Speeds

We did some skate speeds down by the Kincaid Chalet on Friday. After I had finished my speeds I was skiing back down the road. Bart Dengel still had a couple speeds to go and as I was starting my cool-down he took off V2-ing in front of me. Now Bart was really hammering these 30sec speeds and as I watched him an entire scene recreated itself around him-- snow, pin-flags outlining finishing lanes, phantom competitors (two on his left, one on his right), a finish line just over the crest of the hill.

It was only the access road to Kincaid, but he was skiing with such a purpose it was no stretch of the imagination for me to put him into a race. Now THAT is cool, that is how you should train. To really train for ski racing is to be able to hear the cheering of spectators during your intervals, it's being able to feel the elastic of your bib across your ribcage. To really be able to train is to feel like everyone is watching your splits on the big screen even is you're the only one who will look down at the time on your wrist watch at the end.

There should be such a purpose that your teammates can recreate a race around you as you train.

IAAF World Champs

Two of my In The Arena teammates competed at the Track & Field World Championships in Berlin this week. I am so proud of both of them!

Mike Hazle threw the javelin 78.17m.

Zoila Gomez ran the marathon in 2:42:49.

Click on either of their names to read about their experiences at the World Championships!

Eagle Glacier August 10-16

I had my final glacier camp of the summer this week. I'll let the photos do the talking. Don't forget you can click on each photo to enlarge it!
coach-athlete meetings on the glacier.


Stretching party.


sling load
Mark Iverson
Becca Rorabaugh
Kate Fitzgerald

Rollerskiing and Realskiing

We had our first rollerski race on Saturday. Even though it was super low key I realized that it had been forever since I'd put on a race bib. All this training sometimes gets in the way of racing! I set a PR by three seconds. Which is a very small PR, but still my fastest time over this course so far! I would also like to point out that there were more girls racing than boys. I'm liking the gender equality that I'm seeing these days in skiing.

The type of rollerski is listed along with the results because rollerskis can have drastically different speeds depending on the bearings and the wheels.




Sunday we head into the glacier for another week. Hopefully we have some snow.

This photo is shot from down glacier. The facility sits on the ridge in the middle-left of the photo and the ski trails we use go from there off to the right. We stay high up on the glacier because once you get closer to the foreground the slope gets much steeper and the cravasses get much more intense. The ash has made for some unique melting this summer and you can very clearly see how variable the weather is up there. The patches of white snow are where there's been snowfall recently. When we're out skiing we can go from sunshine to snowstorm or white-out as we move around the course.

Kincaid Adventure Camp

Since school was out for the summer, I helped out with the Kincaid Adventure Camp down at Kincaid park. It's a camp for local youth with three different week-long sessions, each focusing on a different zone of the outdoors. One week focused on terrestrial life, the second on things that fly, and the final week on aquatic life. The really cool thing about these camps was that the main focus was outdoor recreation so our goal was to be active while exploring the outdoor world.

On one of the days we were paddling the kids were super jazzed up to get out into the lake. We had to go over all of the water safety and how to paddle talks first.






The kids were psyched to finally get into the water, practice their canoeing strokes, and explore the riparian zone from the water side.


After they got comfortable with the canoes, we let them "upgrade" to kayaks.

It was super fun to get involved with another activity during summer break, hanging out with kids is a refreshing way to see the world!