The guys in Team United Bakeries don’t waste time. They plan to be unbeatable on the course come winter. They take advantage of long bright summer days at Sognefjellet, Norway, pushing long hours and huge workout. Hard? Yes. But they don’t complain about the office landscape.
“We definitely take advantage of the weather, and spend all our energy improving both fitness and technique,” says Oeystein Pettersen, who is a rookie in the long-distance team United Bakeries this season.
The former Norwegian national team sprinter is making the transition to marathon racing, and the road to the long-distance circuit is just that: Long. Long hours, hundreds of kilometers of double-poling. And Sognefjellet is hardly the worst location to put in overtime these days. But that has made them heavy on the bottle. SPF 30 at a minimum.
“And so far I’m not even sunburned,” Pettersen says with a grin.
But Pettersen has work to do outside of workouts too. Both Pettersen and teammate Johan Kjoelstad are new to Team Madshus this season, and are hard at work on dialing in their quiver of skis for the upcoming winter.
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The equipment has to be fine-tuned by the time the race season rolls around. Getting the work done now means more confidence when the snow flies. The first Ski Classics races don’t happen until January, but time is already getting short.
At his first team camp, Pettersen got a taste of what’s in store for the next part of his career.
“Five and a half hours roller skiing. Some of us got more tired than others,” Pettersen points out.