Every four years, I sit my ass down on a couch with some chips, soda, and friends and I watch the Winter Olympics. Not only are the winter sports really cool, but I also would much rather stay out of the cold and watch other people be cold than have no feeling in my fingers and soaked socks. Don’t get me wrong I love going out in the snow, but only up to the point where you fool around too much and snow penetrates your boots or back, and then all the fun ceases like it was never there in the first place. Despite this, I can still say my favorite activity by far is skiing; I don’t like being cold, but when I’m skiing I can manage.

When I’m watching the Winter Olympics, I especially pay attention to all of the skiing-related sports, and every four years the sport of biathlon always catches me off guard when it comes on. Biathlon is a combination of cross-country skiing and rifling, I know, what? You basically race around a track on skis and stop every now and then and shoot some targets. For like wintery military purposes, it’s good to be able to cross country ski and shoot together effectively, but really, why does this need to be a sport.

Honestly, I do not like guns, at all. I just don’t see a need for everyone to have one and master the ability to kill as a sport. You take a very nice form of transportation through the snow (although I don’t personally like it) and you just ruin it with a rifle strapped to your back. Like who in the hell created this? I actually looked it up, couldn’t find a specific person, s0 I can’t target my blame which is sad. Well whatever, I don’t know, I guess I just don’t see the purpose of shooting guns all over the place.

Anyway, I have never tried this sport–and certainly don’t plan on it–but I have gone cross-country skiing. In my opinion, cross-country skiing is basically skiing without the fun. I’ll tell you, it’s tiring as hell trekking up hills and stuff on skis and its literally all of the worst part of skiing when you’ve just finished a run and have to traverse over to a ski lift. When I went cross-country skiing, we went to a beautiful area and it was actually a pretty great day but most of that was shrouded by my panting as we just happened to choose a really hilly path. So essentially, this sport combines the worst part of normal skiing with the blindingly elementary ability to kill other people.

For those of you that enjoy rifling and cross-country skiing, or even biathlon, I’m sorry you just read all of that. If you are looking to join a biathlon team here at Penn State, you are fresh out of luck because no such thing exists, thankfully. I know these blogs are supposed to be about sports here at Penn State but I’m starting to run out of options I’d like to write about, so here we are at biathlon.