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!

Football, random pictures of Canmore, and links to more interesting things

So many times I have been asked what it was like to with an NCAA title, and so many times I have been asked where I think I'm taking the sport of biathlon, how long I'll stay, what I'm hoping to achieve.  This is my answer to both questions, in a long, drawn-out monologue.  

What I like about football is energy. Energy and fluidity. I know football is a "boring" American sport with a lot of stops and go's and changing of teams, but it is deeply fluid at its base. Four tries to go 10 yards. In essence, an extremely simple game, in practice a complex one. Momentum is a powerful force of nature, and momentum is the strongest force of football. A team driving forward, fighting to the last man to gain that last yard builds momentum.  And the fan base catches the momentum of the team and turns it to energy. Energy, in turn, drives more momentum. 

Consider the home of the Seattle Seahawks. The twelfth man of the Seattle Seahawks is their fan base. Eleven players on the field, and one measurably, scientifically deafening roar. The twelfth man is so loud that the actual decibel level in their home stadium is just barely under that of the deck of an active aircraft carrier.  The Seahawks so honored their beloved twelfth man that the number 12 is borne only on fan jerseys, and never on the field. Their gift in return? Energy. Ferocious, unbridled, passionate energy which aids the momentum of their beloved team. 

This I feel when I enter the active football stadium of my alma mater. I rarely (never) watched a game as an undergrad, but I always drifted by the chaos around and in the stadium just to witness it.  This is the case of any stadium of any sport with fans who love it. The absolute and overpowering passion makes the stadium electric. 

If I enter a stadium full of 10,000 Colorado Buffaloes, I feel who I am. The times I fought for my brothers and sisters in the black and gold echo within the roar. My path has turned away from being totally surrounded and immersed in University culture, living and breathing academia and team competition.  But I am still the person who did those things, who I am now was shaped by what I did then. And 10,000 people dressed in black, on their feet in salute of our real live buffalo who tramples the very grass of the football field, has a way of slamming that reminder into your face like an knockout punch. 

It is odd to look back. If I choose to give, I give my whole self. If you had cut me open, I would have truly bled black and gold.  For the eleven other members competing on the NCAA team, I would have done anything.  For those left behind, I would have done everything. 

What was it like to win an NCAA championship? This is what it was like. Six alpine skiers watching from the sides, exhausted. Their battle was over.  Three Norwegian men, clad in the Colorado black, silently watchful. Their battle was yet to come. Two of my sisters, next to me at the start. Our battle was now. I was the twelfth man.  I had a Buffalo sister at each shoulder.  Their gift to me? Energy.  

I didn't win because I needed to win, I won because they needed me to win. I simply became one name in a long legacy and history that stretches back before I was born and will continue on for decades.  Those were my brothers and sisters, my acquired family and my adopted heritage. All I could give them in this moment was a single victory, and lay it at their feet in offering. So I did. Those three Norwegians, it was their turn to go. My gift to them? Momentum. 

I don't exactly know where I'm going, but I know who I am, and where I was. Surely that is what is most important.  No one is their worst race any more than they are their best race, which is a truth few like to face.  You are simply the average of your races, barring outliers.  That's the mathematician in me.  The athlete in me has no other thought than a promise to give, to give my whole self until the numbers of the race results reflect what I believe I am capable of.  To do something so well that I can say I mastered it, and then, like my mother before me, turn down a new road with new challenges.  But most importantly, do it joyously, passionately, and with integrity.  

If you just can't get enough of my dithering on, you can find me on Fasterskier Here and the BNS magazine Here . 

 And without further ado, here's a whole bunch of pictures from Canmore in no particular order.

If you follow Susan Dunklee this'll be a repeat, but it was the best picture I took all camp.

Clare and I spent our off day in Calgary, and I wandered over to a park

Hanging out with the newest member of the Biathlon family, Ophelia Bailey

Clare and sports psychologist Sean McCann teaching Ophelia how to adjust for wind

Susan LOVES hiking, and here we are scaling the first mountain of the day

This was before I was totally exhausted,
because we got to the bottom and Susan goes: hey, let's climb that mountain too!

And so we did

Because we can

Two days ago at SMR- holy smokes it was hot out.  Trying to get my prone shooting under 30 seconds,
with moderate success- I'm plateauing at about 29.

Canmore

Hi CBC,

It was eighty degrees when I left Colorado.  Packing for on-snow skiing when you've spent the last couple days with your air conditioning on and avoiding working out in the middle of the day is a weird feeling, one I haven't had often since I ventured out of the great state of California.

