The Circle Game

Well, another season has come around and the biathlon racing season has already begun and I am also one year older!  EEK!!  I'm not sure how it happened so fast...

I've been trying to write a blog post for the last 3 weeks, but since I hadn't written one in so long, I felt like it needed to be a big catch-up, life-update, meaningful, important blog post and that seemed very daunting, so I kept putting it off, which meant that then I kept accumulating more different things to talk about and so then it kept getting more daunting.  It was starting to snowball out of control and I almost decided to never write a blog post again!

Haha, just kidding. But it did seem daunting.   But then I started drawing some cartoons.  Some of them came out really negative.  But...whatever...here they are anyways, in roughly the order that I made them.  

First I started out with a little update about how my summer training went:

yeah...so that was pretty negative.  But to be honest, it did feel like sort of a rough summer of training.  There were a lot of good parts, but also a lot of injuries and problems.  So my confidence was not at its highest coming into the season.  But at the same time, the injuries helped me work on some weaknesses of mine, like no-pole skiing and standing shooting.  I felt like it was still a solid summer of training.  Then we flew to Sjusjoen Norway for our preseason training camp, and I got sick as soon as I got there.  But then I got better, and got to go on a realllly nice ski on a sunny day after a snowstorm:  

After Sjusjøen, we went to Östersund, Sweden for the first world cups.   In Östersund it was quite dark but there were lots of pretty sunsets and its fun to ski under the bright lights:

Next I wrote a few cartoons about life back on the road in Europe:  

And then we raced, and I didn't want to write a blog post because I didn't want to make it too negative:

But a few days of perspective, talking to my coaches, and looking ahead put me in a better place.  (And a little change of scenery and food never hurt either):

And that brings you, via cartoons, to the present!  I'm in Austria now for the Hochfilzen world cup.   There's not really snow here but it is sunny and beautiful and it was nice to go for a little hike this morning.   I had some bad races in Östersund, but when I look back, I have bad races every year at this time.  Every year its tough mentally, but after more racing I get faster and remember how to race again and because of that it gets more and more fun.  So that is what I'll do this year too!  After all, biathlon is just a funny game of skiing around loops and shooting at circles in cool places all over Europe.  

Cheesy Cornbread

I made some cornbread today to go with my leftover chili.  It was so pretty, I had to paint it.

Oh yeah, just so you know mom...I stole a few dish towels when I moved in here.  Thanks!!

Feeling like Fall

In the last two weeks, the weather here in Lake Placid took a sudden turn towards fall.  Cold nights, crisp days.  At first I resisted it, and wanted more summer.  But then I gave in and now I'm happily enjoying the sights, smells, and habits of fall.  I'm still holding out on turning on the heat in my apartment and so I am bundled up pretty much all the time, whether I'm inside or outside.  I've been drinking lots of tea, and making soup and applesauce.

But the leaves are only just now beginning to catch up with the chilly weather and turn red.  I was impatient to make a fall painting, so I got a photo from a bike ride we went on last fall from my teammate Annelies.  So no, the leaves aren't this bright quite yet.  But they're on their way now!

a happy painting

I did quite a bit of painting in Finland, but in the end I didn't quite paint every day.  Sometimes you just can't force it, I guess.  But I did break through that initial inertia that makes it so hard to start painting at least!  This is a painting I did just for myself--something to make me happy.

Nils flying a kite. 

I also did a few little paintings from Finland.  Nothing special, but I figure I should post them anyways.  I have to get over the fact that I won't be happy with every painting I make, and thats totally fine!

The abstract one was inspired by the colors of smushed blueberries.  And I was experimenting with using salt with very watery paint to make some interesting textures. 

Other types of art, and a challenge!

Well, I've been bad about painting for quite a while.  I'm not sure why--I always love it when I get in to it.  But sometimes its just hard to start.  BUT, I have been doing other creative projects.  And I've also set a new challenge for myself.  I just arrived last night in Joensuu, Finland for a three-week training camp (one of those weeks will be in Sweden), and I've decided that I have to paint at least a little bit every single day I'm here.  It shouldn't be too hard...it's light for so long, I could paint outside right now as I write this at 10:30 pm!!

SO, keep a lookout for my painting challenge posts.  I'm doing 4 small paintings on one page, so I think I might just post every 4 days, but I haven't decided yet.  I did my first one today, but I think I'll make you all wait.

But here are a few of my latest creative projects from back home in Lake Placid!

Nope, this isn't a post-modern sculpture.  Its the pile of junk dorm furniture that all of the wood for my next projects came from.  The "free wood" Craigslist listing turned out to be a jackpot!  I even got three fully functional chairs for my deck.

