Checking in from US Biathlon Team Camp in Austria

Written by GRP Biathlete Jake Brown

We didn’t do much hiking, but one afternoon we had a gorgeous outing up to the Guttenberghutte

Morning commute to the glacier via gondola- you can tell why there was a Covid outbreak traced back to the gondola last year!

Jake Brown here, sending greetings and an update from beautiful Ramsau, Austria. I’m here with the US Biathlon Team men’s contingent, finishing up what has been an excellent training camp with plenty of variety in workout types and opportunities for development.

This was my first European training camp trip. Before arriving I was hesitant if the advantages of training in Europe would outweigh the cost of traveling overseas: jetlag, lost training days, not sleeping in my own bed, and new foods for the body to get used to. However, Europe offers some notable training and racing benefits that we don’t have access to in the eastern US at this time of year: snow, international biathlon racing, testing, and altitude.

Ramsau am Dachstein, Austria has served as our training launch-pad the past three weeks and has provided access to all these resources. Ramsau has the added benefit of being the home of the men’s National Team coach, Vegard Bitnes, and his four-year-old son Henrik, who is blossoming in his role as part-time coach, part-time athlete, full-time “Duracell rabbit.”

Early days up on the glacier: beautiful, icy conditions. The groomed trail is a 1km of s-turns in the open field.

Snow!

Up on Ramsau’s Dachstein glacier, stored snow from last winter is pushed out in September to allow for extra-early season skiing. After spending our first week of camp focused on dryland training, we’ve put in eight mornings snow skiing up on the glacier. There are few things that get a cross-country skiing more excited than the first skis of the year- this year was no exception. Now after over 20 hrs of skiing up on sloppy glacier snow, I’ll welcome October dryland training with open arms.

The first week on the glacier we were spoiled with cold weather overnight, which made for hard conditions and excellent crust skiing on the glacier’s natural snow. We made sure not to drift too far from the groomed loops for fear of crevasses, snow-bridges, and glacier gnomes. A few warm rainy nights were all it took to melt the natural snow. Soon the glacier’s dirty summer state had returned, with striations of moraine and rivers of melt flowing toward its divide. Back to the 1km loop we went.

The US Biathlon Men’s Team

Altitude

This year we are looking to spend more time at altitude in preparation for the Beijing Olympics, where the cross-country and biathlon events will be contested at 1500m. Ramsau is at a modest altitude of 1200m, and the Dachstein is up at 2600m. Accordingly, our skiing on the glacier has been SLOW. The focus was simply to get used to the balance of skis, translate our technical progress from rollerskis to snow, and move a lot of oxygen through the body. I wish I could have transported myself to Oberhof for a few days to rip some intervals with the GRP ski team, but alas, I was forced to endure beautiful views from a majestic glacier while poking along at a snail’s pace. We supplemented our slow glacier skiing with faster workouts on Ramsau’s rollerski-biathlon loop in town.

International Racing

At the end of our first week in Austria we took a weekend racing trip to Hochfilzen, an Austrian town and military base two hours away which boasts one of the IBU World Cup’s iconic biathlon venues. These Austrian Cup rollerski races turned out to be quite competitive as the Swiss, Austrian, and Italian national teams, along with a few German athletes and our US men’s team, all showed up ready to rumble.

The races reminded me that biathlon in Europe is at an incredibly high level with excellent participation (57 men were on the start list for our race). I finished 16th with 80% shooting in the first race, 19th with 75% in the second. For biathlon, there is no better training session than racing against athletes who are better than you. Plus, sometimes it’s the slap in the face that shows you what you need to work on and, in turn, brings you closer to becoming your best.

Testing

In our final week of camp, the US biathlon wax techs joined us up on the glacier to test new skis. I’m lucky to get a few new pairs of skis from Salomon this year, and Gio (one of the techs) and I skied a few kilometers on each to get an initial idea for what grind the techs will put on what ski.

In addition to ski testing, we also participated in a day of physiological testing at Hochfilzen. Luckily for us, Vegard has good relationships with the physiologists in the Austrian Ski Federation as he was a coach for the Austrian women from 2017-2019. “Sanny,” the physiologist who administered our tests, and Vegard put us through the ringer with back-to-back testing sessions on the rollerski treadmill.

The first test was a morning lactate profile test, where we repeated 13-minute stages of varying grades at progressing speeds; our heart rates were recorded every 2-3 minutes (with every grade change) and our lactate was taken at the conclusion of each stage until we hit 4.0mmol (considered by many physiologists to be a good mark for anaerobic threshold). The difficulty came toward the end, since the test allowed you to push over 4.0mmol on some uphill sections before recovering on the flat section prior to having your ear pricked for a lactate sample. Most of us made it to 5 or 6 stages.

The second test was an early afternoon (read: too soon after lunch!) VO2 max test running on the rollerski treadmill. This was a short one. After a warmup on the spin bike, Sanny hooked us up with all the gear: treadmill harness, heart rate monitor, mask, flow sensor, and tubing that routed our exhaled breath to the analyzer on our back. Then we were released to run on a 3% grade. The treadmill started out at a crawl, slowly increasing speed at an almost unperceivable acceleration of 1 km/hr per minute. Then the task was simple: keep up with the treadmill until you can’t anymore. It was brutal, and I pushed myself to the limit. I hope the effort given in both tests pays off and that Vegard is able to use the data acquired to inform our training going forward.

It’s been a privilege to get access to some top training resources and experiences in Ramsau. At the end of the day, though, what matters is the accumulation of smart, hard work, no matter where you are. I’m looking forward to getting back to Craftsbury for a brief rest before continuing the mission of self-improvement.

The view from our AirBnB never got old

Glacier skiing!