We arrived in San Francisco on Sunday which was actually before we left in Australia! That day we went for a light 40min run on the outside of San Fran which was extremely hard seeing as we were dead after the 13 hour flight. That night we drove to our coaches parents house which was at grass valley which was about 2 hours from San Francisco. The next day we woke up late seeing as jetlag was killing us. From then on our training has compromised of a lot of running - as sadly there is barely any snow in California. We went for a nice scenic run down the Yuber River which totalled in about 14km.

We arrived on Tuesday at Tahoe Donner near Lake Tahoe which is where I am staying till the 8th of January, that same day we went for a really long rollerski with a local club who were generous enough to lend us some gear to use (we thought we would be skiing).

Today we went for our first ski which was on a 2.5km course at Auburn ski club, this consisted of a 30min warm up to get back into the groove as we hadn’t skied for ages. We also did a lot of sprint intervals going uphills, downhills and on flat. We also got about 1cm of snow today which isn’t much but its giving us hope that this trip wont be a complete waste of time.

This weekend me and the other athletes training here in Tahoe are competing in a race at Auburn Ski Club which will most likely comprise a few 2km sprints in the morning and hopefully a 6km race in the afternoon.

The impact of competing in the WYOG is really starting to kick in now which is helping me keep motivated which has been hard with the lack of snow. Can’t wait to compete in Innsbruck.

Alex