France: Day 3 - Shaking it up

Today is Day 3 of our stay in Bessans. It is usually the hardest day at altitude. Most of us are feeling a bit better today, however, despite still having trouble sleeping at night. This morning, France had one of its Nationals races. It was a biathlon, and Alex took part in it. The rest of us just took the opportunity to practise shooting, since all of the Eko rifles had been set up for the race.


In the afternoon, I skied with Harris and did a few short classic intervals to get my muscles to remember speed. I thought it would be really hard, but it was actually just the ticket. I felt so much better afterwards, like I’d finally woken up from a coma or something. I think my body needed a bit of a shake-up. If I’m still feeling alright tomorrow, I will do a few short skate intervals as our first race is a biathlon, and skating is the only technique used in those.

When Harris and I came back to our wax room, Courtney and Andrea were just finishing up waxing their skis, and Andrea was heading out for a ski. Once she left, the three of us started thinking about how we should organize our skis to make it easy for the wax techs to find the ones we wanted for our races and to reclaim some working space in our tiny wax hut. We didn’t have much to work with in terms of tools, but thanks to Courtney’s brilliant organizational ideas and our splendid team work, our wax room now looks like this:

Rather than this

Oh yeah, Jamie and Alexei later showed up and helped too. :)

Alright, I've got to go: there is a line up to use my computer for Skype, so good night from Bessans.