Hero Hill

Hero Hill is a dirt road leading down to a sand and gravel quarry on the edge of town - one of the few long hills in Brunswick, and a great place for bounding intevals with poles. It used to be one of Coach Slovenski's favorite training grounds for the XC team - he's the one who named it - but no one's used it for years. Yesterday we resurrected the Hero Hill tradition, at least for a day. The workout was 4x4 min VO2max intervals for most of the team. Like the 30/30 workout, 4x4s are meant to increase VO2max, but through a more traditional method - moderate length intervals at 90+% of max HR followed by full recovery. Four minutes is long enough to get your heart rate up to the necessary level and spend some time there, but short enough so that you don't have to slow the pace and drop the heart rate. In my opinion, there's no workout that will get you in shape faster than bounding with poles for 4x4 minutes at VO2max pace. There's only so much that can be gained from this kind of workout, though - everyone has a VO2max "ceiling," and a well-trained skier can reach this ceiling fairly quickly. We don't want to be in top shape in December, which is why we've waited so long to start our VO2max training.

Now that we're here, though, we're hitting it hard - the team gave it a great effort yesterday. I jumped in and out of the workout to check out technique and give feedback, so I got a pretty good sense of the effort level: hard. Seems like it didn't take long for people to remember how to push themselves - in a few weeks, they'll still be pushing just as hard, but they'll be going a lot faster while doing it. Everyone was pretty worked by the end, and it sounded like they were still feeling it today, which is to be expected. We cleaned it out with a long rollerski today - same thing tomorrow, and then a day off on Monday should have everyone fresh and ready to go again on Tuesday.