Arriving in beautiful Annecy, France - we could see Lake Annecy from our hotel, as well as the surrounding mountains that we would be running through in a few days.
We laid low leading up to the race - but checked out a bit of the course. This is the view from the top of the first climb.
Of course, we needed to give a huge THANKS to Trail Butter, who helped us fundraise for our tickets to France! (Some of our team, with a few jars of Trail Butter.)
You have to laugh at the translations of some of product names - 'Crazy Craq' is actually Cheese Doodles to us. Casey was ready to fuel her run with Crazy Craq!
Of course, some folks on our team got interviewed by news outlets. Here, Alex Nichols is being interviewed for irunfar.com.
There was also a pre-race press conference, where Krissy Moehl and Alex Varner were chosen to participate.
The opening ceremonies were neat - it opened with a several folks parachuting circles in the sky as smoke streaked behind them.
We got a group shot with the World Championship mascot - but were all a bit unclear what type of animal it was...
As in Wales, we were assigned a local kid to march us into the stadium for the opening ceremony.
Maud Gobert, the 2011 World Trail Champion, read the charter which she had written.
The team was ready to hit the trails!
The truth about how the Team USA women prepared for the race - painting our finger nails a sparkling blue. Looking down, this would shock me throughout the race the next day...I wasn't used to blue nails.
