Hello everyone, Graham here reporting from Norway! As the summer is getting started, our team is gearing up by going to Norway for a two week training camp. The first half of the camp will be spent doing typical dry land training in Sjusjøen with team Elon and the second half the camp will be spent at the Sognefjellet Summer Ski Centre where we will be getting some solid on snow training and potential training with more Norwegian teams that will be there at the same time. Why come all the way to Norway at the beginning of the summer for a camp that we could do in Bend, Oregon? Well there are a few reasons, one is getting everyone on the team exposed to traveling around Europe with a ski bag and other large bags, so that when we come over here in the winter for the World Cup, we are familiar with how to navigate. The second reason is to train with other skiers from a different country who are the same speed if not better than us. The advantage to this is we are able to learn potentially new approaches to training and get to push ourselves with those who are faster. Also, it's fun to make friends with people from different countries! Third and this might be the most obvious reason why we are doing this camp, but it is to get on snow one last time before a long summer of roller skiing and running. The skiing benefits are the same here as they would be if we went to Bend or perhaps better, I don't know yet as I and the rest of the team haven't skied on the glacier yet. But being able to ski in June rather than early May means we can push the hours higher because we have already had a month of solid training under our belts. Whereas skiing in Bend in May makes it hard to get a lot of on snow time because we are not used to high volume weeks yet.
As to why I am the most excited about this camp, apart from everything that I have mentioned above, is the opportunity to get to ski in Europe. I personally have never cross country skied in Europe before and as such have only ever heard about how awesome it is from everyone else. But also because it's a place that has such a big impact on our sport, as many of you know generally what the Norwegian national team does with its athletes, other nations take notice of and sometimes copy. But more is to come in the following weeks as the training camp officially begins on June 8 when we will be roller skiing with Team Elon in Sjusjøen, so tune into the BSF Pro instagram page to see more behind the scene content!
Peace out!
Graham
