Evaluating and Planning

As always during the spring, I'm in the midst of evaluating the past season and planning for next year.  This season was a great learning experience for me - I had a few valuable realizations, and the skiers were full of creative ideas and insights in our end-of-season meetings.  I'm pretty excited - I feel that if we can make good use of the lessons learned this year, we have a chance to take a big step forward.  This is why I love the spring - time for thinking, planning, and getting fired up about the future.  Here are a few of the ideas I've been thinking about:

Speed and Technique Sessions:  Finding time for technique work is always hard.  Every practice has a training objective, and stopping to do a technique session of any length makes it hard to accomplish this objective in our limited time frame.  I've come to realize that we're going to have to schedule technique sessions into our training plan if we want to do more than just the occasional roadside reminder.  So, I'm trying to design a twice-weekly session combining technique with speed work (with a little agility thrown in for fun).  We've done variations on this concept in the past, and it's worked out well - making it a regular part of our training should give good results.

Mini Strength Sessions:  Every year I become more convinced that general strength training isn't the answer.  This is ironic, because most athletes and coaches (including myself) spend a disproportionate amount of time fretting about general strength training - when/how often to do it, which exercises, how much weight, how many reps, etc.  But as far as I can tell, it takes a huge general strength improvement to yield even a small change in a skier's ability to apply power to skis and poles.  If we had unlimited training and recovery time, I'd probably have our skiers on some sort of carefully periodized strength training plan - maybe Olympic lifts, a really hard circuit workout, or whatever.  But we don't, so our time is better spent on specific strength and other forms of training.  Next fall, we'll replace our two weekly general strength workouts with frequent mini-sessions added on to other workouts.  This should be enough to give our skiers a decent foundation of general strength while freeing up time to do more productive types of training.

Specific Strength:  We already do a reasonable amount of specific strength training, but I think we need more - in addition to our regular weekly SS session, we can add more frequent SS to our overdistance workouts, and also perhaps fit in more short ski erg segments as add-ons to running workouts.  I'd like to find a way to include more double pole hill intervals and sprints, but I'm not sure yet where these will fit.

5K Training:  In recent years, we've tried to close the gap between our performance in long and short races.  We've made some progress, but we're not there yet - some of our women still felt a little under-trained for the 5k races this year.  We do a ton of threshold training, a lot of 20-30 sec sprints to build speed, and some 3-4 min intervals on hills to build VO2max, but some of our skiers are still lacking the extra pop to ski fast over the tops of hills and through rolling terrain.  One idea that we'll experiment with is doing short (1-4 min), fast intervals, which will allow us to work on sustained skiing at 5k speeds rather than just revving the engine on a hill or skiing fast in very short bursts.  A couple extra short time trials should also help.

Goals:  Goal-setting has always been a pretty low-key exercise on our team - no real process, just occasional informal conversations.  We're changing that.  A few weeks ago, Athletic Director Jeff Ward was kind enough to lead a goal-setting session for the team.  The athletes set team and individual goals and identified specific action items necessary to achieve them.  This was a really productive exercise - I think it will give the team a more clearly defined common purpose, which should help people stay more focused during the long months ahead.