As some of you might know – crosscountry skiing and biathlon are some of my passions.
In North America you will struggle finding better training facilities than the beautifully located Nordic Skiing Centre in Canmore.
The Centre is home to the Canadian crosscountry skiing and the Biathlon teams with outstanding training and competition facilities.
When visiting – as a member of the London Region Nordic Skiing Club (you can imagine that there are not a lot of us around….) – I was given a guided tour of their gym, including the facilities for the top athletes, featuring a custom made treadmill for roller skies.
This beast is the size of a small gym itself and most of the machinery is underneath it in the ground, making it very difficult to fit it through the windows in the first place.
When exercising on the treadmill, athletes need to wear a harness and have to hook themselves up on a rope with a carabiner, to avoid injuries in case that they fall or faint, which happens from time to time if endurance limits are tested.
I was wondering – as the facilities are used by skiers from all over the world – how many world and olympic champions might have hung on this rope and this carabiner over the years…..
This is, providing that they were not attacked by a bear, which currently is a real problem (take a closer look at the small yellow sign..)
The ski tracks are used in the summer also by mountain bikers and runners and it is advisable to have “Bear Spray” ( a very strong pepper spray)
rather than your water bottle with you, when exercising in the forest, hoping that at the end of the session the only bear you have encountered was the one on the outside of your beer can……
The Blue Vet Diary 