My favorite projects:  funky fabric shoulder bag, sitting on top of the coffee table.

The coffee table was made out of old pieces of a bunk bed frame and a broken piece of granite countertop that an old tenant left behind our house.  Another jackpot!!

I made a bedside table too.  Not the most beautiful, but it works, and its way better than the milk crates that I had stacked up before!

My "garden" is also in a bunch of drawers from the junk wood pile.  This is from a little while ago.  The plants are bigger now and I've even been able to harvest some beans and spinach! The zukes are coming along too, just in time for me to be gone for 3 weeks. 

Season wrap-up in drawings, pictures and paintings.

I somehow managed to not take any pictures in Kantiolahti, Finland, where we had the second-to-last world cup, and where I had my best sprint race of the season, scored my first world cup points, and qualified for my first pursuit!  I guess maybe it was because Finland was the least photogenic of the places I've been this year.  It had some stiff competition though--I've gotten to go to some incredibly beautiful places.  But it was a great weekend of racing, and I had a lot of fun racing in my first World Cup pursuit, even though I didn't shoot that well in it.  After such a low point as far as racing was concerned in Pokljuka, Kontiolahti was sudden upturn!  But then I once again struggled with the shooting in the Oslo sprint, didn't qualify for the pursuit, and my spirits plummeted once again. Biathlon is always testing my ability to deal with ups and downs.  Maybe I'll write more of a real wrap-up later when I'm less jet-lagged, but for now I mostly want to post some more pictures and paintings.  Here they are!

Looking out over Oslo from Holmenkollen

Hotel Rica, where all of the teams stayed together for the final World Cup. 

This is one thing I will NOT miss about living on the road for 5 months--hand-washing laundry in the bath tub and then trying to ring it out as much as possible and then it still ends up dripping all over the bathroom.  But somehow it always dries faster than I think it will. 

Going for a ski on the Holmenkollen trails. 

Norwegian fans lining the course. 

My teammate Sara is retiring now, and Oslo was her last World Cup. We had fun cheering together during the mass start races on Sunday.  Congrats on being done, Sara...but we'll miss you!!

Our shooting coach Armin is also leaving our team, so I made him a painting of Antholz, which is where he's from. 

One of our wax techs, Mattias, is also leaving (so many people leaving, its sad!).   Mattias is a great wax tech and also a lot of fun to be around.  So of course I had to make him a painting too!

And then I flew home!!  I'd been scheming and looking forward to my first breakfast at home for a long time...gluten-free crepes!  With lots of homemade maple syrup, of course.   Yum!  

Don't worry, I still paint

This is the view from the front porch of the cabin I stayed in at the Rauschbergblick in Inzell, Germany. We stayed in Inzell after the Olympics and the weather felt like May.  It was great for recovering from the Olympic excitement--I sat out on the porch in the sun.  Last year when we stayed in Inzell after World Champs, there was two feet of snow and we could ski all over the valley.  Quite the contrast!

Stefan and the rest of the Schwabl family have always been gracious hosts to our team when we've come in the winter and the summer, so I painted this for them. 

It once again felt like springtime when we were staying right next to Lake Bled in Slovenia.  On the lake, swans were swimming and rowers were rowing.  I'm not used to seeing swans, and it might be cliche, but I think they're beautiful!  I took lots of swan photos while I was in Slovenia.  

sLOVEnia and moving on

Slovenia, I've decided, is a really cool country.  I am sad to say that I am now no longer in Slovenia.  But I hope to go back there for several reasons:

1.  I need some vengeance on the Pokljuka biathlon range.
2.  I need to go to Slovenia sometime when I am not competing and ideally do all of the following things: backcountry ski, cross-country ski, mountain bike, road bike, hike, row...eat...probably some other things too that I'm not thinking of.  That might take more than one trip.  But actually, the amazing thing about Slovenia is that I could have done every one of those things during my short visit, given proper equipment.  Its just that cool of a place.

Some more interesting tidbits about Slovenia:
1. It's motto is "I feel Slovenia".  And I felt the love!
2.  Everyone in Slovenia seems to speak good english and be really friendly.
3.  It has beautiful forests, lakes and mountains
4. The people of Slovenia are very active.  It has one of the highest ratios of Olympic medals to population size.
5.  It also has a small coastline on the Adriatic Sea!

