L a t e s t  n e w s ..... Rachel Adcock and Gerard Flahive win both races at Scottish Dry Slope Championships ...

'The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams' (Eleanor Roosevelt).

Lynn Sharp, recently reselected to the British team has agreed to write for Racer Ready. 

NEW: August 30: Saas Fee: I wrote about my last dry land training camp a few weeks ago…well that was in preparation for my snow camps that I have now started.  From now until October I am in Saas Fee for 10 days and then home for 10 days consecutively.  It’s great to be back on snow now and I have adapted to it quite well.  Unfortunately Saas Fee’s weather can be quite temperamental, I was here for 6 days at the end of July and two of those days were shut which left me with 3 and half days skiing.  Saas Fee’s glacier is shrinking, and having been here for the last three summer’s its quite scary to see how much of it has gone.  This year is particularly bad, up on the glacier itself is really dirty brown snow, it gets very soft quickly and huge crevasses open up daily!!  It all sounds a bit dodgy but if it’s not safe up the hill then the lifties won’t let us up!

On the camp I’ve just finished this was the problem.  When the glacier was closed on first day out there  I knew it was going to be bad again.  After several closed days and a forecast which was only getting worse, I ended giving up on Saas Fee altogether and I moved camp 8 hours up the road to a giant freezer of a ski hall in Bottrop, North Germany.    I was there 3 days in total, 2 sessions a day so 6 really good slalom sessions.  The slope can hold a 30 gate course and it was icy conditions so all in all it was worth the drive.  I was also training alongside the Norwegian and German team girls for the first few sessions which was good to watch. 

I returned home on the 24th for 10 days at home dryland training, but I was fitness testing at the weekend in Stirling and I’m flying down to London for another fitness test at the Olympic Medical Institute during the week.  As long as I pass my tests then it is back to Saas Fee again on the 4^th so fingers crossed the weather is better!

August 2: As I’m writing this I am sitting on my bed Compexing – an electrical muscle stimulator that I use immediately after heavy training sessions for recovery in my legs.  I have another session this afternoon after lunch so I think I’ll be having a power nap in between once my legs stop twitching!  I am in Lofer at the Olympic training base where I stay all winter, on a fitness camp.  Everything is green though and very different from during the season.  Instead of taking gondolas and chairlifts up the hill, I’ve been walking and cycling up them!  I’ve been doing a lot of mountain hikes and climb’s for endurance sessions this past couple of weeks.  They’ve been getting easier though and it’s really great to see the improvement in my fitness in just weeks - I know I’m getting somewhere and the hard work is worth it.  The altitude training is great too as it’s similar to the altitudes I’ll be training in when I go skiing on a snow camp.  The training is tough but I’ve been in a routine now that I’m used to… before breakfast I have an hour’s recovery bike session.  After Breakfast it’s down to the gym for a weights session or interval training and after lunch, a long endurance training session either hill walking or out on the bike.  The other day I cycled 1500m up a mountain and ended up at 2010m – at the top I could look over at the Kaprun glacier!  It was a 6 hour cycle all in all, but worth the massive bowl of Spaghetti Bolognese I got at the top!!  There’s always a core and flexibility session each day as well to fit in, but it’s not all slaving away, I’ve been having lots of fun – walking back down after a mountain hike fills me with a sense of achievement especially after seeing the awesome view at the top!  There are hundreds of miles of bike paths to use all which go different places, away from the traffic like there is back home in Glasgow.   And I’ve also been rock climbing outdoors which is actually really good for skiers.  It builds up agility and body awareness and is good for the core stability too.  On my day off the other day we went rafting for a few hours which was brilliant and then hung out at the swimming pool at Lofer. 

It seems a long way to travel out to Austria just for Dry land training but there are so many options around Lofer for training and activities. Plus it always helps having people to train with and so was nice having the other full-time girls there to push each other along.   So after this fitness camp, I head back to Glasgow to continue training and I have fitness tests every 6 weeks, one is coming up.  Hopefully my hard work the last few fitness camps will help me pass it in build up for the first snow camp in Saas Fee.  It’s been a long time now since I skied back in April doing an APC course so I really can’t wait to get back on the boards and I’ll report back to you on how it went.