Editor's note: The following is a log kept by Timber Sports competitor Peg Engasser.

May 3, 2004

Spring training has begun for the 2004 woodchopping season! Actually, it didn't really stop for very long … after a pretty good year in 2003, I took most of October and November off from training, then started up again in December.

	Peg Engasser

I traveled to Sydney, Australia, in April as a member of the U.S. National Team, so I had to stay up with my chopping through the winter.

It was a cold winter here in upstate New York, and it was hard to motivate myself to go out to the barn to cut blocks when it was below 20 degrees.

But it was well worth it, as I had steady (although not really fast) cuts in our team races, and we won two out of three against the Aussies and Kiwis. Besides chopping a bit this winter, I also lifted weights at the Groton Fitness Center and swam at the local community college pool. Oh, and I played volleyball with a fun group of folks, mostly co-workers, so winter workouts were quite varied.

Now that the season has begun, I will mostly just practice my events, and throw in some running and bike riding for variety. We had a contest in Bracebridge, Ontario, this past weekend, and things went OK (if you ignore the facts that it was a six-hour drive, one-way, and it rained the entire day).

My underhand chop went well, although I was sloppy with my hits on the backside. Since the underhand is an event at every contest I go to, and since it is part of the Great Outdoor Games Endurance event, it's an event that I have to keep improving.

So I'll work on placing my hits this week when I train, and I'll focus more on accuracy than speed for a while. But in the end, the fastest cut still wins, so I can't leave out speed for too long. We have next weekend off (I do have a rugby game to play in on Saturday), so hopefully the weather will be good, and I'll get some good training work in.

Once the season gets going, the weekends are spent traveling and time to train becomes hard to find.