So, as you can probably tell I really liked Slovenia.  I think that my pictures below will help show you why.  But I also had my worst biathlon race ever on the World Cup in the Sprint race in Pokljuka. Well, maybe it was better than the one in Antholz that I didn't even finish...but to me it seemed worse because it was all my fault, and yet I still don't really know what happened or why it went so horribly.
I was skiing pretty well (the positive of the day was that I skied pretty well), and came in to shoot prone and missed my first shot.  Then I missed my second shot.  I thought maybe it was windier than I'd though, so I took some clicks into the wind.  Then I missed my last three shots as well.  Yup, I missed all 5 shots...thats what we call "dirtying" in biathlon.  And just as the name suggests, its shameful.  I did my 5 penalty loops with my tail between my legs.  I had another good ski loop, and came in for standing, and just somehow didn't get into the zone.  I shot, went to ski my two additional penalty loops, and knew that there was now way I was going to be qualifying for the pursuit.  I seem to have a curse when it comes to qualifying for pursuits.  I was so disappointed in myself, but also just confused by how it ha gone so badly, and then I finished and got even more bad news:  apparently I had actually missed 3 in standing.  And since I'd only done 2 penalty loops, I was given an additional 2-minute time penalty for my missed penalty loop.  Now I really felt ashamed of myself, and disappointed and frustrated ad dumb, all at once.  I cried a little.
But then I went for a cool-down ski out on a side trail that winds through a beautiful mature evergreen forest and then suddenly looks out over an awesome view of big snowy mountains.  It was beautiful, and soothing.  Which sounds cheesy.  But I really love being in beautiful places, and it makes me happy.
Sometimes biathlon feels incredibly brutal and merciless.  You feel like you're doing a good job, training is going well, you start to gain some confidence and get you hopes up, and then you race and the biathlon gods just rip it all out from under you.  But then there are other times when you go into a race with no expectations, just planning to fight for it and somehow it just falls together and its so rewarding.  I guess that the volatility of biathlon is what makes it so addicting to compete in, and so popular to watch.  Its dramatic and vicious and emotional.  In a biathlon race you can watch people's hopes be brutally dashed and you can also watch an underdog win in glorious fashion.  To be a biathlete, you have to be able to get tossed around and toyed with and not let it disrupt your focus and confidence.  Boy, can that be hard!! But luckily I got to spend some time in beautiful Slovenia moving on from the bad race.  And now I am on my way to Finland, where I will have more chances to race well.

We stayed in a really nice old hotel called Hotel Triglav, overlooking lake Bled.  Down by the lake, it was full-on springtime, with ducks and swans, flowers blooming, and people out for strolls.  

Sara bough each of us a cool mask for Carneval/Mardi Gras/Fasching, and we celebrated on tuesday night in Slovenia by wearing them to dinner.  This is a big holiday in most of Europe, with people out in costumes and lots of parties.  The food at Hotel Triglav was deeeelicious. Very gourmet and even the simplest things tasted amazing.  That was a definite highlight of the trip!

Swans!  I had fun trying to take pictures of them.

Lake Bled is about as picturesque as you can get.  Its got a castle on a cliff overlooking the lake, as well as a castle on an island in the lake!

I bought hot roasted chestnuts from a guy who was grilling them along the path by the lake.  I'd never had freshly roasted chestnuts before.  Yum!!  And I was wearing a t-shirt too!

But then when you drove up the mountain to the venue...there was SOOOO much snow!!  

And beautiful views.

Doesn't this look like a cool place?

Beautiful trees!!

The town of Bled is touristy, but with a cool funky vibe that I liked.  This little pizza shop had delicious gluten-free pizza!

Too much to write about in one blog post

Well, I've realized that I just have too many things to fit into a reasonably concise blog post.  Thats because its been too long since I last wrote, but also because its just been very action-packed!  So bear with me as I cover some of the events of my last 10 days in roughly chronological order.  

First of all, there was more racing.  And it was exciting racing!  I raced in the mixed-gender relay with Susan, Tim and Lowell.  I had never been on the mixed relay team before, and I was excited about it but also nervous.  I felt that we had a good chance at doing really well if all of us could have good shooting.  So that would require me to have good shooting.  I put pressure on myself.  I dry-fired and visualized and made a plan of attack. I tried to be as prepared as I could be. 

A screenshot of the tag-off when we were in 4th place that my friend Courtney sent me.

Susan skied the first leg and had a great race and tagged off to me in 4th--just a few seconds behind the leaders.  Thats right A FEW SECONDS BEHIND THE LEADERS!!  At the Olympics!!  I knew that it was totally possible that I would be put in that position, and I'd tried to prepare myself for it mentally.  My plan was to not be intimidated, but to just be psyched and to think "good, this is exactly where I want to be."  You can of course never be prepared for something like that if you haven't experienced it before, and so I wasn't prepared...but I did enjoy it!  It was awesome!!  I sort of felt like I was floating for that whole lap.  I had a lot of fun.  I may have gone too hard.  And then I came it to shooting and tried to follow my plan for that too...

