Thoughts on This Season and Next

Earlier this week I sent the team the outline of our 2011-12 training plan. As usual, before finalizing this plan I did a lot of thinking about last season and had a lot of good conversations with athletes about what worked and what didn't. Here are a few thoughts:

I'm pretty pleased with the season. Our fall training was excellent - definitely the best fall we've had in my 4 years. People were focused and positive, team chemistry was good (aside from a few bumps), and most people stayed pretty healthy. Our results continued to improve - I would say that this was perhaps our best overall team performance ever. We've had some great individual performances over the years, and occasionally one half of the team or another has been outstanding, but this year we got very solid skiing on the men's and women's side alike. We improved our classic skiing in particular - in fact, I felt that our classic results were actually a bit stronger than our skate, if anything. We haven't been anywhere close to even in the 2 techniques since I've been here, so this feels good. So, a very good season.

But, of course, there are lots of things we can improve on - although we're taking baby steps forward, there's still a long way to go before we can be consistently competitive with the rest of EISA. Here are a few of the things we'll be tweaking for next year:

1. More hills! How does one train on hills in Brunswick? I don't have a good answer yet, but I'm going to spend the summer figuring this out. I've known for a long time that our lack of hills was a disadvantage, but this year it really hit me when almost every skier noted a clear disparity between their ability to be competitive on flats versus climbs. An occasional trip to Pineland or Bradbury for bounding isn't enough. Next year we'll be headed to these places more frequently, as well as Gloucester Hill, Penny Rd, and Ridge Rd for rollerskiing. We may also try to do more with the short hills that we have in the area - I just need to get creative and break out of the "3-minute hill" mindset. I'm also not above using artificial hills once in a while - ie, stadium steps, treadmill, etc. We won't be caught dead running up the Tower stairs, though - ugh.

2. Quicker start to the carnival season. This has varied over the years, but our team often seems to be a bit flat to start the carnival season. It's been nice to improve throughout the season, and we consistently put up our best results at Regionals, but I think we can have it both ways - be more competitive in January without peaking early. One of our skiers pointed out that we don't time trial much, and this is certainly true. In fact, we don't do much high intensity training of any sort until late fall. I think this is generally a good thing, but recent patterns would seem to indicate that we can be a bit more aggressive. Specifically, we'll have a more even sprinkling of high-intensity training added to our threshold work throughout the summer and fall, as well as a few more time trials. Some skiers will also need to be more assertive about finding race opportunities over Winter Break - this is a critical link between fall training and the carnival season.

3. Modified strength program. Nothing new here - I tweak the strength plan every year. Truthfully, I don't think anyone really knows the best way to do strength training for cross-country skiing - there are a million different approaches out there, and lots of highly successful skiers use very different programs. So I'll keep playing around with different ideas - one of these years I'll find the perfect plan and win a Nobel Prize for Nordic Skiing. For next year, I think we can make some small but productive changes. I may end up recycling some old ideas that perhaps I gave up on too soon and patching these together with some of the stuff we already do. Not sure how/if I can make it all fit together smoothly, but that's what the summer is for.

We'll mix up a few other things as well - more "unpredictable" training, an adjusted speed workout, and a really awesome treadmill test - but in general, we have a good training framework that seems to be effective. We also have a really motivated group of skiers coming back and some fired-up newcomers - next season should be fun!

Tuckerman's Trip

Spencer sends this post about a classic spring ski trip:

Each year there is a narrow window when the race season ends and there is still some lingering snow to be exploited. Over the last few years some of have used this time to get in our fix of the other type of skiing. Last Saturday, Maren, Riley, and I went and skied Mt. Washington for what turned out to be one of the best days of skiing I've ever had. First off the weather and conditions were amazing, which brought people in the thousands - one of the Rangers there guessed about 2500 people made the hike up that day. The combination of a high number of people there and the pretty technical level of skiing led to a ton of spectacular wipeouts in which people would slide up to several hundred yards down the bowl, almost always followed by cheers and applause from a very sizable peanut gallery, including a few Colby skiers.

After the 3ish mile hike into Tuckerman's Ravine where most of the skiing takes place, we first hiked up the main headwall into the upper snowfield and skied back down to the bottom of the bowl. Maren pretty solidly proved that she was a far better skier than Riley and I and ripped down the headwall leaving us to more cautiously make our way down. Next we hiked up almost to the summit for an awesome view of Wildcat and the Northern Presidentials. It was a great day, way cooler than I can give justice to, so here are some awesome photos we took along the way. . .

A view above the top of the headwall.

Riley and Spencer (below) climbing up the headwall.


Maren and Riley near the summit.

The three of us with the mountain in the background.