Sochi: Day 3 - Skiing in the sub-tropics

On the agenda for today was race prep for tomorrow's 15 km classic race. It wasn't as sunny today but more muggy up at the ski site (there's a sentence you don't hear every day!). We don't think it dropped below zero overnight so the snow was very sugary and mushy. It flew everywhere as you went down the hills. So of course we had to use Klister (everyone's favourite glue-like grip wax), but at least it worked.

Tomorrow's race promises to be challenging but it will be that way for everyone. My guide Phil and I went around the course a few times testing wax and doing a few pick-ups and sprints in order to wake up our muscles. Mine felt a little sluggish from the long travel and the jetlag starting to kick in. We met Brian McKeever on one of the hills and I asked him for some advice for tomorrow's race. He gladly gave us a little lesson on how to take uphills conservatively on the first few laps in order to save some energy for the big push at the end, which was much appreciated.

This afternoon Phil and I went over our race plan in fine detail so we will be as ready for tomorrow as we can be. Our start time is at 1:22 p.m. and our category is pretty small unfortunately. But we will totally give it our best and stick to our race plan.

I just got back from a nice evening stroll with Joanne, the team massage therapist, and Colette, my roommate (and a para-nordic ski legend, might I add). It was 15 degrees out there! We cannot believe how nice it is, except for, well, it makes for some wonky ski conditions. On our return from our walk, we watched two guys trying to walk a really drunk guy back to his room (it is Friday night in Russia after all). It was hillarious. At one point, the guy keeled right over taking one of the support guys with him, who fell right on top of him. We really wished we had gotten it on video!

Anyway. here are a couple of pictures before I go to bed. Better make sure I'm well rested for my race tomorrow!

This was taken on the edge of the IPC stadium yesterday or, as Phil put it, "on the edge of paradise." Pretty amazing, eh?

And this is one of the buildings on the little strip that we are staying on. I've still got the touch with photos, don't I? :) 

Good night from Sochi.

Sochi: first impressions

So my last few posts were over a year ago again, but the last ski season wasn't really that exciting to write about anyway.

This year we've got excitement though! I'm currently in Sochi, Russia, getting ready for IPC World Cup races at the Paralympic Test Event.

We got to Sochi yesterday after a very tiring journey that lasted over 24 hours for me, 10 of which were spent at the Istanbul Airport - a very loud and busy place. After arriving here in the morning and catcing a few hours of sleep, we set out to explore our surroundings a bit. The hotel we're stying at is super modern and practically brand new I think. It's very nice. The area we are in is all just hotels on two sides of a pretty fast-flowing river.

Today we went up the mountain to check out the ski courses and conditions, and I have to say both are much better than I had expected. The courses are pretty mamageable I think with no crazy downhills or really steep climbs and the conditions today, although soft and sugary, were still nowhere near as bad as the last race in Minneapolis last year (which I neglected to write about). It was pretty warm down here and up top, but it was nice to enjoy the sun!

I will have to write more about my impressions tomorrow as I had better go to bed.

Good night from Sochi. 

Sprint races

As I mentioned in my previous post, today's races were sprints. the standing skiers' distance was 1 km. The way the sprints work is there is a qualifier in the morning: everyone races the course once individually with 30-second intervals. Then, depending on how many skiers are in the category, a certain number of skiers advances to quarter- or semi-finals. For example, the sitski men had 25 participants today, so the first 16 advanced to the quarter-finals. In my category, which tends to be quite small and is even more so here, we had only 7 participants so all 7 got to advance to semi-finals as long as we got World Cup points (within 130 per cent of the winner's time). I know this sounds a bit complicated but, hopefully, this gives you somewhat of an idea of how the sprints work.

I was last out in my category today and Laurent did his magic on the skis again, they were fast and had awesome grip, even though we had to use Klister (a really sticky liquid grip wax for icy conditions). The course itself was not too complicated, having only one big downhill with a corkscrew turn. I stumbled a bit on he second turn of the corkscrew but stayed up. So I got World Cup points and advanced to the semis.

