December 26, 2008 (Dusseldorf, Germany) – As I wrestle about in my coach cabin seat at hour seven of an eleven-hour flight from Frankfurt to Seattle, the realization dawns on me – after six weeks and five World Cup starts in Europe I am finally headed home. It’s Monday, Dec. 23rd and I’ll be home just in time for the holidays.

Everyone appreciates heading home just as we can all relate to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz clicking the heels of her glittery red shoes and saying, “There’s no place like home”. After spending a week in exile, in a Swedish cabin quarantined from the rest of my team, followed by five more weeks of bouncing around Europe from ski race venue to venue, from hotel to hotel, I crave a little normalcy – and the comforts of home. I look forward to the looks of city drivers as I ski through the snowy streets of Wenatchee on my rock skis with my yellow Lab as my companion. I look forward to catching up with friends from elementary school yard days; to striding it out along the first ski trails I ever knew; to sitting around the Christmas dinner table with my brother and sister, mom and dad, digging into a monstrosity of slow roasted prime rib with all the accouterments.

And skiing. After starting the season with the most ebullient hopes – I love that word, ebullient, meaning a bubbling up of high-spirited fervor and enthusiasm – my season began slightly below my expectations and continued this progression through the next two sprint World Cups. Yesterday I awoke and I told myself, “Today is another chance. Let’s make the most of it.” Then I went out and did that – in perhaps the most diabolical of ski race formats – the two-man sprint relay.

In bricks-and-mortar terms, the sprint relay begins with perhaps forty teams, broken up in two semi-final heats. The race starts with me racing 1.5km (1 mile). Then I tag off to my teammate Andy Newell. As he navigates his 1.5km segment of the race I try to recover before starting my next 1.5km race-within-the-race. This goes on for six (6) rounds or 3 legs each.

The top three teams from each semi-final move on to the final. The next four fastest non-qualifying teams, regardless of which semi they raced, fill out the World Cup Sprint final. My teammate and I made it in as the 7th seed, the fastest of the “lucky losers.” The eleventh fastest team, Switzerland I, was just .9 seconds behind us. Five teams, four spots in the finals, all separated by less than a second. Welcome to the razor thin edge separating success and close-but-no-cigar of World Cup competition.

Racing an hour later in the finals, under the floodlights of the otherwise dark of the Düsseldorf sky, is what it’s all about. As I spin on an exercise bike trying to clear the leg-burning lactate acid out of my system between races, our Swedish wax tech Petter Johansson says, “You know, we could be on our way back to Sweden if you and Andy didn’t ski so well.” Johansson’s smiling. Maybe even beaming, which is saying a lot of the most-practical of all people, the Swedish blue-collar worker. It’s his way of saying, “Good job. Now forget this and focus on the task at hand. Let’s do something special in the final.”

It’s chasing after moments like these that made me want to be a professional ski racer more than anything in the world – president, professional ball player, derivative analyst at Goldman Sachs – from the second grade on. Moments like these are confirmation that I made a pretty good decision.

For the coaches of the US Ski Team, I’m pretty sure helping athletes put themselves into opportunities like this is what keeps them in the sport, and away from their significant others for significant chunks of the year. For Johansson, I’m pretty sure watching his team rip around the track on race skis he prepared beats the 3,400 kilometer road trip he made to get out in his fully-loaded Fiat Ducato cargo van from Northern Finland to Central Europe.

In the end, a Russian took out five other skiers in a horribly skied 180-degree turn on the fourth of six laps. Newell was one of them. Norway I, Sweden I, Russia I and France I all get away clean. We fight our way back, almost all the way. In the end, we finish fourth, four seconds behind the winning Norwegians.

Personally, only my third place in the 2007 Estonian World Cup classic sprint is a better result. For the United States, no relay team has done better, ever.

I am close. I am fit. After a couple weeks of mediocrity, the training, the talent, the desire and the racing opportunity are all coming together – an ideal way to end the first block of my racing season. Now I have a handful of days at home to enjoy, to get out for a couple hours on the Tele boards, then time to sip afternoon an cappuccino, before my next hard period of training start.

The heart of the season beckons ahead. Bring it on.