The Whitman Ski Team flies to Crested Butte in an hour and I, sadly, am staying in Walla Walla. There is life happening here that I need to catch up with.

Slovenija was a great experience, from the races to finally deducing that the "ice cream" I was eating every night was actually probably gelato. Competing at this level reminded me that I am a very good skier. It also made it clear that I still have a lot of work to do! Fortunately, there are several aspects of skiing where I can take concrete steps to make improvements. My technique, while better this year than ever before, still gets sloppy when I loose focus or get tired. Through repetion and focus during practice I can work towards making perfect technique second nature. And I can train more.

As Ben Husaby pointed out, many of our international competitors are only skiing, no College, no second sports or activities. Their only job is skiing for a team. This allows them to train many more hours per year than I do. I estimate that collgiate skiers in the US train 450-600 hours per year. The hours we train during a week range from 7 to 25, as our training cycle flucuates (rest/high intensity/high volume phases). Husaby claims, via the German Junior coach, that the German U23 men's team members each train 1000 hours per year. The problem with training so many hours isn't the hours spent working out, it's the hours of rest that are required to support so much training. Skiers are some of the laziest people; if you're training 1000 hrs/year, when you're not training you had better be eating, sleeping or somehow else immoble so that you can recover for your next training session.

hmm... time for a nap?