The Lady Fortune and me chilling on my front balcony.
It was actually too hot to be wearing this long sleeve shirt,
but the orange is too lovely to pass up

United delayed my flight (surprise), so I spent two hours sitting outside in the sunshine, watching the strange new artwork of the Denver airport, which has finished its new transit center and added "artwork."  Look at those klister scrapers billowing in the breeze...

But I get ahead of myself.  Remember my rear sight acting up?  Turns out that isn't super uncommon.  In flew the cavalry.

When your bullets are stuck on the left side and won't move right.

The Oppligers (Team Oppliger Biathlon) are close family friends from Houghton,
 and one of my major biathlon catalysts

My dad decided on Friday that he was showing up on a plane Saturday morning, so suddenly he was there.  Rather than tangle with my rear sight and its newly acquired attitude problem, we decided to swap it out entirely, and analyze the part later.  Apparently sometimes sights don't appreciate you asking them for clicks, and therefore just don't bother to move.  Mine actually had a major wobble where the aperture is inserted into the sight.  Odds are that I, the Human Hammer, as my dad has thus titled me, probably whacked it somehow.  I also whacked my snow cover, speaking of.

Human Hammer at SMR, wooden firing line vs. snow cover

I also became the new owner of this sweet one piece "whale tale," courtesy of my talented mother.  Yeah, my mom is cool enough to mold my rail and butthooks, and then recreate them in carbon fiber wrapped wood.

After some drilling and tapping, more drilling and tapping, reinforcing, stabilizing, and gluing, the required visit to McGuckin Hardware (greatest hardware store ever?) my dad flew out again on Sunday.  No daughter of his was going to go cavorting around the world with a wobbly cheekpiece.  How awesome is he?

What I would like to know, if any of you guys have done this, is if this Anschütz nameplate can be removed.  It's heavy and it's metal, and it's advertising a company that I had to give money to.  So really, why keep it?

this is actually Clare's new action-
 she swapped over to the sprint barrel

So delayed United flight notwithstanding, I arrived in Calgary and caught a ride with the rest of the team to Canmore.  We decided to go to Canmore because they have this early season situation they call "frozen thunder," where they take stored snow from the previous year, and roll it out on top of woodchips.  So yeah, we got on snow on October 25th- how cool is that?

If you haven't been to Canmore, I recommend you go.  Encircled by Canadian Rockies, bisected by the Bow River, and just to the southwest of the border of Banff National Park, Canmore is lovely.  I do recognize that everyone can't just spend their time traipsing about in pursuit of snow, but I imagine in the summer this place is even lovelier.  I would like to declare this one of the loveliest places I've ever been.

I present my argument as follows.

The rarely-captured smile of the elusive Russell Currier

Leif disappearing up the road to Lake Moraine.
This is actually natural snow, up higher in the mountains in Banff

The range on intensity day, otherwise known as:
get your butt mostly kicked by Susan Dunklee day

So, we spent Halloween here.  And between the three of us, Clare drew the most laughs.  Can't see her in the picture?  She actually is wearing a fake mustache and sporting a Ukrainian suit.  To get that, she actually went over to their hotel, used google translate and pantomime to try to explain Halloween, and managed to acquire the goods for that costume.  The Ukrainians were so excited by this they spent the whole day (which was interval day, mind you), cheering for her, and in one case actually pushing her uphill.  When they saw us taking the photos, they came over to join in.

But really, the best way to suffer through intervals is to follow Susan Dunklee's fake grass skirt around the ski trails.  In case you were wondering, our coaches were of course THRILLED that we showed up to intensity decked out in ridiculous attire and taking ourselves overly seriously.

#squad

There was too much snow to classic rollerski (oh darn),
so we suffered through this beautiful run instead

Susan really wanted to climb this rock, so she did

Susan and I just finished some of the slushiest, sloppiest intervals I've ever done (it was over fifty degrees and we were skiing on post-race snow), so I'm off to go faceplant on the couch.


-Joanne

June, July, August

June, July, and August

Hey CBC,

I returned to Boulder for some time, longer than my coach would like, and shorter than I would have preferred to stay. 

a brief interlude to display reasons why I live in Colorado ... 

Somewhere outside Telluride

This is what happens when our range is closed during the week... 
Shooting at poor, unsuspecting dead trees in a yard in Ridgway colorado

My beloved car and I decided to make the journey to New York. This may have something to do with the fact that by the time I looked at tickets, three days before I was supposed to get my rear in gear towards the East, they were quite pricey. NO PROBLEM, I'll drive, I figured. 

