Voukatti, Finland is a dark cold place. We’ve been training at the Voukatin Sports Center for the past couple days to get ready for our next sprint World Cup in Kuusamo, Finland. The sun looks like a glowing orange orb that pokes it’s face over the horizon at about 9:30 in the morning, but is ready to go down again by 2 o’clock in the afternoon. By 4 PM it’s as black as night.

Despite the short days and commonly cold temperatures, northern Finland is a sick place to train. Skiing is a mainstream sport here and it shows in the way each town prepares its ski trails. Even if there is not a lot of snow they will move as much as possible onto the trail or make snow if they can in order to accommodate all the skiers. Because of the lack of daylight, it’s also common for ski area to have several kilometers of lighted ski trails for afternoon training.

So life has been pretty good here at the Voukatin Sports Center. There is a distance World Cup going on right now in Norway, but Chris Cook, Torin Koos, and I skipped that stop in order to come to Finland and prepare for the World Cup in Kuusamo. Even though traveling to Europe seams easier and easier each time, adjusting to the sleep schedule over here has proved harder than normal. I think a lot of it has to do with the lack of sunlight, or for that matter lack of light in general, during the daytime hours.

The past five days have consisted of some solid training both on the ski trails and in the gym. Our Sprint coach, Chris Grover, is also here with us making sure we’re on track with each work out. So far the workouts have been fairly easy in order to preserve our health as much as possible. Traveling to Europe can put quite a big stress on your body, so the first couple days over here are always a balancing act of how much training you can put in without pushing yourself too far.

Another major health precaution I’ve been taking while over here is really watching out for my lungs. I think this is one area that has helped me stay fairly healthy over the past few years. As XC skiers we hammer on our lungs… there’s no doubt about that. And lets face it, there aren’t too many things our there more valuable to an XC skier than his or her lungs, so we might as well try to take care of them. The cold can be wicked harsh on them when we’re outside training for so long. One of they ways we avoid doing any damage is by wearing lightweight scarf’s over our mouth or these funny respirator things. The goal is just to warm up the air a little bit before it enters my lungs and I think it’s helped me avoid some bad respiratory infections.

We will be hopping in the van tomorrow for the 3-hour drive to Kuusamo. We’ll be there until the World Cups this weekend. For the next few days we’ll be testing skis and putting in some hard intervals on the course to make sure we have every inch of it memorized.

Hope there’s snow on the ground wherever you are and make sure to have fun skiing or snowboarding. Check back in a few for some Kuusamo updates.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 3:43 pm and is filed under andrewnewell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.