All is well up here at the Foret. We have had a very successful start to camp and everyone has been making good progress working onto the snow. Though the conditions are slowly but surely deteriorating (with more rain to come..) we have still been able to get some really quality training sessions in. On Thanksgiving day, more and more people started to arrive for the weekend, so the trails started to get tons and tons of traffic. To combat the crowds, we did our interval sessions before breakfast and then took to the woods and ungroomed terrain for our other sessions. The trail network here is really extensive and most of it is ungroomed, but conveniently most of the college teams did a lot of OD workouts where they ended up skiing in a really nice track.
Life up here is definitely rhythmic. The closest town is Stoneham, which is 40 minutes by highway, so there really isn’t much to do besides sleep, eat and ski. We’ve been skiing 2-3 times a day, pre-breakfast, mid-morning and afternoon, and meals are 7:30, noon and 5. To break up the down time and make sure that we don’t zombie too much in front of the screen, there is some homework, some reading, but mostly board games! The girls team collection right now is pretty extensive- Monopoly, Chess, cards, Settlers of Catan, Rat a Tat Cat, Slamwich, Bananagrams. You name it, we got it.
Yesterday was a down day, so after some video review, a little woods tour and watching some of the college teams pull off a little time-trial, we headed to Quebec City for some food, culture and exploring. We had a couple of hours to explore and then we met back up for dinner at a Creperie. I went with a fruity theme and had an apple and cheese crepe for dinner and a chocolate-hazelnut and banana crepe for dessert. It was yummy and a nice break from the decent but nonetheless cafeteria food we eat here.
Getting art-z
Jenna and some HUGE dogs (in the back ground)
Cannons on the Citadel that was built to defend Canada from foreign invasions... us
Girls team!
We mostly strolled the old part of the city
Cool shadow
Just your run of the mill squirrel in a tree
The crew!
Today, we had a nice skate ski that was made a little bit challenging due to the firm and slick surface- the result of about 1000 skiers over the past few days and the continuous mist/freezing rain that has been looming around. We had a long break in the afternoon (lovely nap!) and then went for a team run. Though we were running instead of skiing, spirits were high and we all had a good time sliding around on the iced up gravel logging roads that surround the Foret. Pete also set up a great presentation after dinner that detailed the ideology and science behind our training plan. It was interesting to learn the ideas that go into our weekly and monthly plans
We’ll be up here until Tuesday, and after that our plans aren’t concrete. We have one more week of camp-time after that and we’re going to go wherever the best training is whether it’s at Mt. St. Anne where we are planning to go, stay here if it snows more, or head back to the States and ski at Craftsbury.
Also, the US Ski Team women have opened the season with a bang!! Multiple women on the team have already had multiple personal bests and it has been exciting to watch. It is really inspiring to be able to look up to these fast women! Here is a great article about their early season success:
http://fasterskier.com/2011/11/randall-takes-6th-in-ruka-tour-brooks-23rd-u-s-women-keep-rising/
One last thing- Thanks to Jane, Kate, Pete, Kaitlin and Jenna for some of these pictures!
That's all for now,
Emilie
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