The deep freeze

The deep freeze...
No, unfortunately for my sake I am not referring to a McCain deep and delicious frozen dessert - The food choices most recently have been of a warmer variety (tea, coffee, hot coca) also some of our dinner choices have been spicier in nature (butter/curry chicken, fajitas and chili) since mother nature decided to introduce us to her cold hearted temper.

Groomed terrain, as we like to refer to it 'perfect corduroy'
 just beautiful!

The benefit of the freezing weather means that the snow stays very hard and sets up very well for minimal course maintenance. The drawbacks of this weather are the snow is very slow, and the athletes get cold quickly and have to go inside often. Marty and I took advantage of this situation today. Because the athletes were going to have to go in, we looped often with them and had them do full suit runs.

Today it was this cold. 

The athletes burned up a lot of energy this morning working very hard in Super-G (in skin suits) and then transferring that intensity to their first few runs in the GS this afternoon. Super G can be very exhausting for the younger athletes especially who are being exposed to higher speeds for the first time. As coaches it is important to be patient and setup environments that are conducive to building confidence. We worked them very hard today with a combination of the cold weather, 6 SG runs and then a full 40 gate GS on old timer (just short of the NorAm start). Their GS is benefiting from the speed training as all the athletes are getting more comfortable going faster. Below please find a little mashup of their skiing over the past 2 weeks.

Please stay tuned for a mash up of the athletes skiing so far this camp. We are very pleased with how far they've come, some within the camp and others within the years we've had them on the team. Next week we put their work to the test with the NCO shoot out in SL and GS.

NCO shoot out (for those who are unaware): A race day simulation with timing at the end of the Panorama camp where an official bib draw and rules meeting is held the night before, and the overall winner receives recognition.