OWI ski cross coach Matt Lyons reports on ski cross training in Colorado, as Jenny Owens prepares for the opening of the World Cup in the New Year:

Despite some continuing weather battles this past week, the OWI/NSWIS ski cross program has been getting in some great preparatory training at Copper Mountain in Colorado.

After a week of good tech training with a mixed bag of teams, from club alpine programs from the flatlands of the US mid-west to the World Cup teams of the US, Slovenia, Sweden and Germany, we moved into some speed training this week with one of the US regional programs (Rocky Central).

Daily snowfalls of between 10-30cm have made life a little more challenging than the past couple of weeks of sunshine, but the base has remained firm and fast and, with a bit of effort, we've managed to get in a good week of SG and GS training.

The Japanese ski cross team has arrived and we're about to get into some start-training and some further GS with them over the next week or so. 

Jen is skiing well and looking forward to the World Cup circuit kick-off in January. Unfortunately, the Jeep pro-tour events have succumbed to the vagaries of the global credit crisis and so our first event will be the opening World Cup in St Johann, Austria, on January 5.

As a result, and to get in some competitive environment training, we've planned to do a couple of warm-up FIS GS races here at Winter Park and up in Nakiska in Canada, through to Christmas.

Following that, we're planning on heading to Germany for a week or so of training with the German ski cross program at their National Training Centre in Grasgehren.

That'll bring us to the start of January and the beginning of the main part of our competitive season.