My semi was at 1 p.m. and I had to warm up for it by running as there was absolutely nowhere to go skiing. I had one of the fastest and the slowest Russian girls in my semi and a German B1, who has become quite fast also. The B1 girl got a 29-second head start and the Russian B2 got a 4-second head start on me and the fast Russian. When it was finally my turn to start, I skied as fast as I could but I could not catch those girls. The weirdest thing happened during that race though. Just as we started the race, this crazy siren went off somewhere. It was super loud and it sounded like an air-raid siren from the old Russian war movies. it scared the heck out of me! I thought we were going to get bombed! It turns out it was a tornado warning siren. I guess it was some kind of test. But talk about ironic timing - it just had to be during the blind race!

Anyway, sprints are really not my thing, and I'm glad they're over. I got World Cup points, and that's good enough.

Tomorrow's race was supposed to be a 15 km but they had mercy on us and reduced it to 12 km for the women standing. They did this because the course is quite difficult: there's nowhere to catch your breath. It only goes up and down and really mostly just up. So it's a kind of course you really have to pace yourself on. In addition, when Brian and I skied it this afternoon, it was like skiing on brown sugar: the snow is sugary and really dirty! My start time tomorrow is 1:04, so it's going to be pretty horrible, and, if it's sunny, also hot. Good thing I just bought a new pair of skis for wet conditions. They're going to come in handy!

Well, that's it for today. One more race and we're home free!

Good night from Minneapolis.



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First day in Minneapolis

Today it became quite apparent how much we've been spoiled over the last week in Cable. For one thing, the food here is not nearly as varied or as plentiful as it was in Telemark. Much more importantly though, there is no snow at all in the town, and the race course looks like they usually do in Europe. The snow is brown in places and there's barely enough to cover the golf course we are skiing on. When we got to the race site this morning, tomorrow's course wasn't even marked. And by the time we left they were still trying to figure out whether we were going to be racing clockwise or counter-clockwise! But Brian and I skied the race course quite a few times, dodging sitskiers, who were skiing the other way, and tripping over Klister all the while. Good thing tomorrow's races are sprints and we're skating on Thursday!

So I start at 10:21 tomorrow for my qualifying race. There are only 7 girls in my category and we're not sure how many will advance. It will be either all of us and we will have semi-finals or only the first 4 and we'll just have finals. I'm inclined to think it will be all of us and I will get to do at least two races. We will see tomorrow though.

All right, I will now go to bed and dream fast dreams before tomorrow's fast race.

Good night from unseasonably warm Minnesota.

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Last two races in Wisconsin

So my last attempt at a blog post failed miserably due to some problem with the app I've been using to post to my blog. I hope the problem has been resolved and this post will go off without a hitch.

We are now in Minneapolis. We're staying at a pretty fancy Hilton hotel. We got here around supper time today and were disappointed right away by the lack of dessert in our supper menu. Apparently, the organizers had to make some budget cuts and dessert had to go. So a few of us took a little walk to the nearest Target store and picked up some cookies. You gotta have dessert after all those races! Other than the lack of dessert though, the food was very good and the hotel is super nice.

My race this morning was a 5 km skate, and I skied it with all my might. I thought it was a very good race overall: we went out appropriately fast on the first lap and kicked it into as high a gear as I could on the second. I had a bit of asthma on the last climb, but got it under control on the downhill and then raced to the finish as fast as I could. This was the first race that I couldn't stay standing at the finish - I fell to my knees after the finish line because I was so exhausted! I was still 6th, passing only one Russian, but I got World Cup points and feel that that was a solid race.

