Rune told me last year that you don't ski yourself into shape if you have racing on your mind; the season is too short and the races come too fast. Instead, you think of your summer and fall of training as filling your savings account of fitness, and then you draw that down over the course of the winter, hoping it lasts until your last race! And then you rest, and then you fill it back up again over the following summer. I love that cyclicality of skiing.
This summer and fall have seen some of the best training I've ever done, not just in terms of volume, but also smart, focused training. I can't help the fact that I came to skiing late in life and will never have that technical proficiency and ease that comes from skiing since you were four, but I can at least try to be strong and fit and maximize the amount of fun I have.
So I took the last ten days off from work -- what a delicious break! -- and turned it into a training block, trying to top off the savings account without training myself into a hole that would take all winter to work back out of. Out of these ten days, I skied on seven of them, and each day's workout had a specific purpose. No recreational touring for me this week; even the easy distance day I had on the Iron Horse was still an opportunity to focus on technique, on weight transfer, on stretching with every stride for that extra two or three inches Coach Ozzie told us about. There were a lot of snow bombs on the trail that day, which put speed bumps into my attempts to be smooth and dynamic, but I just considered them another chance to improve; there is never a guarantee that a race track will be smooth and perfect, especially in the back of the pack where I hang out.

There were a number of things I wanted to work on this week: for one, my wimpy tolerance for cold, with a race planned in Edmonton ("butt naked cold"), Alberta, in early February. Around here, Stevens Pass is your best bet for cold(ish) temperatures. The first time I went there, I count as a fail. Sure, I held out for 90 minutes, which was about half what I wanted to do, but I never did warm up and felt awkward and stiff on both the uphills and the downs. That wasn't doing me any good, so I bailed. The next time I went, I did a better job of dressing and learned what I need to be comfortable when it's 20 degrees: a hat that covers my ears, an extra layer under my ski pants. I felt so much better (although still cold), and I skied for two and a half hours.

The other good part about that day was another thing I wanted to work on, which is downhills. Stevens is great for that; there are no flat parts, and the downhills are continuous and curving, some steeper than others, but all challenging and fun. This particular day, the snow was a mix of crunchy/soft/crunchy/soft, so the transitions kept me on my toes and made for excellent practice. Plus, did I already say fun? Yes, fun!
Another thing I wanted to work on was speed (or what counts for speed for me!). I did an awesome workout at Cabin Creek that was, after a warm-up cruise down the road and back, six loops around just the Berg loop, which I think has the most hills per kilometer. I did each one as if it were a bounding women workout, charging each uphill as hard as I possibly could, taking advantage of the hero snow to charge the downhills, too, going for max exhaustion, just to see if I could do six laps like that without letting up. And I could! That was awesome and, again, super fun!
In the same vein, I needed to recalibrate my pace; what kind of speed can I maintain over a longer time? All the bounding women workouts were two hours; how fast can I push myself for four or more hours without blowing up? My previous long races and workouts have been at a very pedestrian cruising pace; can I go faster, now that I am stronger? So this time I did the full Viking and Berg loops, five times, ratcheting back the intensity a little bit from the Berg speed workout, but still trying to push hardish on the uphills, or at least not slow to a walk, and keep up the dynamicity on the flats, pushing the downhills as fast as I dared, and not letting up the intensity for the full four and a half hours. That was a day that snowed really hard all day; flying down the downhills, the hard little snow pelted my eyeballs, making me almost blind as I skied down. That was interesting! The tracks started filling in by my fourth lap; by my fifth lap, everyone else had left and I ended up skiing in my own track, in several inches of soft deep snow, but I didn't let myself let up too much on the intensity. That was one immensely satisfying day, and a real confidence booster.

Strength, of course, was another focus. On the day that the pass report said chains required, I decided it was a good time to go to the free gym in my office building for a max strength workout; I don't want to be anywhere near trucks on I-90 when it's a chains-required day! So I got in one good solid set of everything I wanted to do, and then some doofus guy came in with the worst case of flu you can imagine, sneezing and coughing and snotting and blowing and just about as disgusting as he could possibly be. No way I wanted to be around those germs, so I shot him a hateful look, washed my hands, and left. Yuck! But I made up for it today, channeling Anders Aukland with a super-hard double pole workout at Cabin Creek. I skied down to the end of the road, then double-poled all the way back to the Berg intersection, all double poling, no striding, and people, it was freakin' hard! I've never been able to do that all the way before, and I really wanted to do it at least twice. On my way back down between repeats, I skied smoothly and easily, focusing again on weight transfer, balance, fluidity, stretching out the glide. After I had done two, I saw Rob and asked him, with all of his coaching experience, what he thought the optimal number of repeats would be. He thought three would be great, four would be the absolute max, so I did four. And wow, it was really really hard, which was exactly what I was looking for on this last day of my training block. I hope I can get out of bed in the morning!

So, that is the end of the training block, and tomorrow I go back to work. I feel very satisfied with how that went: I didn't waste any time, I followed through on my plan pretty much every day, I got plenty of sleep and took naps, and I ate a lot of vegetables. Training gets a lot more complicated when I'm trying to work it in around my erratic work schedule, but this was a good chunk of quality hours stored in the savings account and in my legs and lungs, and I'm ready for the ski season to begin. Can't wait to see what will happen in the next three months!