The value of sprint simulations

I have talked a lot about getting better at qualifying–what about heats? You can be a somewhat successful sprinter in the US if you only have qualifying speed–you will always qualify and sometimes get lucky in your quarter-final. These two successes in tandem earned a skier a top-12 on the world cup–not a feat to be scoffed at. However, when we are talking about being one of the best in the world at sprinting, as is my goal, you need to be able to ski heats consistently well to give yourself a shot in the finals. 

So what is the best way to practice and get better at racing sprint heats? The simple answer is to race more sprints, but various factors such as lack of sprints on a domestic or regional circuit or inability to qualify and/or move through heats really hinders a skier's ability to practice getting all the way through the final. To this day, I have only raced 6 full sprint days (quali, quarter, semi, and final), and this is probably more than many of my peers in the US have done. If you can’t rely on a winter racing schedule to practice your skills in heats, you must turn to implementing it in summer and fall training. This is where sprint simulations (sims) come in. 

Of course, like all events in skiing, you can train to become better by doing workouts that are unlike the race itself to some degree. For example, I like doing 6x1’ better than just doing a full effort to get better at qualifying. Similarly, distance skiers will more often do 4x4’, 5x5’ or similar workouts to get better at 10ks instead of just doing time trials all the time. With sprint heats, you can do similar things such as 2’ or 3’ repeats with a lot of rest or shorter efforts repeated many times–it’s not rocket science. However, unlike individual start ski races, sprint heats require very specific tactical moves that are best learned by actually competing. 

Luke getting lost in the wizarding world of Harry Potter

Because of this, in my opinion races and simulations are the best ways to get better at sprint heats. That leads to the question of what do you actually accomplish in a sprint sim? First and foremost, a sprint sim is a good, hard workout. It could be anything between 4x2.5’ and 4x4’ with very long rest. This falls in between a traditionally “Vo2max” workout and level 5. You work at a very high speed always above your aerobic capacity which can be beneficial for all aspects of skiing. On the flip side, this type of workout is incredibly taxing, but I’ll discuss this later.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, a sprint sim is excellent practice in your sprint tactics. If you and the group you are doing the workout with are taking the workout seriously, it can be almost as good as a race for practicing getting top-2 in quarters and semis and trying to win the final. In different workouts, you can practice working through traffic to get to the front OR sprinting at the end under load, but it is very hard to work on these things together outside of the environment of a race. 

I like to format my summer sprint sims as a king’s court–a format that makes it so everyone races all three heats and gets moved up and down depending on performance. However, It is important that your group takes every heat seriously because the goal is to get good enough to compete in very competitive quarter finals. If you sandbag the quarter you are doing you and your teammates a disservice.  Dress for the job you want–not the job you have. 

Flowers on the Glacier!

Sprint Sims are costly; are they worth it? From a physiological point of view, a full sprint sim probably doesn’t make sense until the direct lead-up period to racing. The workout is very hard and in order for the body to fully absorb it, I think most skiers would have to be training at a relatively low volume–not a popular approach in the summer. However, from a tactical standpoint, US sprinters are at a disadvantage having raced so many fewer high level sprint heats than our Scandinavian counterparts. Although you can’t expect to be racing at a “high level” in a random summer sprint sim, you can expect some serious tactical gains from racing a full sprint day. 

Right now, my current balance is I don’t do any sprint sims in the early summer (May and June), and then I try to do one per block at the end or after a recovery week if I am feeling good. With having raced a lot more high level heats in recent years being on the world cup, I think I have started to progress faster, but I still wonder if I could be doing more. If I don’t continue to improve tactically in the semis and finals, I may consider adding in more sprint sims during the summer. 

In cross country skiing, the model of high volume of training and L3 is very popular at all levels of the sport. My argument is that if you want to sprint well and feel like you are underperforming, you should do more sprint sims. The only “risk” that comes from doing these somewhat brutal sessions is that you lose a lot of energy that could have been devoted to training a lot more hours or 1 or 2 more L3 or L4 workouts. If you want to sprint well you need to practice making it to the final more than once or twice a year. Additionally, the benefits of sprint sims begin to tremendously outweigh the costs as you look at younger, less experienced athletes that want to be good sprinters. I can’t prove this, but it makes intuitive sense that if athletes aren’t getting the practice necessary during the season to sprint well in a final, they need to supplement in summer and fall training to make up for it.