Antholz, Racing and Training before World Champs

Hi CBC,

It turns out I'm not a very good blogger (surprise).  We are finishing up our long stretch in Antholz- just one more week, and then off to Hochfilzen for World Championships.  Somehow, when I arrived here in the very beginning, way back when the World Cup was here a whole two weeks ago, my standing shooting took a vacation.  I'm not sure where it went, but I'm guessing someplace tropical.  

As best I can describe what happened, I'm an incredibly high energy person.  I like to sleep, a LOT, but as soon as I wake up I'm going. I don't really nap, and I don't really slow down much (ever).  Some point on the road between Germany and Italy, my energy levels overloaded.  You know that freshman stunt where you drink an entire pot of coffee before your first final, before you realize that's a horrible freaking idea, and then you get more and more jittery and it feels like your eyeballs are about to shoot lasers?  That's roughly how I would describe this feeling.  Every time I stopped skiing to shoot I felt like I was going to leap right out of my boots at the massive amounts of jittery energy raging through my body.  And really, it didn't stop much when I was skiing, either.  I felt like I was skiing like a sort of spastic fish, arms and legs all disconnected, and my glide phase totally gone.  And downhill cornering when your legs are shaking like you took a straight shot of adrenaline?  Yikes! Well, it was one hell of a ride.

For a week and a half, this lasted, before, during, and through the races.  That's a damn long time to be riding what feels like an epic caffeine high, with no way to slow down.  I took a lot of days of off shooting after the races here, in attempt to re-center my shooting, specifically standing. It has slowly, ever so slowly, come soaking back into me as I've resettled back onto planet earth.  

Things that re-centered me...

-Firstly, my amazing family often gets up to watch me race, and from the West Coast that's one heck of a time change.  Every time I clean a stage they all get a piece of chocolate.  They are happy skiers themselves, and they really couldn't care less how often I miss at standing.  They're going to be so mad I put them on the internet :D. 

Since Truckee got that ENORMOUS snowstorm of doom, they’ve just been playing in the snow for the last couple weeks (at least that’s how it seems from the pictures).

My mom, conquering the world

My dad, proving that all black is still the most intimidating ski outfit. Fact.

My second oldest brother, Carl, who apparently ran into some wet Sierra snow.

My oldest brother, Garrett, who has never let anything in life bring him down.

-Susan freaking Dunklee.  Seriously, that woman can do anything.  I have what I would best describe as an occasional breathing problem, where it feels like a mountain landed on my chest.  Susan came into my room when I was having an argument with said mountain, and sort of having a loser-like spazz on the floor.  In the next ten minutes, I was changed, up, moving, walking, and breathing like a normal person again.  

I got to do a bunch of workouts with Susan this week, and I decided that I was just going to shoot as fast as our rockstar, and screw where the bullets actually landed.  This worked out really well about half the time, and about half the time I probably sent some fliers right over the mountaintops.  It's really good practice, and really fun to get to shoot with one of the fastest shooters in the world (Susan) and one of the best in the world (Maddie).  Anyway, riding the ski tips of Susan was really fun, because her strongest skiing sections are totally opposite than mine, which forces me to get technical and press sections that apparently I usually just slack the hell off in.  See, this is why you should have friends who kick your ass.

We locked up her crazy though, we'll unleash it for World Champs

I re-f**ked my shoulder on the bench press.  That's the last time I'm EVER doing that workout.  Either I have fragile shoulders (? tendons?), or it's maybe just not the best workout for me to be doing in the middle of ski season, regardless, I don't care what the training plan says, it's out.  Another thing I learned from Suz- stand up and fight for what you believe in.  Anyway, it's not nearly as bad as last time- I can get my arm over my head! I've been giving it a break on easy days so that I can still engage it on intensity days, and it has been soldiering on.  So, all eyes turn to Hochfilzen now.  

-MOUNTAINS.  Woohoo!  

