Vacation Time: How do I approach work/life balance as a professional cross country skier?

There are many ways to approach summer periodization in a cross country skiing training plan. Some athletes elect to maintain steady volume through the summer months while others choose to drastically reduce volume every three or four weeks in an effort to recover more from the training and perhaps be able to do more during those harder weeks. This is my third year training with the GRP, and the block periodization has always been along the lines of two or three hard weeks followed by a dramatic reduction in volume for a week coupled with a hard session or two at the end of this easy week to capitalize on being more rested. With how the summer calendar played out this year, the training plan allowed for three really easy weeks over the course of the summer where I had a lot more freedom to do just about anything. The first of these weeks, I spent with my family on a beach vacation in Prince Edward Island, Canada. The second was spent just relaxing in Craftsbury partially because I had just gotten home from Alaska and wanted to settle in for a bit. The third of these recovery weeks just concluded and I was lucky enough to spend it with a former teammate from Colby in the Czech Republic. 

Relaxation vs Recovery

In order to get to the point I want to make in this blog, I first need to try and define “recovery”. Getting better at an endurance sport is generally just figuring how much you can possibly train AND still recover from that training. So what is recovery? Recovery can be broken up into two categories: active and inactive. Active recovery can take the form of a light jog, stretching, or some light core. On the other hand, I would define inactive recovery to be the act of doing nothing except eating and hydrating. The similarity between active and inactive recovery is that both are focused purely on maximizing performance. 

Rollerskiing just outside of Prague

If you take the last few statements I have made and put them into practice, it would lead an athlete to “recover” during all times they are not training. In a perfect world, an athlete could get back from their morning session and only lie in their bed until they want to either actively recover or start training again. 

While arguably ideal for performance, a life spent either training or in bed isn’t sustainable for most athletes. This is where my definition of relaxation comes into play. It is actually helpful here to quote the dictionary definition of relaxation: “the state of being free from tension and anxiety” because it doesn’t reference actually physically relaxing. So, instead of thinking of relaxation as lying in bed, I think of it as any activity that takes my mind off of skiing. Some of these activities such as watching baseball on TV, playing cards, or reading are most definitely both relaxation and recovery, but more active hobbies such as playing golf, disc golf, or slow pitch softball probably inhibit recovery. 

Poor course management

Perfect Recovery all of the time is really hard

For the vast majority of days in the training year, I am aiming for my recovery to be as perfect as possible in all aspects of life. However, I find that trying to be perfect at all times in this way is exhausting. Throughout my time training and racing competitively in cross country skiing, I like to think that I have gotten closer to perfection in regards to recovery. This being said, I can confidently say that I will never be perfect. If eating, training, and sleeping are the only things going on in my life for too long of a period of time, I have found that I start to lose the spark that keeps me motivated to always be training as hard as possible. In order to keep my training as sharp as it needs to be, I need to take some breaks mentally as well as physically. 

The closest I can get to perfect is through planned imperfection

Two summers ago, in 2023, I experimented with taking very few days off. Before this, I had always taken one day off per week (I think this is pretty standard for cross country skiers), but I wanted to try something else. The only full days off I took that summer came every three weeks at the end of a hard block where I would take two consecutive days off. This didn’t really work for me, as it left almost no time for any “relaxation”. Recently, (and I hope to continue this schedule) I have made an effort to only do one session on Saturday and take Sunday completely off from training to give myself a full day and a half away from training and strict recovery. This schedule almost gives me a full weekend which I really enjoy and try to make the most of with activities that make me happy outside of ski training. 

Moving onto the macro side of things and into the focus of this blog, the other form of planned imperfection in my training/recovery balance is trying to do more than just recover on recovery weeks. As I mentioned earlier, we only have three easy weeks scheduled into our summer training plan, and making good use of these periods feels critical to maintaining some semblance of a training/life balance in this sport. That is why, when Pepa told me we would be doing a training camp in Europe starting in late August, I immediately called up a former teammate who lives in Prague to try and orchestrate a vacation. The schedule ended up working out pretty close to perfectly, so I got to spend one of my precious few recovery weeks chilling with a friend in the Czech Republic. Hypothetically, I could have been recovering better at home in Craftsbury, but they don’t have Pilsener Urquell on tap in Craftsbury do they? 

Closing Thoughts 

I didn’t spend the entire week in the Czech Republic sipping cheap beer and sightseeing. I did plenty of those things, but I also got to do a fair bit of training with a fellow Mule going into his senior year. This may seem like a contradiction, but the right structure of training in the right environment can feel like a break from the daily grind. Getting to ski on different rollerski tracks and explore new mountains was more fun for me than a pure vacation anyway. 

Liberec, Czech Republic: Site of the 2009 Cross Country Skiing World Championships

Additionally, this post isn’t really about how I need a mental break from training. I love training and if it was up to me, I wouldn’t really ever take my foot off the gas pedal. Instead, this post is about how I need a break from strict recovery every once in a while. Sure, I spent a couple hours every day on vacation training, (as with any other vacation I take unless it's in the month of April but that's a topic for another day) but I wasn’t thinking about skiing at any other time during this vacation. Hence, I can confidently say that the week was relaxing and I’m mentally ready to attack the training plan with all necessary vigor until the season starts. Sure, I’m 100% committed to becoming the best skier I can possibly be, but without incorporating some downtime that's more than just sitting around in Craftsbury, I run a higher risk of burning out. I can’t confidently say where this line between maximizing performance and burning out is, but I’d always rather be a hair on the conservative side of the balance. Hence, I feel pretty comfortable claiming that trips like these that are in no way structured around training and recovering may be what I need most to give myself a chance of long term success in this sport.