fasterskier.com/2009/10/meditation-as-a-recovery-tool/). This article reminded me that one of the most ignored and important part of training, behind but closely related to recovery, is the mental game.

The mental game is interesting because some people believe that it's you really need, "If you want it bad enough!" and it is important but it has to be accompanied with the physical game. I believe that when two similarly trained and talented athletes compete it will often come down to who is mentally tougher but that the real 'Mental Game' happens every day.

Every single day an athlete makes choices that will ultimately help her/him become successful or lead to their ultimate downfall. For most athletes it is relatively easy to tough out a workout, push through the end of a race, or do that last rep in strength. It is not easy to then lie down, go to bed early, eat the right stuff AND give your brain a break. Small choices snowball into huge avalanches when the season starts and it is the athletes that, because I'm also in Wyoming, just "git er done!" every day, all year long, that will ultimately see the success for which they strive.

This is one of the things I like about Patrick's blog post, he is acknowledging the importance of dealing with your mind to increase your ability to recover. Being mentally able to deal with the everyday trauma of training is extremely important but in many ways dealing with the everyday stresses of life is more difficult and finding the balance between the two is the most difficult.

Patrick gave us one example of mental work that athletes can do. Our team started doing yoga last fall for the same reason. The mental part of yoga is extremely important but it also has the advantage of increasing flexibility, balance, strength and provides a great opportunity for active recovery. It's a win-win!

Whichever method you choose, it is important for you to consider the mental part of your training. In the long run what separates the dogs from the pups is not the ability to train hard on the interval days but the ability to recover from those days, make good choices and keep mentally focused.

Christi

It's a good day in Laramie!

From the Eurochopper!

Dear all,

As some of you might know (many of you don't) I am currently on a research visit to the TU Delft in the Netherlands. I will be working here until Christmas which I will spend in Austria. I am still not done with my PhD but really not too far away from finishing anymore (most likely sometimes in summer). Below you'll find a brief summary of my experiences so far...

The traveling was pretty smooth (thanks to my ride Kristyn to Denver, and my hosts Andy&Laura in Denver) since the predicted snowstorm was a little bit late. My last minute packing method worked perfect as usual but my brain did not after a nice meal at the Cafe Berlin and so I managed to forget my Laptop + some paperwork in Kristyn's car. The problem was solved the next day by arranging for a shipment of the documents to the Netherlands (thank you Rene!). Getting to Delft after arriving in Amsterdam was a piece of cake and so was checking in to my new room. I am sharing kitchen and bath with my new roommate Mehmet from Iran. He does not talk very much and I really hope he is not here to get is pilot license...
On my way from the apartment to my new office (which is only 10min by foot) I realized a few interesting things:
1) I must have really adapted to the nice, cold and dry Wyoming climate over the past 4 years, beacause the 15C rainy weather with a humidity of close to 90% was killing me!
2) I already missed mountains!
3) I am not used to people anymore: everybody looked very important and busy here, how annoying!
4) Similarly to the states not many people walk here but that's because everybody rides a bike. I almost got myself killed several times! The way traffic works here: bikes first, then cars at the end of the chain is the pedestrian
5) There is a lot of water here!

After getting a desk in a really nice student office (!) I met my new Prof. Dirk Roekaerts. He seems to be very much like Dr. Heinz described him to me: very smart, very nice with gray hair and sometimes a bit lost in thought (isn't that how a Prof. should be?). We went straight to talking business which was not a good idea since I was pretty incoherent after not sleeping much for 48 hours...Anyways, I think he did forgive me for that and we had a much more fruitful discussion the next day and by now we have already a pretty good idea of what we want to work on (a flame of course!).

Over the last days I met most of the PhD students and a few undergrads. A nice international mix of people! Also, half of them do experiments which already resulted in some interesting discussions about, guess what, flames. Next week I am invited to watch one of the students fire up a burner and take some measurements in the flame. Besides my immediate colleges in the thermo-fluids group I am surrounded by labs in which people research pretty cool things like quantuum tunneling and so forth (my office is in the physics building). Overall, an intellectually very stimulating environment!

The food in the Mensa is pretty good and decently priced. In the evenings I have different cheeses and sausages with pretty good bread everyday. In terms of food it already feels close to home. Though there is one striking difference to home (and to Laramie): the people here are all so tall! Every other guy and every third girl are taller than me (nothing for you Rene!). Must be from the cheese...

After I got rid of a cold which I caught on the plane (of course...) I went on my first run yesterday. Going for a run is always a good way to check out new places. To avoid getting lost (which I usally do) I decided to run along the main canal which runs through Delft. Running at sea level (or even below) is quite an experience after living on top of a mountain for the last 4 years. I started with a nice slow zone 1 pace but my heart rate did not really go up. After a few minutes I increased the pace to what would be a fast zone 2 pace in Laramie. My heart rate was still in low zone 1. I felt like supermen! Along the canal there are very pretty old brick stone buildings all of which are renovated nicely. Living in Laramie, I almost forgot how nice houses can be! Besides the old houses there were more things that really made me feel that I am in an old European University town.
I must have came across at least a dozen rowing boats. To my surprise (and pleasure) most of the boats were filled with pretty hot girls (thats what paradise must be). Seeing these girls I was thinking to myself that I better should have learned rowing instead of spending all my time playing tennis in St. Gilgen. I don't know if the girls were the reason for my heart rate to catch up with the pace I was running but it eventually did. I guess some things don't change: you cant turn a donkey into a race horse, not even at sea level.

It's Friday evening and I pretty much wrote what I have to tell so far. I will go for another run now and perhaps I am able to find out where the rowing girls hang out later on. I will grab a bite to eat and have myself some of the Dutch brews!


Cheers and Goedenavond,
Mike

Nutrition talk!!

In case you missed the nutrition talk on Friday afternoon or just want to review something the videos have been uploaded on the uwski YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/uwski

There are four parts uploaded on YouTube but here's the first section.