Kris Freeman

I had an e-mail waiting for me this morning from Kris - stuck in an airport waiting to get to China. It sounds as though more or less the whole World Cup is stuck someplace or another in asian airports. About half the Norwegian team was with the Americans, but another half had flown direct to Beijing and had been there (when he wrote the e-mail) already for over 12 hours.

The travel situation is a bummer, but on the whole things are looking good. Kris got himself on the Asian scheduled pretty quickly, and generally has been feeling good. After a few days his heart-rate crept up during a couple of training sessions. But it wasn’t because he was tired - it was because he was feeling good and enjoying the skiing. His insulin dose has come up dramatically, which is exactly what we expected and have been looking for as a sign that the overall systemic stress load has come down. There are other signs of an overall state of recovery as well, but they don’t all have to be mentioned here.

Kris says that James Southam came down with some nasty bug, including a pretty high fever. Those guys had been rooming together, and they got separated pretty quickly after James came down sick. Kris sounded much more concerned on James’s behalf than with the chance of his own exposure to some pathogen. He’s pretty confident that he’s done everything he can to stay healthy.

It’s unlikely that Kris will be in touch again until they get back to Japan - if they’ve even left Japan!.