Yesterday I raced the 10 km biathlon, which did not go as well. My shooting started out well (I shot clean on the first lap) and then went downhill from there. I missed 2 on the second lap, 3 on the third and 4 on the fourth. Despite this horrible shooting, i felt that I skied the race well. Brian paced me properly over the 5 laps and there were no asthma attacks in sight. However, with all those penalty loops I had to do, there were no World Cup points either. I believe I wasn't able to shoot well anymore because my supporting arm and shoulder were getting really tired. I need to practise with a rifle in order to shoot consistently well. I found out that the rifles we were using belong to VANOC and will try to see about borrowing or renting one from them to practise with. After all, the short biathlon was by far my best race here so it might be a good idea to get more consistent at shooting.

We don't have a race tomorrow morning (thank God, I really need a break). So we will just be going out to look at the race venue and the courses for our two races here.

I had better go to bed. Good night from Minneapolis!

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Location:14th Ave S,Minneapolis,United States

Second race - 6 km biathlon

Yesterday was the first biathlon race of this competition. The women's vision impaired distance was 6 km: 3 2 km loops with 2 shooting.

I haven't done any biathlon or any shooting practice since the Paralympics in 2010, but I have been shooting really well since I have been here. I had decided to take back control for yesterday's race and so I went back to what I had learned about racing when I first started. I wrote up a race plan, I visualized the race course, i found keywords that would help me focus and feel positive. In other words, I was ready to race.

I did my warm-up and practised some shooting in the time allotted for VI skiers. I got to the start line feeling pumped. I went out on the course and felt so strong that I was pushing Brian on the first lap. We got to the shooting range and I shot clean. On the second lap there were some people passing us and I tried to keep up with them, which triggered a bit of asthma, but I got it back under control and kept going. On the downhill towards the shooting range I caught the track or some separating branches that were left on the course after the sitski race. And I went flying with my legs up in the air. I didn't get tangled up though, so I got up really quickly and kept going. I missed my first shot that time, but was able to refocus and hit the rest. We did one penalt loop and went out for our last lap. I was trying to stay with the German girl who passed me when I fell. It turned out to be a bad idea, as it was not a girl but a guy (which I couldn't see) and therefore much faster than me. This attempt to catch him triggered a full-on asthma attack and for a while I almost couldn't move at all. I couldn't breathe! Once we finally got to some downhill, the asthma let go a bit and I was able to finish the race more or less quickly.

But even with these adventures, I still did well in the race, even beating one Russian girl. So keeping yesterday's race in mind and making appropriate changes (longer warm-up, slower on the first lap), I am racing the 10 km biathlon today.

Well, gotta go get ready! Good morning from Cable!


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First race - 15 km classic

Yesterday was our first race. It was a long one and quite tough. We did 3 laps of 5 km each. In my category, there were only 5 people: 4 Russians and me. I wasn't feeling focused before the race, and so just basically went out and skied as apposed to really racing. My skis were also much slower than Brian's, so that didn't help on the downhills. Brian and I decided to take the first lap really easy in order to save up energy for the last two. The second lap was the hardest for me. By the third lap, I finally started racing as I could hear the last Russian girl coming up behind me the whole way and was trying to get away. Even though I did get away from her, she still beat me by something like 6 minutes, being a B1 (totally blind) and having a big time recalculation as a result. My final race time was 1:07, a whole 12 minutes behind first. I was really upset after the race, as I'm still not any closer to the Russians even though I feel that I'm in much better shape overall. I realize now that it was likely because my head wasn't in the game, and I wasn't ready mentally. So today I'm putting that race behind me and focusing on the races to come. After all, I tend to not do well in the first race anyway.

Today, we're practising shooting and skating tomorrow's race course. Tomorrow is the first biathlon race. It will be a short one: 6 km. I practised a little shooting yesterday afternoon, and it went reasonably well. I shot a lot of 4 out of 5's and even a few 5 out of 5's. Today we'll practise with a higher heart rate, which always makes staying on target more difficult, as you tend to move the rifle when your chest moves with heavy breathing.

Well, I'd better go get ready for my ski. Good morning from Wisconsin. It looks sunny and beautiful out. Who could stay in a bad mood on a day like today?


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Location:Telemark Rd,,United States