Thoughts on How We'll Get Faster

As the current school year wraps up, we're looking ahead to next season with some thoughts about this past season in mind. It's been a good year - excellent grades, solid results, and amazing team chemistry - and we're hoping to build on this for the future. With Baby Charlotte's arrival, I haven't had much time for posting, but I've had plenty of time to think about what we learned this year and what we need to do to continue improving. The skiers gave some really helpful feedback in our spring meetings, and I feel good about the plans we've made. All of the little details are too numerous to describe here, but here are three big things that I've been thinking about:

Classic Skiing - All of our exciting results this year were in skate. We had some decent classic days as a team, and plenty of people had classic PRs, but overall there was a pretty huge gap between our performances in the two disciplines. Why is this? Waxing is always a convenient explanation, and it's true that we didn't have good skis as consistently as we should have. In particular, both skiers and coaches need to do a better job of figuring out the nuances of individual wax pockets (a few pairs of Zeros on the team wouldn't hurt either). But waxing isn't the big reason we struggled in classic. Here's what I think: A) Most of our classic rollerskiing last fall was distance and specific strength work - not a lot of speed or intensity. In particular, our 200/100m skate intervals on the bike path seemed to be very productive - we didn't have a comparable workout for classic. Skate intensity is a better fit for the gently rolling terrain we have around here, but we can't afford to neglect classic intensity. We can get to the terrain we need for productive classic intensity work - I just need to make it a priority and do a little planning ahead. B) We need to make a bit more time for working on classic technique - more no-pole striding, particularly on snow. Now that we're settled into our new ski room at Farley, it should be fairly convenient to follow our general strength work with a few rollerski sprints and drills, which should be a nice opportunity for technique work.

Speed - We've been here before - pure speed is still a weakness for us. Our best results were in 15-20k races (and the Rangeley Loppet). As a team, we're clearly less competitive at the shorter distances. This mirrors the kind of training that we did - respectable training volume and a lot of threshold work, but not as much speed work. Actually, I think we did a pretty good job of speed work in the fall and early winter, but we were much less diligent about this in the summer - and when I say "we," I mean "the athletes." Speed work is ESSENTIAL for us, even more so than for other teams. Many of our skiers have a bit less experience than the typical EISA racer, and this really shows when it comes to speed - less comfort on skis, less polished technique, and thus less ability to go through good clean movements at high speed. So, we have to practice going fast on skis, and we have to do it A LOT. I'll be doing a lot of nagging via email this summer. We have a lot of catching up to do and we can't afford to ignore one of our biggest weaknesses for the next three months.

Running vs Rollerskiing - In the past few years, the large majority of our fall training has been on rollerskis. Running has always been a significant component, but we spend far more time on our rollerskis. That's great from a specificity and technique standpoint, but I feel like we're missing out on the pure fitness benefits of running. I don't know of any scientific data to support this, but it feels to me like nothing gets you fit more efficiently than running. Obviously rollerskiing will still be the backbone of our training, especially given the two issues I've described above, but we'll try a slightly more balanced approach next fall.

Those are a few of the big things we'll be thinking about as we prepare for next season. Right now, everyone's taking a well-earned deep breath and making the transition to summer plans. I'm hearing lots of good things about training so far - sounds like people are really getting after it now that exams are over. This is good. The future is bright.