Mathew Bailey - Training Diary - 07 Aug 2012

We were down the range for the first session this morning. When we got there it was already pretty full with some of the German national team training with fritz fisher a famous biathlon coach. He had Andreas Birnbacher training with him (third in the world cup last season) and Micheal Greis (3 time Olympic champion) amongst others. Part of the Italian team and some junior German teams were also there training so the range was totally full with us on the end of the range. It is great to be on the same range training with some of the best biathletes in the World. I was trying to watch there technique and shooting to maybe pick up little things that would help me become a better biathlete. We zeroed on the range as normal then did some static shoots. Coach then took us over to the new balance assault course that had just been built on the range it was pretty good with a few slack lines and balancing poles to work on your balance so you can ride your ski more and help with down hills and cornering. There was also some tires and the side to practice fast feet and a zig zagging poles to run through. After a little play on here we went into doing some ski ganging (bounding up hills with poles) we did a few loops with some shoots in between and that was our session done for the morning. We had a different session in the afternoon as we were down the swimming pool in ruhpolding doing lengths of the 50m outdoor pool. We did this for a hour and it was a nice change, we went slow but still a little tired after an hour of doing lengths. After which we went off to the diving boards at the pool and all tried the flips we had seen while watching the diving in the Olympics we were not very good with carl the only one doing a back flip :D