Training Log Archive: biggins

Pictures!
- dodgy train ride
- morning jogeroo
- event center
- ski-o training trails 1 and 2 and 3

All of them here.

C • thanks for the pics! 2

Success! We made it. Got our flight to Oskemon (dodged a few overweight baggage charges), got all our stuff, and found the organizer and a few translators. Its been snowing though, so the road up to Ridder was closed, so the bus ride up there got axed. We went out for a quick drive around the city to see some traffic and snow, and then had mayonaise pizza, then got to the train station for a hot sleepy four hour train ride up to Ridder instead. Had some dinner, found our rooms, found the single shared shower for the entire 200 room dorm building, and then insta-crashed for the night.

This morning we got the tour of the wax rooms and stadium, hit breakfast, and went out for a team joggeroo back down the access road. No skiing here, since this is all the competition terrain, but this afternoon we'll get a ride over to the training areas in the next village where some of the other teams are staying. That'll be a pain for the next two days of training, but I think it'll be much better to deal with that now, and then have all the races be right out our door rather than the other way around.

Ski-o! Went up to the training map to play, which is in Sinegorye, right where a bunch of the other teams are staying. The snow was solid and warm and greasy fast, just like home, and thus awesome. We picked up some blank maps, but no one had any pens, so we just went out to ski around. I decided to play the trail-score-o game, to try to ski every single trail segment on the map, ideally in the most efficient way possible. Also known as the omg-ze-brain-she-hurts game. There's a whole lot more to keep track of than normal score-o, and also you have to not die while ski-o-ing into trees. I was doing really well at first, then got all sorts of confused in the middle when I started looping back towards some trails I had hit earlier and couldn't remember which ones I'd done already. So I doubled up a bunch of them in a not-perfectly efficient way, and then quickroute says I missed a tiny little short one in the middle. Though I doubled up the segment just north of it, so I think I intended to hit it I was just a bit lost at the time. Oops.

C • 1 meter contours? 2

Had some time left and it was all awesome out so I skied around for a bit finding all the black things on the map, and then wandering a bit.

In KAZ, almost there, after a pleasant 40 hours or so of airplanes so far. Five of us (all but Anna) met up in Amsterdam and then had a flight here to Almaty, which got in at 2:30am. Hence the team USA pile (there's more, but I'm too lazy to get up for a better view). We're chilling until noon for our last flight to Oskemon, then a bus up to Ridder.

C • Good news 4

Back home late after a few airport delays. Didn't really matter since the plan for the next two days is to stay up as late as possible to try to adjust as many time zones west as I can before I leave. I made it to 2am here last night, though thats really 4am central time where I was all weekend, which I suppose is a good start.

Went for an easy ski around the valley, not really trying and yet almost as fast as the race saturday. Sigh. Good thing I'm only here for two days otherwise I'd start to remember how nice this stuff is. Or maybe its just the altitude, the thin air probably has less air resistance on the downhills.

C • time zones west 3

Playing ski-o around the north end trails. Nothing was groomed, so I just skied around for a while taking the least difficult routes to some random controls.