August 23, 2011 (Snow Farm, New Zealand) – The Snow Farm, New Zealand is a special place, if you want to ski in summer there is no better conditions in the world, than in New Zealand. That’s why the Canadian XC ski team heads there every year for a training as long as I can remember, at least in past eight years. This was a fifth year in the row for me.

Unlike previous years this time it was only the men’s World Cup team that made the trip including Alex “Hollywod” Harvey, Devon “Kersh” Kershaw, Lenny “Shorty” Valjas and myself – and of course Justin W. our coach, Joel “JJ” Jacques our wax technician, and physiotherapy-slave Shayne – a small but very well-functioning team.

Besides the US ski team and some local, New Zealand/Australian skiers, we were out-numbered by the Russian Sprint Team. You know, if the Russians are going anywhere they are bringing a good number of people, just in case.

So you can see that we had a pretty good company for the New Zealand Winter Games, which didn’t go as planned for our team. The US guys dominated in the distance and sprint races – Alex got 3rd in the 15km classic race and our young talent Lenny was 4th in the sprint final.

But that’s OK, we have almost 3 months to get in shape for a first World Cup race. What’s important, is that we had pretty good/hard training out there as a base for a next camp.

The last two days of the camp were very stormy, and the 10km skate race, that I really wanted to do, got canceled, as did most of the flights out of the North Island. But our flight to Sydney somehow got through, and we had pretty good evening there before returning to Canada.

Sydney BTW is a beautiful city, and I hope to visit there at a later date and for a longer time. Next on our calendars is a Park City/Salt Lake City camp in mid-September.