Hi Everyone!

US Biathlon is raffling off 4 tickets to this year’s Superbowl! This is an all-expenses paid trip for you and three guests for two nights in Indianapolis! The raffle tickets are only $2 a piece but the contest ends at 1pm EST on Thursday, February 2. Thanks for the support and good luck!

-LB

http://www.celebritiesforcharity.org/raffle/once-in-a-lifetime-super-bowl-game-raffle

Hey Everyone!

We are now in beautiful Antholz, in the sunny Dolomite Alps of northern Italy.  Just a couple of days until the first race here.  There is plenty of snow (about 1 meter) and the weather has been great so far.  Check out a few photos and video of the surroundings (above).

Cheers,

LB

Now those are some intense fans! Dumping it Portland style!

As the snow beat down on me in Oberhof during the Mass Start today, I was psyched to learn that my sis, mom, and a bunch of friends in Portland were cheering me on back home in the States via the interweb.  For those of you confused by the hand gestures in the photo as well as the title of this post, “Dump It” is a catch phrase that my sis and I, along with several friends, came up with during the past year.  Loosely translated, it refers to anything “cool, interesting, extraordinary, or just plain insane”.  For example, one could scream, “Dump It!” just prior to bungy-cording off a bridge or setting off a trebuchet on a cold winter’s night.  Used as a cheer, one can yell, “Dump it!”  as a means of telling someone to “Go for it!”, “Rip it up!”, “Go for the Gold!”, etc.  To flesh out the phrase, we all came up with the international sign for “Dump It” (See above photo) so that it can be both an auditory and visual experience.

It was a fun race today with a lot of lead changes and an incredibly close field.  I had a couple misses in the first standing stage which took me out of contention for the lead group, but I was happy to come back and clean the final stage to finish in 16th.  Although I think there was roughly 30,000 spectators in the Oberhof Stadium today, I think the “Best Fan” award has to go to the Portland Posse for organizing what looked like a sweet Stateside biathlon party!  Thanks guys and see you (via the net) next week in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic!

-LB

The break is over and I’m back in Oberhof, Germany for the start of World Cup #4.  It has been a mix of wind, rain, and snow since I arrived on Monday, but it looks to be calming down a little bit as I write this post.  We start off this evening with the men’s relay at 6:20pm CET.  The last few days of training, the organizers have only opened a 1.5km loop on account of their being very little snow elsewhere on the course.  So today will be the first time any of the racers will be able to preview the course – an hour or so before the start!  It snowed about 10 inches overnight and the venue looks entirely different from yesterday.  Should be a good race as long as the Oberhof fog doesn’t move in!

Since the last races in Hochfilzen, I travelled to Portland, ME where I spent Christmas at my sister’s house with family and friends.  There was really no snow to speak of, but it was great to get a little down time and relax over the holidays.  Christmas morning brought some big surprises – the biggest of which was definitely a brand new Trebuchet which I found sitting in the driveway of Kendra’s house.  Thanks to KB’s boyfriend, Drew and our friend Thomas for wasting two free weekends to build what is probably the coolest christmas present ever made!  (See the picture gallery for details).  As is stated in the Apple Macbook Dictionary, The Trebuchet is a “machine used in medieval warfare for hurling large stones or other missiles”.  In our case, the “other missiles” included a basketball, a pumpkin, and several members of the squash family.  Cumberland Fairgrounds was successfully laid under siege for the better part of an hour, and the Herrigel-Bailey fiefdom was preserved.

After the break, I headed back over to Munich on the 27th for a small training camp in Ruhpolding, Germany, the site of this year’s World Championships.  While there, teammate Leif Nordgren and I spent the mornings training on the biathlon venue with the help of Tobias Reiter behind the scope.  In the afternoons, we had the opportunity to take a couple skitours in the Bavarian backcountry with some of the Ruhpolding locals.

After a solid training block, Leif and I headed through seven hours of traffic to Oberhof on January 2nd.  Check out the photo gallery for a few photos from the past couple of weeks.

Happy New Years!

-LB

The first three world cups are almost finished and I’m getting ready to head back to the States for about a week.  I’m looking forward to a little rest and recovery and the fact that I’ll get to see friends and family for a week.  The second week of racing here in Hochfilzen turned out to be quite a bit different than the first even though we were racing identical race formats on identical courses.

We got a big snowstorm on the day of the Sprint that dumped three inches of new snow on the course during the first half of the men’s race.  This made the course slow in the beginning and fast at the end, not unlike the race at the Olympics.  I had a good race and finished in 6th place when I crossed the line.  Most of the top 30 world cup contenders had already finished so I thought that it would stay a top-ten.  After that, the snow stopped, and all of us finishers sat in the athlete’s changing room and watched our results slip down the results board.  By the end, I was in 21st.

