Rest and be Thankful

In the cross country ski world, April is generally a rest month. The season comes to an end in April and after 11 months of training and races, the coaches finally let you have a few weeks off to recharge the batteries for the new season ahead.

Well, I didn't even get a month off this year - I'd been racing in Sweden up until the 11th April and then last weekend, the squad has a new additional coach who thought it would be nice to come and introduce himself and also put us through some testing as well.

So, rest month cut to a few weeks and then straight into a 3km run and balance testing. Not sure if it was the 3 weeks off or the gusto that I put into the warm up, but I felt terrible at the beginning of the race. Looking back at my times, I still managed it in a tad over 10 minutes and was slightly up on my timings for this time last year, but I felt like a heavily loaded donkey on this one.

Hopefully its a trigger for the year ahead and the plan is to do testing more regularly over the summer. A session of balance in the gym was also on the cards this weekend and the new coach managed to bring out just about every piece of gym equipment to set up a pretty impressive assault course - must be his military background.

That said, it was a good weekend and I have kind of missed training with my teammates.

This week, it's exam time at school. I've been pretty lucky and my exams are spread out over the coming weeks - therefore study is slightly helped that I can concentrate on them one at a time. Maths up first - and I didn't come out of it feeling that the world had collapsed around me, so fingers crossed.

It's also fingers crossed for me on Friday this week as well. I've managed to get onto the second round of interviews for the Young Peoples Sports Panel with SportScotland. There is a 2 hour interview and I'm pretty nervous but also very excited about it. I don't know what to expect but delighted to have made it down to the final selection list from over 200 candidates - I'll let you know how I get on in my next blog.

The schedule over the coming weeks is pretty hectic with exams, training and some live events which I'm helping out at. After I get back from Edinburgh on Friday, it's straight into supporting an Oasis tribute band in my home town. I'm on lighting and we spent the whole of Wednesday setting it up - looking forward to "Rolling with It" in more ways than one this weekend.