I am absolutely not experienced with this at all but I feel like a blog is a very good way to write down some parts of my life and have it to reflect on later. This will mostly be for my own personal experience but also for anyone who’s interested.
The last few weeks have been quite hectic but really quite fun so here’s some of what I did…
I went to an altitude camp in Copper Mountain, Colorado with my cross country team from June 23rd to June 28th. This was a really great experience and we definitely grew closer as a team and had a chance to bond. Copper Mountain was an incredible place to stay for the week, surrounded by mountains and blue skies nearly every day. Being at 10,000 feet was a somewhat brutal change from 1,000 feet here in MN but it was all part of the experience.
After coming home from Colorado, we had five days in Plymouth during which I spent a lot of time recovering and trying to get my heart rate back down after altitude and a hard training week. My family also ran a four mile race on the 4th of July which was extremely hot but went pretty well.
We drove to Cable, Wisconsin on Thursday morning and stayed at a cabin there for three days before my sister and I went to the Regional Elite Group (REG) nordic camp at Lakewoods Resort. The cabin was really fun and I spent a lot of quality time with my family which doesn’t happen often enough with each of our busy schedules. At REG, we skied twice a day most days and did some fitness testing as well. The fitness testing included an uphill run time trial, uphill double pole time trial, and agility test. The testing is a very useful way of tracking training progress and determining what areas need work and which are already fairly strong. The week was full of hard workouts but also really great experiences. This camp was also a very good opportunity to workout with other skiers from the Midwest and Great Lakes regions and spend time with skiers I don’t get to see often. After coming back from REG, I took a rest day and then got back to training this week.
Mara McCollor 