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.