But biathlon is funny.  Sometimes you try hard and it works. Sometimes you just relax and go on autopilot and it works.  The targets fall.  But for me it seems that just as often, something is a little bit off and the targets don't fall.  Occasionally when this happens I can think back and say "well, I could have prepared better" or "I really didn't have a plan or a focus".  Thats when I'm disappointed in myself.  

But before the mixed relay, I really think that I prepared for the shooting as well as I could have. And something was still a bit off.  In that first prone stage I had 8 bullets to use to hit 5 targets, and I couldn't do it.  I had to go into the dreaded penalty loop.  All of my shots were going high for some reason, but of course I didn't know that until after the race.  So I was frustrated, but I also knew that I couldn't give myself too hard of a time--sometimes that just happens in biathlon.  I dropped our team from 4th back to 10th.  Out of medal contention.  It was not the performance that I was hoping for.  I definitely replayed the race a lot of times in my head afterwards, trying to make it go differently.  But in the end, I'd tried my best.  And I had also had that amazing experience of skiing with the leaders in an Olympic race.  It was so much fun, and I'm grateful for that experience.  

And then two days later I was in almost the exact same position again in the women's relay.  Susan once again tagged off to me in 4th place.  This time I felt a bit more prepared.  I could get used to starting my relay leg in 4th place!  The second time around still didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped for, but it was definitely better in a number of ways.  First, even though I used all 6 of my total spare round rounds, I didn't have to ski a penalty loop.  And second, I skied my own race and paced myself better.  I still lost us a few places and quite a bit of time because I had to use so many extra bullets, but my teammates shot and skied well and in the end we finished in 7th--our best-ever relay finish!!  It was slightly bittersweet because we could all taste how close we were to doing even better, but it was a great race and a great way to end the Olympics.  

And now for the non-racing part!

I spent a lot of my spare time at the Olympics working on a dance video to Pharrell Williams' "Happy" with my teammates.  It was the perfect project to keep us busy and having fun, and it was a cool way to connect with athletes from other teams, and even the Sochi volunteers.  If you haven't checked it out yet, here it is:

In the 3 weeks that I was at the Olympics, I spent almost every hour in the Endurance Village, which was on top of a mountain, quite a ways from the city of Sochi.  It was the day before the closing ceremonies, and I hadn't even seen an athlete from a sport other than Biathlon or Nordic Skiing.  So we decided we needed to get off the mountain and see the sights.  

Rosa Khutor.  This was a pristine river valley full of trees just a few years ago. 

Rosa Khutor in the day-time.  It had pedestrian streets on either side of the river, townhouse-style buildings with fancy shops and hotels and stuff.  It was a pretty surreal place, and crazy to see how much was built in such a short period of time.  It made me sad.  I'll be interested to see if tourist continue to come now that the Olympics are over.

We went to Adler, which is a city next to Sochi along the black sea, and went to the shore.  

Sochi had lots of palm trees, and had the feel of a summer resort.  It was so different from life up on top of the mountain, it was pretty crazy.


We found a great barbecue place right on the black sea and got platefuls of skewered-cooked meat and potatoes served with pickles, raw onions, and sauce.  So we ate yummy food while simultaneously watching the men's biathlon relay on TV and the sun setting over the Black Sea.  

I had an hour or two before the closing ceremony to check out the Olympic Park.  It felt like being on the set of a futuristic sci-fi movie. 

I should have swapped costumes with one of these girls!!  I saw them before the ceremonies as we were waiting to walk in.  If I'd seen them again after, I would have tried to trade. 

I had a MUCH better seat for the closing ceremonies than for opening.  Front row seats!  (My seat for Opening ceremonies was on the couch, in front of the TV).  

The show was SO COOL!  I loved the big moon and clouds, and the upside-down houses!

Here I am with Ida, Susan and Liz, in our funny costumes.  Northern VT was well represented!!
I was happy to have the warm wool sweater and wool peacoat.  But the boots were not comfortable and I walked barefoot on our way back.  

And now the Olympics are over.  In some ways I felt like I was in Sochi for a long time.  But in other ways I feel like I flew by way too quickly.  Its crazy to me that it will be another 4 years before that happens again.  Thats an awful lot of build-up for some races and ceremonies and stuff.  But then again, it was definitely more than just a few races.  I think that what made the Olympics the most special was just how much support and excitement and following I got from home.  It really just blew me away.  All of you are the best!  

And now I am recovered from all of the excitement, lack of sleep, travel, let-down, requisite head-cold...and I'm not back home yet!  The winter isn't over, and there are still three more weeks of World Cup races to come.  Tomorrow I head to Bled, Slovenia for my next adventure.