Kris Freeman

A hard 50K followed immediately by difficult trans-continental travel is not a recipe for feeling good. If Kris’s experience is any indication most of the world’s strongest skiers have had one hell of a tough week. But each of the past few days has been better than the day before, and things appear to be headed in the right direction for Kris in a timely manner. Heart rates have been extremely low, which is encouraging. Mostly Kris has felt like he’s got tired muscles and a really sore shoulder. He’s back on about 1600mg of ibuprofen per day which makes a big difference to the shoulder. He figures that, if a little vitamin I is sufficient to control the pain then it’s probably not too serious. The ski team has brought in a PT who arrived this evening and will be there through Holmenkollen, which is good news for Kris.

The training load is very low right now. Wednesday was a fairly long day because Kris wanted to ski until he started feeling good. It never happened, so he finally gave up. Thursday he felt quite a lot better, and today he said the difference was night and day. He was popping over the hills, and is starting to feel like his race-ready self again.

The only change of plans since the last write-up is that he’s now planning to skip the Drammen sprint. Kris has not trained specifically for sprinting at all, and the reality is that he unlikely to qualify for the ski-downs. The problem with that is that in Drammen, if he does the sprint, here’s there for the whole day regardless of whether he advances. So it would be a long hard day even if he’s done racing early. Holmenkollen is a much higher priority.

Ski testing has been interesting the past couple of days. Interesting, mostly, because it’s been entirely fruitless. There was fresh snow right before they started skiing on the courses, and for the first day of official training the only grooming was a light track put in behind a snowmobile - no tilling. Today there was no track at all. It’s warm and wet - very Finnish weather in Kris’s estimation..