We spent the last nine days in oberhof, skiing in the ski arena. The snow hall had a 2 km horse-shoe loop that i skied about 250 km on. It wasn’t action packed, but it provided awesome training, and perfect, consistent conditions. The hall was maintained at minus four degrees and groomed daily. You couldn’t ask for better fall training conditions, especially in September.
For the remainder of the European camp, we moved to Antermatt, Switzerland in the heart of the Alps. October 11th was the first day of training, and the conditions were a big change from oberhof. We went from 15⁰C and shooting in an indoor shooting range to -6⁰C and 30km winds in Switzerland. It was a hard adjustment, but reminded me that biathlon is an outdoor sport.
On October 15th coach iLmar Heinicke decided to cut the Switzerland camp short and move to Klingenthal, Germany. It was getting hard to roller ski in Switzerland, with snow blowing onto the track, but not nearly enough to ski. In East Germany, they had received an unexpected snow dump, and in places there was enough to groom and ski. We skied three days in Klingenthal, and four days in Oberweisenthal. In Klingenthal we only had the option to ski on a 3km cross country track, but Oberweisenthal had a five km loop and the opportunity to shoot. We had perfect conditions! We shot on the range three days, and the skiing was amazing. On the last two days, it was -5⁰C and bright sun. It felt like February rather than October 18th.