But, that’s biathlon.  This is a sport where not only do you have to execute two separate disciplines, but you also have to have a little bit of luck on your side.  I have to say, at bib #42, I was not as worse off as Jay and Tim who drew earlier bibs.  Regardless, I was happy with the race and looked forward to the Pursuit.

The Pursuit day dawned much the same as the Sprint, with gusty winds and about a foot of new snow, with fresh heavy snow falling from the sky.  It wasn’t able to shoot as well in the first three stages as the previous week, but I managed to get up to 13th place with 2 misses by the time I headed into the last standing stage.  Unfortunately, I had another lapse of focus and missed two in the last stage and finished in 25th.  The first time was a bummer, last week was frustrating when I missed in the last stage again, now, I’m just motivated to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  Of course this is something that is more a mental game then anything else.  I know I can shoot well in the last stage of a four stage race.  Now it’s just a matter of getting the job done!  On a positive note, Jay had a  great race with clean shooting and finished 9th.

Overall, I’m excited about the way the season has started and looking forward to the next trimester of racing after Christmas.  We will be heading to Oberhof, Germany for World Cup 4 after the New Year.  Oberhof is always an exciting event because they routinely have a crowd of around 30,000 spectators per race.  After that it Nove Mesto, Czech Republic and Antholz, Italy.

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

-LB

We arrived to our hotel here in Hochfilzen last night after a longer day of travel than expected.  Ironically enough, we left Ostersund in a snowstorm.  Then, after a 3-hr layover in Stockholm, we arrived in Munich just in time to sit on the bus and wait for another hour and a half.  When you send the whole world cup down to Central Europe at once, it is inevitable that someone’s bags will be lost.  So, we sat on the bus in the parking lot and waited for a few of the Norwegians to get there bags.  After that, a two-hour trip, and we were at the hotel by 9:30.

The tracks look good here.  They’ve laid out about 3.5 km of manmade snow and it has been snowing all afternoon.  It’s a quick turnaround during this phase of racing and we’ll be back at it again on Friday morning with the Sprint Race.

Here are a few pics from the races last week, courtesy of Sam Merrens.  Sam – Thanks for the pics and good luck this weekend if you get the chance to race!

http://eurovision.digotel.com/ibu/index.html

Finally a little bit of natural snow is falling here in Ostersund. This is the first snow falling out of the sky that I’ve seen this year! Just in time for the US crew racing the IBU cup here this morning!

Hi Everyone,

The snow is flying and winter is in full swing here in blustery Sweden!

Er… wait… that’s not right.  Oh yeah, that was last November.  This year is a whole different ball of wax, or ball of mud as it were.

We arrived last Tuesday to above-freezing temps and nothing but green Swedish tundra to look at as we descended through the clouds of Jamtland.  But not to be outdone by the milquetoast meteorological conditions, the Ostersund venue organizers planned accordingly and stowed away close to 40,000 cubic meters of snow during end of last winter.  They buried it under a blanket of sawdust and let it sit all summer until it came time for biathletes from around the world to make Ostersund there preseason training ground once again.  There is presently a nice 4km loop that spans the entirety of all the various race courses that will be used for the World Cup starting in a little over  a week.

The training has been pretty good so far and other than the stark contrast of green grass directly adjacent to white snow, the conditions are pretty normal.  I’ve spent the majority of my time getting used to the feeling of snow again – lots of skiing and getting used to skis on the feet while shooting.  Tomorrow is the first Time Trial of the year on snow.  I’m looking forward to racing the Ostersund course once again!

Other than that, I spent the first week here pining for my beloved laptop which decided to crash the day before I left the States.  After arriving at Apple Store in Albany,  a brief trip to Tennessee, back to LP, then across the pond with teammate Annelies Cook, my little window to the world is back with me once again.  I was a little saddened to realize how attached I am to this internet thing.  While my computer was away, I had to do things like read actual books and play my guitar to occupy my free time rather than stare at a digital screen.  I cruised through some serious reading and was a little reluctant to turn the beast back on when it arrived.  But, you can only stare out into the depths of Swedish darkness for so long before the eyes yearn for something brighter… like a laptop screen.  So, after a brief hiatus from the 21st century world gadgets and gizmos, I am now back online, fully pixillating my way from one site to the next as the hum of the hard drive whistles and whirs beneath my fleeting key-taps.

-Lowell