James Upham Ski Quotations

If you're a cross-country skier or an endurance athlete, it's very simple: Here's a gun, go shoot this, too. Everyone would say, 'Yeah, that sounds cool to me. You get to ski around and then you get to shoot stuff every day. That sounds pretty fun.

The way they move is different but they're almost always within a second or two of ski time and shooting time, so the results are very similar. Any time we test heart rates or lactates or anything like that, it's almost the same. It's like testing the same person, same blood.

Very rarely are they separated. Usually at the beginning of the training we do a couple of shootings separated so that gets them in their own rhythm and I can see all the shots. But then they work together the rest of the workout. They ski together, shoot together, test the skis together.

You almost expect surprises in this type of a race. The skiing was so fast because you had this ice coming out of the sky, making really hard tracks. There isn't a huge gap in the skiing. You couldn't make more than a minute or two on anybody today. So the (good) shooters had a huge advantage, much more than normal.