Long time without news.  The season is finally underway.  Well first of all, I think everyone saw how our long Olympic Trials went.  It was indeed very long.  But at least now we can work with the same team all season long and we have a lot of time to prepare for the Olympics properly.  Overall I'm very happy with my results there, especially the first 2/3 of it.  At the end I just wanted it to be over.  It was so much stress on a lot of days.

 

After the Trials, we had a 2 days of rest and 3 days of easy skating in Montreal.  Then we left for Asia.  First stop, Thailand.  We went to Phuket, Thailand for a good week of vacation just to rest and relax after those long trials.  It was very nice;  beautiful beaches, great food and nice people.   We did some snorkling, some surfing, etc ... everything there is to do around a beach. 

 

Then we left for China (Hangzhou) just southwest of Shangai (I think)for the first World Cup of the season.  It was pretty hard to get on the ice again after a long rest like that, especially since our coach had planned some hard training sessions for us this week, which we never do the week before a competition.

It will be like that until the European World Cups.  That's what we are aiming for.  It's important because it's those competitions that will decide the number of skaters per country that will skate at the Olympics. (We want to have 3 per distance, the maximum.)  For that we need to have 3 of our skaters in the top 8 of each distance.  So it will not be easy.

 

Anyway, here I am after my 1500m.  I did my best, but I did not feel great.  My legs were heavy from that week of super hard training. Our coach had warned us that we would feel like that.  I've never felt like that during races before.  My legs were burning so fast.  Anyway, I still managed to do ok.  But we expect better results in Europe.

 

Bye for now,
Jonathan