College Skiing Issues

Some interesting discussions with implications for our skiers at the EISA spring meeting on Monday:

- Looks like sprints are going to become an NCAA Championship event at some point in the next couple years.  Not official yet, but from what I can tell most coaches have warmed up to the idea in recent years.  It's going to happen sooner or later - probably sooner.  I have mixed feelings about this.  I think it's appropriate for us to include an event that's become such a major focus in international racing.  I just don't like how it affects the experience for a lot of our college skiers - it's not much of a race day for those who don't qualify for the heats.  That's fine for one or two races a year, but we're going to have to hold several sprint races a year for NCAA qualifying purposes - it's probably going to take up almost half of our season, and I'm not crazy about that.  That's a lot of skiers who trained a lot of hours sitting on the sidelines for a lot of races (after a 3-minute prelim).  The current proposal doesn't call for a championship sprint race every year, though, which makes me feel OK about the change - I think it's a reasonable balance if we have a sprint every other year or so.  Interestingly, the proposal also goes in the other direction and raises the possibility of a 30k race at the championships.  That's probably never going to happen, but I'd absolutely love it, and I think most of our skiers would as well.

- We also discussed a proposal for men and women to race equal distances.  Fasterskier published a pretty good summary of the arguments on either side of the issue.  Lots of interesting points, and it doesn't break down cleanly along gender lines.  I'm in favor of equal distances - it's 2016!  I've never had a good answer for my skiers when they've asked why women do shorter races, and I'd love to not have to answer that question for my daughters if they become ski racers a few years from now.  I'm not in favor of shortening everything to 5-15k, though, which is where many people seem to think this is heading.  I'd rather have all skiers racing the full range of distances up to 20k (or 30k - wishful thinking).  I think my ideal setup would be something like sprint & 10 or 15k alternating with 10k & 20k every year.  We'll see what happens.  I have a hard time picturing this change happening this year, but I won't be at all surprised if it happens a few years down the road.

What We Learned in 2016

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!