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Location: Jericho, VT
Snow has arrived for the first time this season in Vermont. Not much, but Friday night was the first time that the highest of the Green Mountains have been white since last spring. It is a welcome sign that winter is not too far away. I was looking through my previous updates to the site and realized that I haven’t posted on a regular basis since January 2006. Though in my last update, I said that I was writing a recap of what I have been up to since I left for Basic Training last February; I really should post an update on what has happened since qualifying for the Olympic Team!
But that might be a bit overdue.
When I returned from Basic Training, I spent the rest of the spring in Heber City, Utah, catching up on the skiing that I missed out on having ended the season in late January. This year, the snow didn’t last too long. Certainly not as long as in 2005, when I skied through to the end of June.
It took a few weeks to get back into shape. While Basic Training was certainly a challenge, there wasn’t much exercise. The longest runs we would do were 30 minutes, though there was one time when we went out for some extra, optional training, and I ran for an hour around a 200-meter long sidewalk loop. When I first arrived at Fort Sill, I went through nearly two weeks of processing – basically, a lot of time spent waiting for the real thing to start. The first few days were the worst. My body was not used to just sitting around doing nothing. I decided to take action. For fear of injury, we weren’t allowed to leave the building on our own, and we did not exercise for the same reason. But there was a flight of stairs in our building. And I decided to run up and down to get some exercise. Three times, I went and did stairs for an hour, one time for 90 minutes. Why, there was nothing else to do!
After a few weeks, my body was back into shape and I returned to normal training. Not only did I decide to settle financial issues this year, by enlisting in the Army National Guard, but I also decided to finish college. Over most of the summer, I took courses, either online, or on campus. At the moment, I am in Vermont, with only eight weeks left until I’ll have finished my undergraduate studies and become a college graduate.
I have always been somewhat divided between school and sport. After I put school on hold in 2004, there has always been this tension that I had to finish college soon. Of course, there’s good reason for doing so! There is not much job security in biathlon – what if you get injured, what if you have a bad season, what if you just lose your motivation? Now, so close to finishing, I’m glad that I made the decision to keep chipping away at my degree, even though sometimes it felt like I was using only sandpaper. I can’t imagine going to college, with four years ahead of me, at age 23. It is odd enough having only one semester remaining at age 23! Finishing college in December will allow me to put most of my energy into improving as an athlete – something that I haven’t ever really been able to do, with the pressure of school always having loomed in the back of my mind.
So the summer was a mix of classes and training. I spent most of the summer in Heber City, though I was in Vermont for a few weeks for a class on campus. Soldier Hollow paved a new section of rollerski trail in July that makes it even more of a great training location than before. There’s something about the mountains, the perpetual blue sky, and community there that seems to make everything go right.
A week before I flew to Vermont to start the fall semester, I had two days off on my schedule. I was driving down U.S. Highway 189 from Park City to Heber and noticed a mileage sign that said “Denver – 454 miles.” My sister lives in Denver and I have been thinking about nearby Boulder for graduate school, but I have never been to Colorado, except to the airport on my way to somewhere else. So I made good use of my off days by renting a car and driving through eastern Utah and western Colorado to Denver. Most of the way is through some very desolate country – think Bonanza! Very open terrain, with few trees, exposed rock, with the Rocky Mountains in the distance. I went for fifteen minutes a few times without seeing another person, and this was on a fairly significant highway! Denver was nice because I spent time with my sister, but it didn’t feel very “mountain city”-like to me. You can’t even see the mountains from downtown. Not like in Heber City, or even Salt Lake City, where the mountains are omnipresent. I didn’t get a chance to visit Boulder, so I’m not ruling Colorado out, yet. On the way back, I drove on Interstate 80 through Wyoming, along which the landscape is perhaps even more barren. But barren works for me, so I’m not saying it was ugly.
Training has gone well in Vermont thus far. My classes are grouped together in the middle of the day. It does mean that time I would otherwise spend recovering and napping, I am sitting in class, learning. I have a few interesting classes that I feel are genuinely giving me useful skills and knowledge. The class load and training load have both been manageable. This will be the first fall since 2003 that I haven’t been out West, if only for two weeks, so I’m certainly missing the (real) mountains a bit. Often times, though, it’s important to take care of thing, even if you’d rather be doing something else.
I think that sums up what I’ve been doing pretty well, though a bit vaguely, since last January. The major reason why the posts have been so infrequent the past two years is that I’ve outgrown this site. I am working on making something less complicated, which is easy for me to update. Right now, it feels far too rigid for the way that I write these days. So look out for a new site in the next month or two.
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