Period 4 and End of Season Recap

When I last posted, I was midway through a hard training block and about to head to Trondheim, Norway. I finished out that block really well with 4 more high quality intensity sessions and a whole lot of hours. I ended up training 45 hours over the course of the 15-day block and executed the intensity schedule almost exactly as I drew it up. This was the biggest snow training block of my life, and I’m very happy to say that I finished still feeling like I had something left in the tank. All signs were pointing to this block being productive, but I’d never gone that long without racing in the middle of the year. Sure, the training was good, but I’ve always thought of myself as someone who gets better from racing. This being said, I’ve never had a problem with season openers, so being “rusty” wasn’t too big of a concern. 

Trondheim sun

Falun

Kevin and Maja, who I was staying with in Trondeheim, drove me to Falun, Sweden two days before world cup racing got rolling again. Despite feeling a little sluggish in the race prep and the warmup for the qualifier, Falun went just about as well as it could have. 4 weeks ago, I wrote that I was a little worried about coming into this weekend tired, but it seems as if I cut the load just in time to be rested enough to race well. I qualified well enough to have a few options for heat selection, got third in my quarterfinal (only the second time I had been 3rd or better in a world cup heat) and got to ski in the semi final when Skari got disqualified by way of a second yellow card. 

Trondheim sunset

I know I could have qualified better in Falun if I had been a little bit sharper, but where I may have been lacking sharpness, I was making up for in fitness (or at least placebo fitness). What I mean by this is that for the first time starting a world cup semi-final, I really believed that I wasn’t too tired to succeed. In my other two semis, which both occurred in Davos, I stood on the start line only thinking about ways to save energy and stay with the pack–not get to the front of it. I’m not sure if it was due to an actual fitness boost or just the perception of one, but when I started that semi-final in Falun, I felt fresh and confident. I was ready to compete. I may have gotten last in that heat, but I put myself in a position to succeed, and if I’m able to keep doing that every time I make a semi, the finals appearances are going to start happening more frequently. 

Maja’s cabin

Lahti

Lahti played out very similarly to Falun. I had a better qualifier this time around which I expected after another week of something along the lines of a taper. In the heats I had the same strategy: choose the softest heat I could regardless of what number (heat five in this case) and ski like I belong in the front. I had a bad first few hundred meters in my quarter which sent me straight to 6th, but I’m very happy with the way I was able to move up throughout the heat. I ended 3rd only hundredths of a second away from moving on to the semis. After Oberhof I wrote about staying aggressive and constantly fighting for position. In Lahti, I’m proud to say that I achieved this and was perhaps only a better lunge away from moving on. 

Struggle lunch in Lahti

Drammen

Drammen was a bit of a reality check. Sure, Falun and Lahti weren’t the best races of my life, but in both cases I was possibly a couple feet of positioning or a few milliseconds away from them being career days for me. Drammen was nowhere close to this. The frustrating part about this race was that I actually felt quite good. My double pole felt relaxed and strong and I think I was getting a bit more length out of my striding than I have been in the past. I have a sneaking suspicion that I may not have gone out hard enough, but it’s hard saying not knowing!

Hesburger never disappoints!

Did the Training Work?

This is perhaps the most important and hardest question to answer for a cross country skier. The lack of being able to measure output across different performances hinders a skier's ability to know for sure whether they are performing well (there is no such thing as a time-based PR in cross country skiing). So how do we measure the success of the different training strategies we employ? I don’t have an answer to this question, but I can at least share how I start to approach this conundrum. The first and easiest way to measure the success of training is results in races. This works best when assessing training on the micro side of things (specific workout leading up to a race, amount of volume, or perhaps even a peaking plan). This method however can lead to both false positives and negatives. Race results are inherently dependent on the strength of your competitors, and we know that judging whether a race went well by simply comparing yourself to others is far from fool proof. 

Healthy looking herd in VT

Instead, a method that I find to be more beneficial to me is finding markers that I associate with good performance and looking to see whether the training is creating those markers. A good race is not proof that a training plan worked, but there are feelings that go along with my good results that are perhaps more trustworthy than the results sheet. I have had a lot of good races and a lot of bad races in my career, so I like to think I’m starting to get a grasp on how the two feel differently from each other. When I have a good day, generally: I want to push hard (I’m not dreading the pain part), technique focuses that I sometimes get and sometimes don’t can start to click, my limbs just feel light and springy, and I’m just in the type of mood where I’m excited to race. If I look for these factors instead of results in Falun, Lahti, and Drammen, I would have expected Falun to go poorly and Drammen to go quite well. Reality proved to be the opposite of this, but the important takeaway is that Drammen could have gone well. I don’t think there was anything I did too poorly in the preparation for that race, so either I executed the race itself poorly, or something else completely different happened out there. 

Fan moment

I still have a couple more data points to harvest before I fully reflect on how this last training/racing block went. After Lake Placid and Supertour Finals, I will have a much better idea of how to race this block between 1 and 5 weeks post high-volume training. This being said, I can only determine whether the training led to me achieving predetermined goals that I set for myself. It is of course impossible to ascertain that this plan was ideal–how do I know that I couldn’t have changed something to be better? The answer to this is that I don’t know. However, this is where being a little arrogant can come in handy. I know that I don’t know the perfect way to prepare, but if I can convince myself that what I’m doing is perfect, then the plan works for me more often than not. When you can’t really test whether something is working, the only real option in the moment is to pretend like you know that it will. 

Home at last

Lake Placid

Let me start by saying that with the final data point of this training and racing plan in the books, this period 4 went well beyond expectations. I could feel that I was just getting faster and more energetic as I got further away from the hard training block, and this feeling seemed to come to a peak in Lake Placid. I felt amazing in my race prep workout and the feeling of my qualifier was the best since Davos. Again, I missed outright advancement by a negligible margin and was very happy with how I skied my heat. I think it's safe to say that the training worked

feeling famous

With that out of the way, I want to talk about how amazing Lake Placid was. I raced in Minneapolis two years ago, so I understand how loud a ski race can be. The difference in Lake Placid was that the majority of the people there were part of the New England ski community. US Skiing as a whole is a special community, but there is something even more special about truly racing for the home crowd. I was very nervous for this race–perhaps the most nervous I’ve been all season. One thing that helped me was remembering that the people out here supporting me are the same people that congratulated me on making the Olympics regardless of whether or not I raced. This community cares about so much more than the results, and remembering that allowed me to relax and throw down one of the best qualifiers of my life. 

It appears that US Skiing fans will have to wait another two years before world cup racing returns to this continent, but I think fans showing up for Lake Placid was a step in the right direction. Last weekend, we proved as a nation that Minneapolis was not a fluke. This country has an energetic fan base that will travel for World Cup racing, and I think that bodes well for hosting more races in the future. It will take some serious rethinking of the world cup schedule to make North American world cups happen every year, but if US skiing keeps showing up like this, I’m confident we will keep moving in the right direction. 

Just lovely skiing recently