August 31, 2013 – Here’s the latest from US and Canadian skiers on the move… Devon Kershaw wraps up the team’s NZ training camp at the Snow Farm; Jessie Diggins gives us the low down on skiing with boys and turning 22; and Holly Brooks shares some great training pics including mega-donuts via coach Matt Whitcomb – and to get your engines revved up we’ve got some Tweets .

Check out the view…
Happy Birthday Jessie D from Holly and Andy.
Ivan B’s Blue Bird day in NZ.
Last day of NZ training camp with Alex H…
New wheels for Sadie G

Devon Kershaw
The NST Chronicles
Like a moth to the light, it seems these last ten years there always comes a time when I find myself wrestling a surfeit of warm weather gear into my worn, beat up, green busted up duffel bag – willing it to all fit. It makes no difference that while I sweat, swear and battle my belongings to fit into a space that always seems unreasonably small, the temperature outside hovers in the high twenties with that sun shining brightly on those high rocky mountain peaks, most definitely devoid of snow and with winter about as far away from nature’s thoughts as one can imagine.

Warm or not, gear fitting into small spaces or not, it’s August and that means a few things in my life: I probably have a sunburnt nose, the Toronto Blue Jays are officially out of the playoff race for yet another year and a band of assiduous Canadian ski racers and I will soon fly south in search of snow for our annual Southern Hemisphere training camp. Think of us as the antithesis of Canada Geese that fly south in the winter in search of sun. While we are just as loud, we tend to have a more colorful and profane vocabulary than those feathered screeching creatures.

Read more here.

Jessie Diggins
On Skiing with Boys, Speeds with Girls, and Turning 22
Back in my final years of high school, I did a fair amount of skiing with boys. It was a fun challenge to hop into intervals with them, and occasionally, get to hop in a race with them. Though it seemed a weird coincidence that the race I did with the boys happened to be the most times my poles were ever stepped on or knocked sideways during a race…till I made the world cup, anyways. Today I reverted back into my high school self, getting carried away (sort of) during intervals and jumping in behind the boys, to see what I could learn and to push myself just a little bit farther.

The team was doing 4 x 12 minute L3 intervals, with the last 30 seconds of each being an all-out sprint. It was a pretty cool workout. But it was just windy enough that if I slipped in behind the boys and rode in the draft, I was able to keep up for a while at the top of my L3 (and while the boys were comfortably in their zone). There’s a lot of useful things I’ve learned from skiing with boys. I can spit clear off the ski trail. I know how to blow a great snot rocket. And today I picked up on a couple of things I would do well to improve on. The guys ski really close together…like, really close, which is a good thing because that way you can actually get in the draft and use the people around you.

Read more here.

Holly Brooks
Training Camp in the 84098
Just got home from TWO killer weeks of altitude training camp in Park City; home of the US Ski Team!  Only this time, I went with my club, APU. I’m going to use my blog to focus on a couple of pictures from the two weeks. If you want to read more about what we did check out my teammate, Sadie Bjornsen’s blog here…

Read more here.