September 3, 2009 (Steamboat Springs, CO) – SkiTrax is excited to announce that top US Nordic Combined skier and 2003 Sprint World Champ, Johnny Spillane, has joined our Skier Blog section. Spillane talks about his summer training with lots of bike riding, the NC Team’s training camp in France, and about the recent minor surgery on his knee.

Summer Training and Surgery Update
Hello everyone, I’m excited to be working with SkiTrax to join their Skier Blogs and start keeping readers and fans up to date on my progress and the US Nordic Combined Team as well as we head towards the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

I’ve been on the US Nordic Combined National team since 1999. I was an alternate at the 1998 Olympics and competed in 2002 and 2006. In 2003 I was the Nordic Combined World Champion in the sprint event at Val di Fiemme, Italy.

I am stationed in Steamboat Springs, Colorado and I do most of my physical training here. We have a 68-meter jump that we are able to train on, and though it is not ideal, it is good enough to maintain our jumping form in between camps. I make the 5-hour drive to Park City fairly often to train at the Utah Olympic Park and that is where we do the majority of our jumping.

As far as XC skiing goes, I ride my road bike a lot in the spring and early summer. I have found that it’s a great way for me to get a ton of hours in without beating up my body. This year our A-team went on a really cool camp to France; we were stationed in Courcheval and mixed jumping with a bunch of riding. Many of the famous climbs at the Tour De France are in this region and we road as many as we could including the Col de Madelaine, Cormet de Roseland, Lalpe d’Huez and Col du Galibier. We were able to watch the Tour as they rode over Col de le Saises and Petite St. Bernard. It was great to watch the best riders in the world in their element.

Besides biking in the early summer, I try to get the rest of my hours by doing a mix of running and roller skiing. Where I live there is awesome roller skiing with sweet pavement and some big hills that are great for intervals.

Unfortunately I have been doing all of this on a bum knee, and when I got back from France I had it checked out. Turns out I tore my medial meniscus fairly badly and last week I had it scoped. They had to put five sutures in to repair it. The good news is that it is a relatively minor surgery and I am hoping to be back on my feet in a matter of weeks. Now I spend most of my day either icing my knee or in therapy, and hopefully I will be off crutches in a few days.

As far as the rest of the summer goes, I’m hoping to be back to full training by mid- to late-September. At that point we will be starting our final preparation for snow. We will be doing more intervals and fewer hours with a couple really big weeks thrown in the middle. In October we have Nationals in Lake Placid so it should be a good test for the team before we get on snow.

Until then train hard and ski fast!