July 25, 2010 (Wanaka, NZ) – After a six-year break, it’s nice to be back in the Southern Hemisphere winter at the Snow Farm in Wanaka, New Zealand.  Since my arrival with the rest of the US team on Tuesday, the skiing conditions have been excellent, the food has been superb and this place is already feeling like home.

The travel down from Anchorage went smoothly.  For some reason I find the 12hr flight from San Francisco to Auckland easier to handle than an 8.5 hour flight from Washington’s Dulles to Munich, Germany. I settled in, watched a few movies, and made sure to get up every couple hours to keep the blood flowing.  Before I knew it we were in Auckland and a few hours later, we were strapping on our skis at the Snow Farm.

The first couple days were mainly distance.  All the trails are open, so there is plenty of terrain to ski.  On Thursday I put in some solo level 3 classic intervals to wake up the body, 5x5min.  It felt good to pick up the pace and glide on real snow.   In the afternoon, we drove down to Wanaka for a strength session.

On the next day’s schedule was some skate speed training as a team. We practiced starts, transitions and fast finishes.  A couple were done alone and then a few more head-to-head heats with a teammate. The workout was challenging and fun and it flew by,  despite a brisk wind.

On Saturday we joined forces again for an L3 classic workout, 5x7min.  Liz, Morgan and I took turns leading up a sweet section of gradual striding, intermixed with a few flats and turns.   The tracks were freshly groomed and the kick was solid.  Skiing doesn’t get much better than this!  In the afternoon, we made our second trip down the mountain to do strength in Wanaka. A solid first week of three finished strong with a 3-min hold in the plank position.

Today (Sunday) was an off day from training.  Of course it turned out to be clear and beautiful, and the skiing looked to be near perfect again.  It was tempting to sneak in a short ski just because it was so nice.  But I reminded myself of the two weeks of training left in this camp and opted to rest today for more quality this week.  With no training to be done, I dinked around on my computer, did some laundry and got one of the highest quality sports massages I’ve ever had.  So far life at the Snow Farm is pretty sweet.

I haven’t had the chance to take many pictures yet but check out Pete V’s shots here.
And now, week 2 begins…

Cheers!

Kikkan Randall