October-December recap

October

In October, I flew out to Canmore, host of the earliest on snow skiing of the season in all of North America. Piles of snow are saved every year after the ski season and are then rolled out into a 2km loop called Frozen thunder. I was there for a training camp with the rest of the junior national team and the senior national development team. Thanks to the woman’s comity, we stayed in the beautiful Paintbox lodge (owned by Olympian Sara Renner and her husband) in downtown Canmore. The week was filled with many activities including cooking with the cook that will be going with the Canadian team to Sochi, a talk with the national team’s sport psychologist, a rollerski treadmill test with a physiologist and not to mention a very inspirational talk with one of my idols Clara Hughes.

Group picture of the woman's camp. (I am on the bottom left)

December

At the top top of silver star mountain with the team

First stop was Silver Star in British Columbia. This year was my 4^th consecutive year going out to Silver Star. Before leaving, the snow conditions at home were decent, but we had only been skiing for about 5 days so we decided to take advantage of the on-snow skiing and focus on training instead of the races.  The only downside of this trip was the extreme cold. It was about -20 every day. The race on Saturday almost got cancelled but after being delayed a couple of hours, the race was on. I was really satisfied with my first weekend of racing with two podium finishes, first in the 10km skate and 3^rd in the classic sprint.

Podium for the classic sprint

After Silver Star I was off to Rossland while the rest of my team headed home. I stayed with the Alberta world cup academy for the week. In Rossland it was warm, humid and very hilly, a combination that makes it difficult for wax technicians.  We raced on a mix of klister and hard wax which resulted in many face plants.  Although I managed to stay on my feet, I was a bit disappointed with my result (5th Junior) but was glad to take away gold in the skate sprint.

Good news! After those two weekends of racing out west I earned the pre-qualifying spot for world juniors in Italy!!