Wrapping up in Canmore

We just finished our second to last workout on snow in Canmore. All we have left is a jog this afternoon, a classic sprint time trial tomorrow morning, strength tomorrow afternoon, and then an early Halloween tomorrow evening. We are going costume shopping this afternoon and the girls have a pretttty clever idea. This week we will have done two timetrials, a speed session, and a lot of easy distance. On Monday we had a 10k classic timetrial. The course was 5 laps around the 1.8k loop and I don't think anymone lost count! It went pretty well and I got to ski a lap behind Liz Stephen and see what she was doing so that was the highlight of my workout. It is still early and very few of us were using race skis so we're not getting caught up in the results, we're just viewing it as a good hard effort that will hopefully help ease the transition when the real race season begins in a month!

Erika (Packer photo)

Andy, Sylvan, Skyler

Annie and Sophie (Packer photo)

Annie, Jessie, and Sophie (Packer photo)

Packer photo

In general I've been feeling pretty good but I'm definitely starting to get tired. A couple of the other training highlights of the week were being able to ski some of one of my skate distance sessions behind Eric Packer and some of the guys and feeling like I made a lot of progress on my uphill skating technique. I probably went a little too hard to try to keep up with the boys but I felt it was worth it because I learned a lot and made myself go stride for stride with Packer (Sorry Eric). The other highlight was our speed workout this morning. Skate speed workouts are probably my favorite workout but today was especially awesome because the conditions were perfect, we had a good size group, the weather was beautiful, and everyone had a really positive attitude or if they didn't in the beginning, they definitely did in the end thanks to Matt Whitcomb's motivational pep talks.

Yesterday we had a much needed off day and Eric, Erika, Skyler, Annie, and I decided to go sightseeing. Our first stop was Lake Louise and then we went to Banff for lunch and wandered around for awhile. It was a beautiful day and we took a lot of pictures. Check out Eric's BLOG to see some of his amazing shots!

Lake Louise!

Annie and Sophie

The girls minus Jessie

Skyler, Annie, Sophie, Erika, and Eric (Packer photo)

On Saturday, we each go to our respective homes for about two weeks then Skyler, Annie, Erika, Eric, Gus and I meet back up in Bozeman on November 9th and Jessie and Andy head to Europe! We're looking forward to our last couple of days here but we're also very excited to go home! A couple of us are starting to go a little crazy...