Garage grind, countless calories and thousands of shots - inside biathlete Samuelsson's preparations

STOCKHOLM, Jan 14 : Sebastian Samuelsson has lost count of the miles skied, shots fired and calories consumed during his Winter Games preparations but the Swedish biathlete knows his gruelling training regimen will pay off when the going gets tough in the Italian Alps.

Samuelsson, who won a relay gold at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games and a silver in the pursuit, told Reuters that the key to his success is consistency in training.

"It's far from every day that I wake up in the morning and think that it's going to be great fun to train, when there's bad weather, you're tired or you're worn out," the 28-year-old said. 

"But I think my biggest strength is that I train anyway - and when I train, I make sure to do the workout as well as possible. That, I think, is my biggest strength."

The biathlon competitions get underway at the Anterselva Biathlon Arena on February 8, and Milano Cortina will be Samuelsson's third Winter Games after he finished out of the medals in Beijing four years ago.

It has been a long journey.

"We started training on May 1 last year. We did some training at home in Sweden first, and then we went to a training camp together with the Swedish Olympic Committee in Crete," Samuelsson said. 

"We were there for a week, and then we just continued throughout the year.

"A lot of people seem to think that we train a lot during the winter and so on, but it is between May and November that most of the training takes place."

Samuelsson said he was unsure how much ground he had covered in training for the Games.

"I don't really know how many miles I've skied altogether but we've probably trained about 100 hours a month and then during a training week in the winter we train 10 to 15 hours a week, or around half of what we do