Nordic Skiing: From Novice team to World Championship course

The Nordic Skiing season started in mid-November for the 1 R WELSH team. A team of 8 deployed to Idre-Fjall in Sweden for the pre-competition training package organised by Infantry Nordic. There were some familiar faces in the team who brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to the team, notably Cpl Morris of B Coy who is also a Nordic Skiing instructor having done 7 seasons previously. These were joined by 6 of the team who had never heard of Nordic Skiing!

Idre-Fjall, Sweden was the perfect setup for a Nordic Skiing camp, it was a leading venue with perfect snow conditions and a state-of-the-art range complex. The camp was three weeks long with some of the best instructors around, several of them were ex winter Olympians. Mantas Strolia represented Lithuania in Pyong-Chang the most recent winter games and was a firm favourite of the Royal Welsh team!

The winter camp took the team from learning the very basics of Nordic skiing to being able to compete in races by the end of the package. Training was intense with only 1 day off a week and skiing for up to 5 hours cross country a day; this coupled with shooting practice made for an extremely arduous but rewarding time. The race courses in Idre-Fjall were some of the hardest we would experience all season, very technical and hilly with several the uphill segments reaching over 16%!