Typical Friday

 This team frequently gets together multiple times per day for ski practice. It's a big commitment, being on an NCAA athletic team, in any sport. It's a rare occasion when I can make it to practice twice per day, let along once. After all, I do need to go to my office every once in a while and do some work. But on Friday, I felt like I could let things slide at the office for a bit, and I made it to a full day of Skiwolf training - all three sessions. Here's what happened:

Session 1:  Skiing at Kincaid. With new snow, spirits were high. 

Session 2: Afternoon session in the weight room.

Session three: Classroom session with the team's sport psychologist, Jon Osborn. He told us that, just like you have to do physical training every day to gain proficiency at your sport, you also need to do regular mental workouts to build the strong neural connections that allow focused, peak performance. In our classroom session, he taught us how to do these mental workouts.

So there you have it - a day in the life of a Skiwolf.

We're All Smiles Now

 It snowed in Anchorage last week. Looks to me like around six inches at Kincaid Park. (The Ski Club says eight inches.) The forecast for this coming week is stable weather with temperatures staying below 0 degrees C.  So I guess the ski season has begun here in Anchorage! We're pretty happy about it. Rollerskiing was getting kind of old, especially as the roads and paved trails were starting to get icy.

Meanwhile, the alpine team loaded up the trucks and rolled out of town yesterday morning, headed for their annual early-season training camp in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. They'll be there for the next three weeks, getting good quality slalom and giant slalom training every day at Mt Sima.