Adventures of an American Biathlete: A chilly start

After nearly three weeks into my time here in West Yellowstone, I finally had the opportunity to race, with my rifle! Today was the first day of the North American Cup #2, here in West Yellowstone, MT. I have already had nearly three weeks of skiing in here, which has been awesome. I also have been able to do two Nordic sprint qualifier races and a five kilometer skate Nordic race, all o f which went well and I am happy to have been able to do. But today I was very happy to be starting a race with a rifle on my back.

After feeling pretty crummy yesterday and taking the day off, I was a little worried I would be full on sick today, but was happy to wake up feeling much better and was ready to race.

Looking out the window as I woke up, there was a heavy fog sitting low in the sky. My initial thought was that it had warmed up a bit, believing the fog meant warmer weather. This silly assumption of mine was simply not true. It was about -7 F out around 7:30 and didn't feel like it warmed up much in the next two hours. Our start was at 10:00, which was when the sun just started to creep over the trees and hit a few open spots on the range and race course. While the little pockets of sunlight were nice, it was still COLD! I find it harder to warm your body up in the cold, making the maximum race output you're working towards a little harder to reach, but it is doable. Shooting with a numb trigger finger on the other hand, is much harder to deal with. I was bummed to have come into shoot prone with my trigger finger feeling like a frozen Popsicle. Going on faith that my trigger finger knew what it was doing, I got through my prone stage with two misses. That made for two more misses then I had hoped, but such is life and I still had two more loops to ski, along with my standing stage. Thankfully after a bit more skiing my hand came around and warmed up. I took my time with standing and hit all but one target. Overall an okay day on the range and not a bad start to the season.

Upon my finish I was finally starting to feel the warmth from the sun. During my cool down it was starting to feel like a whole different day outside. In the end my three misses and skiiing speed added up to a win for the day, which always feels nice!

Happy to have one race this winter in my belt, I am now putting my focus and energy into the International Biathlon Cup trials series that will be held at Mount Itasca in Minnesota next week. There is one more race here in West tomorrow, but after looking at my schedule I have decided to sit this one out and prepare for Minnesota. Tomorrow afternoon I am off to Bozeman to catch an early flight Monday morning to good ol' MSP! Looking forward to spending a little time in my home state and to have some awesome races there as well! Let's just hope the cold doesn't follow us there.

cheers,