We’re down to the last few days of the 2015-16 school year –
classes end tomorrow and exams start next week.
It’s been a very challenging yet very enjoyable year for our team, and I’m
sad to see it end. Like any other year,
this season had some lessons for us.
Here are some of the things we learned these past few months:
- The bar continues to rise for upper body power. Every year I scheme ways to improve our upper
body power, and every year I feel like we’re devoting more and more time to
this aspect of fitness. It’s still not
enough. Double poling distance races has
trickled down to the college level and even the junior level. Even in skate races or classic races with wax,
the advantage gained by skiers with great upper body power is readily
apparent. It drives me crazy, because I’ve
KNOWN THIS FOR YEARS, and I’ve adjusted our training accordingly, but things
are evolving so fast that I continue to underestimate the sheer volume of double pole
focused training that’s required. I
think we do good work with our upper body power training – we just need to A)
do more of it, and B) do a more diverse range of upper body focused workouts. I wonder if I need to start treating upper
body power development like a whole separate discipline of skiing – ie, skate,
classic, and double poling. This isn’t a
perfect model, because poling power is obviously a sub-category of skate and
classic skiing, but breaking it down like this might make it easier to give it
the attention it requires. For example,
when I think about training for skate or for classic, I plan a whole range of
workout types for each discipline: easy distance, threshold, speed, etc. We also do these different workouts with a
double pole focus, but I tend to squeeze it all into the category of “specific
strength” training – it takes up a smaller proportion of our training, and we
only scratch the surface with each workout type. Maybe the answer is to cut the pie into three
roughly equal pieces to make sure we’re fully developing each aspect of fitness
within each discipline. I’m not exactly
sure, but I’m looking forward to trying something different and figuring it
out.
- A close-knit team is a wonderful thing. We had an amazing fall – training was great
and everyone had so much fun. Our Fall Break and Thanksgiving training camps
were probably the best camps we’ve ever had.
Everyone ended the semester feeling fit and happy and motivated. Shortly after coming back to campus in
January, we ran into trouble with weather and health, and things never really
got better. With the lame snow and the
various illnesses afflicting our team, our team could have fallen apart. We had some really rough moments, and it
would have been the most natural thing in the world for people to just check
out mentally or settle into a funk of negativity. But these guys did the opposite and rallied
to support each other and make the training and racing as good as it could be
every week. This was a really great
season for Bowdoin Nordic despite all the challenges, and it was all because
these guys really loved each other. It
was a good reminder that building a unified team is just as important as
anything we do in training. We were
lucky to have a great mix of personalities on our team, but it still took an
intentional, thoughtful effort on everyone’s part to make this team what it was
– captains and seniors setting the tone, hard work and positive energy from
everyone, and regular team activities to cement the bonds. We also succeeded in one of our goals from
last year – to work around class schedules and bring the whole team together
for more workouts. All of these things
will be harder to achieve with a bigger group next year (we have a lot of
first-years coming in), but I really think we can recapture the great team
dynamics from this year. We have to – it’s
too important to it let slip away.
- We could stand to be a bit more neurotic about
health. Every team deals with sickness
every year – it’s just part of the sport.
But this year was extra bad - I’ve never seen anything like the sickness that ripped through our team this year. We had four
skiers – almost a third of the team – miss a significant portion of the race season, and several others missed a race and/or several training days. We just can’t
afford to get hit by this kind of pervasive and persistent sickness – the season
is too short. I’m not sure how much we
could have done to prevent the health problems we experienced this year, but we
can certainly try harder. We need to
double down on the usual best practices – good sleep, good eating habits, hand
washing, getting warm and dry after workouts, etc. Coaches and veteran skiers need to be better
about instilling these habits in the rest of the team. Skiers need to be proactive about seeing a
doctor for a persistent illness, and also honest with themselves about when it’s
not OK for them to train and race. And I
need to be more ruthless about keeping sick people away from the rest of the
team to minimize the chances of anything spreading. All of this might add up to nothing – there’s
a lot of luck involved in staying healthy – but we can at least improve our
odds.
- Thanks, Quarry Road!
The folks at Quarry Road in Waterville really did a fantastic job this
year. They cranked out a ton of manmade
snow when all of New England was bare.
They hosted our first two carnivals in January when there was just about
nowhere else in the East to ski. And
they kept their loop in good shape for training as the snow steadily dwindled
throughout the winter – we ended up training there several times this year when
things were thin at Pineland, and this kept us afloat from one carnival to the
next. This was great work by the whole
community, and it was a huge gift to us and to skiers all over the state.
So these are the things in the back of my mind as we ramp up
the training for next year. Pretty soon
exams will be over and the skiers will disperse. Campus will be peaceful and quiet, and I’ll
have a lot of time to think about how we can keep building on our experiences
to make next year ever better. I’m
really looking forward to this, but I’m even more excited to get a whole new
season started next fall!
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