-Also, you guys.  The emails poured in telling me they forgave me for singlehandedly tanking the American relay.  I promise I'll do better, and a special thank you to CBC sharpshooter Julia Collins for sending me a sweet email and some tips on how not to miss :). 

A random assortment of pictures:

This is how we attend morning lectures at 8am.
Me and Susan just chillin in the back getting outraged at bad statistics because we're NERDS. 

Recovery drink..........?

Russell was pissed that I podium swept the high scores on his Tetris
So.....he finally beat me. 

Susan has a grill sponsor, so we did some biathlon tailgating during the men's race

Picture from my friend Gwilbaud of France, who always has a smile for me when I'm warming up, something nice to say after the race, and is his own entire amazing cheering section, singlehandedly.  

This guy... this guy actually kicked me off my mat during zero, because it wasn't as laser-sculpted flat, or something.  I also got booted off my mat during pre-race zero by one of the overly aggressive brass sweepers.  I mean... which one of us is really more important? Not me, apparently!

Grilling pizza out on the deck (courtesy of Susan's grill sponsor). Or, as my mom said,
"A Hawaiian pizza cooked by orange munchkins outside in the snow😋"

Let's just say... we're sort of derpy at picture taking, but we skied to the top of the pass and it was lovely.

That time I started less than an hour after the first starter, and actually got to warm up on the course.

That other time I got to ski a lap with MDH herself.

See you back in Colorado, someday!!

-Joanne

Ruhpolding and our first relay

Well, in case you missed it (I did!), I didn't race in Oberhof because I got the norovirus, also known as the stomach flu.  It was a lot of deja vu, as I got the stomach flu at almost the exact same time last year, along with Maddie Phaneuf, and the two of us raced the IBU Cup anyway, and it was about exactly as comfortable as you'd imagine.

A successful quarantine (did not leave room for three straight days), some long and gentle classic skis in the woods, and some easily digested food later, we traveled south. We arrived in Ruhpolding where the weather was warmer, the trails were slightly easier (but not by much!) the food was better (maybe? I never once went down to breakfast, lunch, or dinner in Oberhof, but instead depended entirely on the food drop-offs of my friend Russell Currier, who not only fed me but scored his first world cup points of the season in Oberhof), and the crowds are bigger.  I like Ruhpolding because it's familiar to me, and is the site of my first world cup, so regardless of the trails that don't really play to my strengths, it holds a special place in my heart.  It's becoming a little easier to travel places now that I'm learning where all the paths to the start are, the rifle check and the ski checks, and I don't spend ages searching for the bathroom.  For instance, in Sweden I spent about ten minutes trying to find the secret door that led to rifle check and eventually gave up and skied into the range to find the start, the tunnel leading to it, and work backwards from there.  I am oddly grateful to Adidas for giving us the electric orange jackets purely because it's so much easier to find our coaches wherever they may be.

We adopted Maddie from the IBU Cup to field our first relay of the season, which didn't yield the best result ever, but there were no penalty laps from our team, which we considered a victory.  The snow was deep and slow, and skiing was a battle.  With a relay team that had never once skied together, and various levels of preparedness across the board, we look forward to moving up in the field in the next relay.

Germany actually requires you to lock up your rifle when you are..... we're not exactly sure, here.... not dryfiring? Can you get it out and clean it? Can you touch it? Luckily it came with this fantastic picture explanation.

What I get from this is that you can just tie a rubber band around it
 and then lock the rubber band

When I first arrived in Germany I had the wrong serial number on my paperwork, which caused a lot of head shaking and clucking, but they let this American problem child into the country anyway.  Wonder if they'll let me leave!

I encourage you to check my website (HERE) if you want to know where in the world I am (my brother requested that I turn on "find my friends" so that when those pesky people asked him where in the world I was he could just know instead of having to look at that gosh durn world cup schedule, but that seems a little creepy in my opinion), I tried to put in estimations of where we're training and racing.  Plus, I linked in my instagram so you can enjoy my journey of bad picture taking and #excessive #notatallwitty #hashtagging.


Countdown to sprint start!