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!