I drove out one day, and I called my grandma from eastern Colorado. "Hey grandma!" I said enthusiastically into the phone to my incredibly liberal and ferociously political grandma, "you wouldn't believe how many Trump signs there are in eastern colorado!! Hey, can I crash with you tonight?" There was a moment of silence, as there often is at people trying to digest my chaotic life in the span of a few seconds. "...tonight? In Madison?" At my affirmation, her voice perked up, I imagine she was still recovering from picturing the Trump signs. 

And sure enough, I rolled into Madison that night. Well, that morning. I drove through a world-ending thunderstorm in eastern Iowa, the lightning flashing in 360 degrees around me, the sound so loud I wondered if there was a rock concert in the sky  I wasn't invited to.  I lost my right windshield wiper in that storm, it's somewhere in Iowa, and I think it'll stay there for a while. By the time I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, the storm had blown through, ripping down entire trees, taking out power lines, and making roads impassible. It took delicate navigating (I drove through some yards) and a lot of patience (I yelled at the unyielding, fallen trees blocking my way), but I finally arrived in Madison to the Heiden home.  

I stayed here a day to visit my grandparents, my grandfather being the owner of my starting biathlon rifle named Forget-Me-Not (Partial story here). My grandmother, whose social life must rival that of the Queen of England, tired me out. We ran around town finding inventive ways of charging our phones, since the power was still out in her house. 

The University Memorial Center at University of Wisconsin, Madison, on the shore of Mendota.
Both my parents and my grandparents went here

I journeyed out the next morning with a new wiper blade, a hug to my little dog, who resides there in Madison, and one for each of my grandparents. 

one grandfather, one dog

His name is actually Einstein

I charged East. Or rather, they charged me to go East. Once you get past Wisconsin, the states make you pay for the privilege of passing through. I kid you not, I saw a brochure in a gas station that said, "seventeen fun things to do in northeastern Indiana!!" One of those seventeen things was probably paying tolls. 

I arrived in Lake Placid at 5am and slept until 2pm.  If nothing else, I'm a champion sleeper. Here I stayed for a week or so, but no more, to the never ending frustration of my coach. 

Halfway through this week we were shooting a 30/30 test. That's where you shoot.... You guessed it.... 30 shots prone and 30 shots standing, and then your coach takes it down and looks really displeased if you didn't put all those shots into the 10 ring (scored based on rings). I went for the spray and pray method here, a most beloved tactic of the CBC. It was going rather well until both my top and bottom butthooks broke, my riser block came loose, and then my cheekpiece actually fell off completely (huh, should have glued that). 

Because I'm a graduate student in engineering, and a bonafide adult (I know this because I can purchase both tobacco AND alcohol), I did the reasonable thing. I called my dad.  "DAD, IT'S BROKEN," I helpfully explained. 

So the next place I arrived was the Bay Area of California, where my parents call home. The trick to flying into the Bay is not to come in during rush hour. So you can fly in between 1 and 4am. I picked 1. Guess who got me from the airport- isn't my mom great?  

My dad is basically a wizard. That's a fancy word for an engineer without an official engineering degree, but with a PhD and a really high IQ. I did the important work of pointing to the parts that were either falling off or broken, and I left ten days later with everything fixed. The bandsaw, tablesaw, dremel, drill press, and the other toys kept in the garage probably had to take naps after all that working overtime. 

My mom is a magician. That's a fancy word for someone who picks up a new skill, sport, or knowledge in the span of a day.  While I performed the helpful task of pointing out my broken butthooks and ghetto looking rifle, my mom molded and remade the butthooks out of carbon fiber, redesigning the entire attachment system to be more robust.  Then she took out her woodburning tools, and adorned Tunkasila (duen-kah-shee-lah, that's the name of my rifle, passed down from my dad, it means grandfather, or great spirit) with the aforementioned naked lady (the lovely lady herself), sanding and re-varnishing the entire stock, complete with riser block.

So with a new pistol grip, new cheekpiece, new butthooks, other modifications of things I just thought about and my parents actually did, and much more stylish than before, I returned to Lake Placid and subsequent World Cup trials.

I decided I didn't like my pistol grip the way it was (small hands).

my mom was super thrilled about the enormous mess I made on the kitchen table

Getting all prettied up (and protected, since a lot of the coating had to be taken off to make those nice designs)

I don't know why the drill was exactly right there, but stuff was obviously gittin' done 'round there

Having a roller range is so great, they said! Just not for the toes of your boots....
Grand prize for anyone who fixes this problem
(I have heard that they make plastic pieces for the shoes of baseball pitchers, who have a similar problem)

-J