Life for Olympic athletes is not all about training — although workouts and recovering from them often consume their days. To keep their minds active as well, many have hobbies.

Biathlete Lowell Bailey plays mandolin and guitar in a band.

Alpine skier Jimmy Cochran tinkers with engines.

Mark Grimmette, two-time Olympic medalist in doubles luge, builds furniture and does other woodworking (including helping Bailey add shims to his custom-made rifle stock).

And biathlete Haley Johnson makes greeting cards from magazine pages.

Hunh?

I had to buy a couple of her cards, which she sells at The Bookstore Plus in downtown Lake Placid, to figure out what she meant.

The aspiring artist looks through magazines — upside down so she doesn’t get distracted by the words … wait, she holds the magazines upside down, not herself! — and finds pages with large sections of a single color. For example, Rolex ads and L.L. Bean catalogs have large sections of dark green.

She cuts out these blocks of color, then cuts specific shapes into them, such as clouds or mountains. She then pieces the shapes together to make woodblock-type scenes — a sunset over dark blue mountains, a cloud-free deep blue sky over dark green mountains, a yellow wheat field with a background of mountains and puffy white clouds.

She signs them “Haley” followed by a year, like ’05 or ’06.

She prints the scenes are cardstock and sells them for $3 each (envelope included, of course) either through her website or at The Bookstore Plus. She calls her business Snowfall Cards.

At the end of June, 13 Snowfall Cards were on display in the local artists rack at the bookstore, and the sales clerk said that they’re very popular.

When asked where she came up with the idea, she claims that she’s not a very talented painter and that leafing through magazines, her artist’s eye picked up on all the vivid colors of the glossy pages. Why let this color go to waste?

She started making the greeting cards after moving to the Maine Winter Sports Center in Caribou in 2003 to train full-time for biathlon. Income from the cards was “grocery money.”

Now a full-time resident at the Lake Placid OTC, she uses the extra income to fund her training. She works on designing and creating more cards between her morning and afternoon workouts — although some days, the cards take a backseat to a much-needed nap.

When she eventually returns to college — she completed two years at Bates before taking a hiatus to pursue her biathlon dreams — she’ll switch her major from environmental science to art or graphic design, she says.

She’s already developed a portfolio.

To follow her training, check out her blog. Or click on the website she started with her sister Kara and brother Lars, who both are freestyle skiers.