
Sunday Kris knew he was sick. Yesterday, Monday, he woke up feeling worse. We caught a van down to Oslo from Beitostolen (about 3.5 hours of winding snow-covered road) and stayed the night at an airport hotel. This morning Kris woke up feeling better. Yesterday the races for this weekend were looking like a dim possibility. At least, that was my own private assessment, and Pete gave voice to a similar sentiment. Kris was hanging onto an optimistic outlook for the weekend - provided he didn’t kill himself in the meantime. He figured that 55th place in qualifying would be good, and he was still shooting for a top-20 in the distance race. Today he’s talking about the sprint course being good because you don’t need to get the hole-shot to be in the race. Never mind that he’s never even qualified for the heats in a World Cup sprint, and was contemplating suicide last night.
Kuusamo appears to be a small alpine mountain. Apparently it’s the biggest alpine resort in Finland, or close to it. It’s foggy, misty, dark at all hours, but snowy.
Well, Kris wants to check e-mail on my computer now. So I’ll pass the machine over and eat some of Pete’s “mexican” pizza.
Reprinted with permission from the Kris Freeman website at http://www.krisfreeman.net/. Copyright © Zach Caldwell and Kris Freeman