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Written by Brian Olsen
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Sunday, 14 November 2004 00:00 |
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Location: Geilo, NOR Location: Beitostølen, NOR
This morning, getting out of bed, my legs were tired and sore from the mass start race yesterday. James tried to convince us in the meeting last night that we would all feel better in today’s race after the mass start yesterday. Thinking positive certainly helped me sleep better, but by the second hill of the first loop of today’s sprint race, I was cursing him for even the thought that right then and there I was feeling good.
I was skiing hard, but only going nowhere fast. I tried to concentrate on holding my technique together, using my energy as efficiently as possible, but these thoughts did not make me move any faster, though I may have felt and looked decent.
My shooting went very well. The wind was much lighter today. I used a little extra time again in prone, just getting into the right position on the mat, and the sacrifice resulted in perfect prone shooting.
I came into the range for standing a little too hard, and had to take a few moments to recover before bolting for the first shot. I hesitated a bit, but was able to keep from taking a bad first shot. Finally, everything felt good, and I hit the first three targets down in a good cadence. At this point, the thought came into my mind that if I hit the next two targets, I would have achieved the first perfect shooting race of my career.
Miss… Miss… That thought cost me an extra 300 meters in the penalty loop.
The final result was not so great. I was happy with my shooting and I realized that it is not so difficult to hit 80 percent. My legs were extremely tired by the end of the race. I had a rather high blood lactate value, which I was able to test using my Lactate Pro after stampeding through the finish area back to the start.
I will be testing blood lactate after every race, so I am going to need to perfect my technique of getting out of the finish area past very incoherent athletes, while still very incoherent myself.
The first weekend of racing is over. My notebook is filled with thing that I have learned, so though the results were bad, the races were successful.
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