Before snow session,we have a super fun adventure in Happy Jack every Wednesday
,it’s usually about one and half hours or two hours.It’s really different from run in the track.Meanwhile,it’s different from run in sea level.I still remember my first time run in Happy Jack,it’s also my first cross-country running.Before running,I felt exciting and looked forward to it,because it was new thing I have never tried before.After our coach Christi told us we have two groups to follow,one faster,one slower.Of course,boys should take the faster group.Although I knew my aerobic capacity is not as good as other teammates,I still wanted to try.Finally I found out that I was wrong.The boys are so fast from beginning to end,especially when they went down the hill,I couldn’t keep up with them, my heart rate are really high and I had to slow down.I told my partner Bryan about my situation and he told me I should keep my intensity below zoom 3.At that moment I wasn’t understand zoom very clearly, I still believe training hard and gain more.Bryan  asked me to slow down and follow him.I felt much better.He explained reasons to me during running,because we want to develop our aerobic capacity,we need to keep our running long duration and low intensity,if I run in high heart rates,I can’t hold on for so long.In the future training,I never run as that fast,I keep my own pace because I know training smart is more important than training hard.

     As school had began to pick up and our new SUS skiers and American teammates began to be more intergraded into the team they were introduced to our weekly Wednesday adventures. It was a time during the week that we could go for longer runs or skies together. This Wednesday we went to the upper parking lot of Happy Jack and when we arrived there was a beautiful rainbow in the sky. It made me think, as I looked at this huge team that surrounded me, I was grateful to share this beautiful view with them and all the views that were to come. As we began to run that day we were still trying to work out some bumps in the road with our adjustment to having our SUS teammates there. We didn't want them to get lost as we set them loose into the woods that I barley knew myself. We began to settle a little as all of the SUS skiers grouped up with someone that knew where they were going and we all slowly jogged along... or most of us went slowly. There was some small communication errors as one of the SUS boys, Harry, ran off with some of our fastest Americans. While he was running, with his heart rate probably a little too high, I was running with a small group of girls and one our our coaches, Christi. As we ran along, we'd stop every once in a while to grab a drink and chat about how we should be feeling and where our heart rates should be. I don't know if any of the SUS girls understood a thing that we said, but they still followed us blindly. Looking back I now see how much their language skills have grown since we first met them. We finally ended our run tired but happy and we started to wait for some of our boys that had ran a little further. Harry was with those boys and I think we were all a little nervous about his well being. Many minutes later we saw heads bobbing up over the hills. Harry was trailing behind a little. When they reached the parking lot he admitted that he had chosen a group that was a little too fast for him and he wasn't in the correct heart rate zone. I think that day there were a few things learned about how to train smarter not harder. 

     Every great story has to begin somewhere. While I could have pick the moment when we first found out we would be adding ten athletes from the Shanghai University of Sport (SUS) to our team, or when we first saw pictures of them all, or when we met for the first time, I want to choose the moment when we put them on roller skis. Our ten new teammates had quite the athletic pasts at SUS, but they had no knowledge of Nordic Skiing. They had bravely decided to devote a year of their life to learning everything that they could about the sport, and me and the rest of the team was there to support them. The first day we all met we made quick work of getting them on roller skies, a ski roller blade hybrid that Nordic skiers use to train when there is no snow. That day I found myself literally supporting my SUS ally, Murong, as she wobbled on our strange equipment. Being a Nordic skier myself for almost ten years now I was scared for my new teammates. The majority of the Nordic community sees rollers skis as an evil necessity. We need them to keep our training going in the summer, but the taste of pavement in a crash is a lot worse than snow. Even with the nerves that I had for them they showed none as they took their first strides and falls on roller skis. I ran next to Murong as she quickly progressed past my expectations with a smile on her face. After that day I was scared that we wouldn't get them to do it again, but there they were happy as ever the next day at practice.