And The Cat's In The Cradle...

...And The Silver Spoon.  Little Boy Blue and the Man on the Moon!!!  

I hope you are all now singing this little diddy, at least the first line and then mumbling the rest of the song like some of us USA MTBO team members (me)! I wonder what song will stick in our heads after tomorrow's breakfast Muzak!

It's TRAINING CAMP TIME in Suprasl, Poland and Team USA is taking in as much information as possible to prepare for the World Champs next week.  I have to say it's pretty awesome to be able to mountain bike and especially to be able to mountain bike orienteer everyday for 2 weeks, what an experience!

8 out of 9 of us are here in Suprasl, Poland and Joe will be arriving on the 20th to complete the team.  We all arrived in Warsaw on Saturday and rallied to Suprasl, a 3 hour drive, making it a long 24 hours-awake-kind-of-a-day. The reward for the long day of travelling was a relaxing Sunday morning, assembling our bikes in the morning sunshine, and then a little rest before we all geared up to head out to our first day of training camp.
Sunday and Monday's Training Maps got us on similar terrain of what we will be competing on next week - quite a bit of sand to keep you on your toes and plenty of stinging nettles to remind you later that you mountain biked in Poland.  Both days were older maps so there were definitely more trails due to logging and some of the marked trails were more overgrown than what the map stated.  I used these days to work on my weaknesses - reading contours and attention to the scale.

Day 1 Training - Middle Distance 1:10,000

Day 2 Training - Long Distance 1:15,000

After today's training and a little bit (lots) of stretching, I checked out some of the local attractions, below is the Suprasl Orthodox Monastery, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supra%C5%9Bl_Orthodox_Monastery.

USA! Church of Annunciation!

Thanks to everyone back home who are supporting us, I hope you're enjoying our updates.  You can also follow us on our Facebook page,https://www.facebook.com/usmtboteam, where we are all posting random pics and copies of our maps.

And a special thanks to our 8 week-and-under Super Fan, Willa, for cheering for us back in Portland, OR.  I'm looking forward to following your blog in a few years as you travel the world MTBOing!

Now that it's 10:30pm, Suprasl time, I think it's bed time.  

Looking forward to Day 3 of Training Camp. 

Sweet dreams Little Kittens!