.: New Zealand

Well, I just got into Vancouver from a long 12 hour flight, so I guess this is a good time for another update. I just got back from a three week training camp with the Quebec Training Center and the Senior National Team in New Zealand. We spent the majority of our time at the Snow Farm, situated on the south island, about an hour away from Queenstown. The day after we arrived at the Snow Farm I started to feel not so good. I guess I must have picked something up on the long day of travel. So I took the first three or four days easy to try to get better, it seemed to drag on forever, but after a couple days I started to feel good enough to start training again. Half way through the camp we signed up for the New Zealand Winter Games, which consisted of three races in three days, a 15km classic, a skate sprint and a 10km skate. I decided to just race the first two races because I still wasn’t feeling 100%. The races went better than I thought they would, I was 15^th in the 15km and and 13^th in the sprint, which I’m happy with for this time of the season. Right after the last race we had a rest day so we decided to take advantage of it and go to the east coast of New Zealand at Dunedin for a day of surfing.I’ve never really surfed before so it was an interesting experience for me. The waves were ranging from about three to nine feet in height, and I found out that when you crash on one of the bigger waves, it can really throw you around, they are really powerful! After a fun day of surfing for about five or six hours we headed back to the Snow Farm for another week of skiing.Overall the ski conditions where pretty good, not quite as good as in Canada in the winter, but better than anywhere Canada has to offer in it’s summer! Now it’s back to Quebec for be for two weeks, before I head to Austria for one more on snow summer training camp at the Datchstein Glacier.