Two-time Olympian Megan Heinicke has been blasting boxes of bullets at the biathlon range at Otway Nordic Centre the past week.
By the time her three-week trip is over and she's heading back to Germany she'll have fired more than 1,000 rounds, and she might even wear a groove in the hot pavement going back and forth on Otway Road with her roller skis.
This is Heinicke's first trip back to her hometown in Prince George since January 2010, the month before she competed in the Vancouver-Whistler Olympics, and it's a working vacation for the 25-year-old. With her parents Heather and Ed Tandy keeping her three-and-a-half-year-old son Predo occupied, Heinicke is free to keep up with her demanding training schedule, which is like a full-time job. If she's not riding her bike, chances are she's working out in the gym, roller-skiing, shooting at the range, or running the sandy slopes of the Nechako River cutbanks.
Heinicke has committed herself to another four-year stint with the national team on the World Cup and IBU Cup circuits and if all goes according to plan she'll be in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in February 2018 for her third crack at Olympic glory.
"Because this was an Olympic year, it was probably the first year in maybe six I really took a break after the season," said Heinicke. "I really had to ask myself and be 100 per cent sure I'm as committed as ever to doing another four years and I'm really glad I took the time because now I'm sure this is what I want."
Heinicke's Sochi Olympic experience brought disappointment at first when she finished 51st in the individual race and 59th in the sprint, then was forced to drop out of the pursuit when the eyepiece of her rifle scope iced over - by her own admission, her worst race ever. But there were also moments of great satisfaction. Skiing third in the order in the women's relay after Megan Imrie and Rosanna Crawford, Heinicke was flawless in both shooting bouts, nailing all 10 targets in less than a minute, and skiing fast enough to move the team up to fourth place as she tagged Zina Kocher.
"It was a good emotional high ending that sticks in my head as the highlight of the year," said Heinicke. "Zina was in second place after prone [shooting] and we were like, 'We're medal contenders, right now. She doesn't even have to be fast, she just has to hit them.'
"Of course we were disappointed. No one was angry, but it was right there."
Kocher, Canada's strongest skier, missed two of her prone targets, then had three misses while standing and lost count after using all three of her allotted spare bullets, losing more time as she reached for a fourth spare that was never there. By the time she realized her mistake and skied her two penalty loops, Canada had dropped to ninth. Kocher made up one critical spot before the finish and that eighth-place finish in an Olympic Games event means Heinicke is now eligible for non-resident national team funding from Sport Canada for the past five years.
She lost her funding in 2009 when she decided to leave the national team base in Canmore and move to Squamish to join her club coach and future husband Illmar when he took on a position as the regional training centre coach.
"That's $100,000 I missed out on that everyone else got, just because I wasn't spending 75 per cent of the time in Canmore and there were some bitter feelings there," Heinicke said. "So now for the first time in a long time I'm a carded athlete again."
Heinicke, who just moved to Klingenthal, Germany, where Illmar has taken on a new job as head coach of the German junior national team, will receive close to $1,500 per month from the national team for the next two years. That could be extended another two years if she posts another eighth-place-or-better result at the world championships.
Because the Canadian women finished 10th in World Cup points, one point ahead of Finland, Canada will have four World Cup spots for individual athletes in 2014-15, one more than last season. To nail down that top-10 placing, Canada needed three women to race in the sprint, which forced Heinicke to race with two broken ribs after doctors gave her local injections to numb the pain. She'd gotten hurt the day before when she was hit by a ski rack carried by a man who had slipped on an icy set of steps while standing above Heinicke. That came a few days after she finished 15th in the sprint race, her highest individual place of the season.
Audrey Vaillancourt of Quebec is the most likely Canadian to replace Imrie, who retired after the Olympics to pursue a career as a veterinarian. Julia Ransom of Vernon and Sarah Beaudry of Prince George could also get a shot at making the next Olympic team.
"Sarah is a little young but she's awesome and that's so cool to see," said Heinicke. "She's absolutely on that list of people to see if four years is enough to put together a strong relay team."
Heinicke took nearly a year off after the 2010 Olympics while she was pregnant with Predo and started racing again in February 2011, three-and-a-half months after he was born. She's not on her own as a mom on the international biathlon circuit; close to a dozen women who compete at the World Cup level have kids.
"There are definitely times where some of my competitors probably have their feet up after training and I'm chasing my three-year-old around the back yard, but I don't regret it at all," she said. "It's more of a time management question and I can be thankful because I have an incredible amount of support from my husband and from his parents [who look after Predo while she attends her World Cup races or training camps]."
With her father Ed helping her zero her rifle sights, Heinicke was getting familiar with the new range at Otway, built for the 2015 Canada Winter Games, which she says is comparable to any shooting range she's seen in Europe. On Monday she'll be teaching roller-ski techniques to a group of young biathletes at the Caledonia Nordic Ski Club's summer biathlon camp.
"I would never have thought 10 years ago I'd have the opportunity to shoot at home on a world-class shooting range," she said. "I don't even recognize the place. Too bad I'm too old for Canada Winter Games."
