Spring is here at Bowdoin!
Campus is finally starting to look like its best self, with green grass,
leaves, and blossoms popping out everywhere.
Exams are underway, and we’re just a few days away from a collective
sigh of relief. It’s a great time of
year to be here (especially if you don’t have to take exams).
Spring is also a great time to look back on the ski season
and think about what went well and what didn’t.
The start of each new training year brings an opportunity to try new
ideas, break old habits, and make the program better than it was before. With that in mind, here are a few things I’m
thinking about as we plan for next year:
- Keeping the easy stuff easy. This is a constant problem. Younger skiers want to prove that they can
keep up with the veterans. The veterans
want to show the new kids what’s up. No
one wants to drop off the back. And,
skiing fast is just more fun. It’s very
tempting for even experienced skiers to go too hard in distance sessions. This is fine for an occasional workout, but after
a while it catches up to you and leaves you flat when it’s time to go fast for
real. It takes not only discipline but
also confidence to go slow in training – knowing that you’re going to be fast
when it counts, even if others pull away from you in an easy workout in
October. We need to work harder at
instilling this mentality in our skiers.
- AM practices.
Getting up early is rough on college kids, and every year I weigh the
costs and benefits of morning practices to be sure that they’re worth
doing. I’ve always considered them a
necessary evil, but after this year I’m trying to think outside the box a
bit. This year, morning practices during
the winter months really seemed to take a toll on people in a way that we haven’t
seen in the past, so I’m wondering if we can limit or eliminate them during the
carnival season. We’ll always have some
people with afternoon classes and labs, so we would need to either have this
group doing a dryland workout on campus after class or, ideally, have a late
afternoon van to Pineland for an on-snow workout at dusk. Late skiing is no problem at the end of
February, but for most of the winter it means skiing in the dark. Could we have the same quality of training
while skiing with headlamps? Would this
be a problem for the folks at Pineland?
I don’t know the best solution for this issue, but we’ll be considering
our options in the coming months.
- Training together.
During practice, we always seem to be in a rush – sunset always comes
too soon, and there’s always a host of reasons to get back to campus in a hurry. Sometimes we get so focused on the numbers (the
right training time/distance, the right number and length of intervals, the
right rest periods, etc) that we forget to keep the team together – we let the
skiers out of the van and they rush off to get the workout done as individuals. Training together matters. Skiing behind someone in a distance workout
or doing intervals with a group allows you to get so much more out of the
training, and working hard together creates a common focus that strengthens
everyone’s resolve to get faster. We
know this – we just need to make happen more often. Time constraints and differing practice times
due to class schedules make it tough to train together consistently, but we can
still do a better job with the hand we’re dealt.
- Prolonged training load.
A couple years ago, we started bringing the team back earlier after the
holidays – shortly after New Year’s instead of mid-January – in an effort to
reap the benefits of training together for a longer period of time before the first
carnival. This has worked out really
well – we’re definitely performing better in the early season carnivals than we
did in the past. Unfortunately, though, some
of our skiers feel that they lose this edge as the season goes along. I’m positive that much of this is due to
gradually increasing academic demands (classes usually start right after our
first carnival). However, we’ve noticed
that a few people seem to race their best when they’re a bit suppressed from
the heavy training load of January camp, and letting up on the pressure at the
start of classes sets them up for a slow decline throughout the season. It’s not realistic (or desirable) to maintain
the Jan camp load for the whole carnival season, but can we extend it a bit? How do we find the time during a busy week of
school, travel, and racing to add in extra training volume? We also need to make sure we’re targeting the
right people – training responses vary from person to person, and some people
would be crushed by the combination of classes, races, and higher volume.
So, these are a few things that are on my mind as we look ahead. As always, I’m eager to do some
homework in the next few months – reading research, talking with other coaches,
and learning whatever I can to help us keep moving forward. Looking forward to a great summer!
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