hello from Lake Placid NY!

it’s has been a great start to our annual intensity camp here in LP. our first two days started out easy, then we stepped it up with a speed session on Friday and some hard double pole intervals today. check out the hammering in the video. check back for some female video and an update on the Whiteface hill climb. 

For the past week I have been back in Vermont enjoying some killer fall weather and one of the easiest training weeks of the year. Our two weeks in whistler was a hard start to the intensity phase of my summer training program, followed by a testing week in Park City, so it was really important to make this past week one of the easiest recovery weeks of the year. Once you’re used to putting some big hour weeks training only 11 hours in a week is a pretty big cut back, but it gave me chance to hang out in VT and get some work done and skateboard a lot. Gus Kaeding of the CXC team came down for the weekend so we got a chance to train together a little bit hang out with the Foster’s and some other fellow SMSers. It was a good VT weekend with a hammer fest in the SMS gym, followed by a some good times in Manchester at the ‘wife’. A Sunday of football and some wicked sauna weather on sunday night. With the recovery week over it’s right back into the hard training for this week. I’ll have three intensity sessions this week before heading into our big Lake Placid camp next week for the start of two weeks with some TT’s and level 4 training…. Whap it!! 

on our day off in Whistler we went to visit the construction of the Olympic Village… then we jumped off a bridge. 

What up from Whistler!

We arrived here a few days ago for our first intensity camp of the fall. Both the National team and the D team will be training together for the next 10 days while getting in some hard work outs along the way. Aside from a few gaps in the black top, a large portion of the cross-country stadium and the biathlon stadium have been paved for roller skiing. The access road to the Olympic venue is also really good for training. It takes about an hour of easy skiing to get up the whole thing.

So far we’ve had a good sprint work out with a solid crew. We had Bird skiing with us for that workout, which was cool, along with some guest appearances by ‘Chambo’ and the Maine Winter Sports guys. It was pretty rad. Alex, our strength coach, is here from Park City too and he’s been kicking our ass in the gym. I think I was the sorest I’ve been all year yesterday after a hard roller ski in the morning and some ’super sets’ in the gym that afternoon. 

Today we all did a speed work out on the sprint course. Although all the pavement isn’t down on it yet it was still great for some speeds on specific sections. A big part of this camp is to get used to the Olympic venue. Everything from how long it takes to drive up from Whislter, to visualizing the stadium, to actually skiing on some of the race courses all goes into our preparation for the Games. We are going to hammer out a sprint relay work out tomorrow and then we have a day off Friday. There’s some talk to doing a little bungie jumping that day so I’ll have to get a video up. 

                                        Working on some sprint starts in the Olympic Stadium 

It’s been awesome to be back home in the green mountain state. Last week was my first full week home since before June, so I was stoked to be able to kick back a little bit, but it ended up being a busy week. Jess came with me to Vermont from Park City and since she doesn’t get to hang out here very often whenever she comes she likes to do ‘fun red neck stuff’. So we cruised around on the motorcycle a few times, worked out in the rain, and drove up north to help Ryan Foster build his cabin during the weekend. It’s on a sweet plot of land up near Jay Peak in Northern VT and I think it will probably be used as one of our new weekend hang outs and a skiing retreat during the winter.

Ryan had already built the first floor deck before the weekend started but with Ethan and his dad there and me there to mess up some framing, we were able to get a lot of wood up that weekend. I still had some training to do while I was up there so I headed out Sunday morning and did some level 4 bounding intervals up Jay peak in the morning before strapping the tools back on. It felt pretty hard core. We even went down to the local bar Saturday night which was a hilarious experience. This place is in the middle of nowhere so the fact that there was even a bar in this town was unbelievable. It was more like somebody’s house than a bar and there was a DJ playing everything from Alan Jackson to Buckcherry. and all the local girls were out on the dance floor whipping their perms around. it was awesome, pretty funny to go and hang out the some of the good old locals of the ‘kingdom’. 

here’s a look at some of the progress. 

After the weekend I made it back to southern VT in time for a solid week of training and in time to help Sverre out with the Stratton Junior camp. We did some skate roller skiing speeds one day in the rain and it was a amazing that there were only a few minor falls. each speed I was followed by 6 or 8 juniors hammering in behind me. I was impressed by some of the technique and speed of some of the juniors, especially the Stratton kids. On Wednesday the whole camp went to Weston to do some hard double poling and intervals up the ‘three’ hills. Each hill is pretty steep and takes a sold 15+ minutes to get up at Junior level 3 pace. It was a hard core work out. Seeing some of those kids working their asses off is great. Seeing them skiing way harder than they should be, having a severe bonk about to set in, and some serious blisters from the previous three days, brings me back to my junior days at the Stratton camps.

Well I still have a few solid days of training left in this week before I have a slight recovery week next before heading to Whistler for another US Ski team camp. I’ll be sure to report on any more fun ‘red neck stuff’ that goes on this weekend. later 

what up world, 

It has been an epic last week here at the snow farm. With snow continuing to fall every few days it’s made for some wintery conditions and killer skiing. I don’t think we’ve been on klister since one of our first days on the rock. 

I’n the past week we’ve put together one of the hardest training weeks we’ll have all summer long. It will be close to a 25 hour week with two interval sessions, one 10k time trial, 2 gym sessions,  and 2 days of specific strength. Combined that with last week and the beginning of this week and it comes out to around 65 hours of training in the past three weeks. So we’re starting to get a little bit on the tired side. But the past week has been awesome. Our little 10k time trial on saturday turned into a small race thanks to the local ski team… and a few master skiers including Mary, the owner of the snow farm. So that was cool. It felt good to do a real ski race. It turned out to be really hard waxing too, and we all had to race on harries… but it was good practice for Vancouver though.                                        measuring up some poles        photo by Torin Koos

We finished off our camp today with a set of 4×4 level 4 double pole intervals. We always try to do a few of these when we’re all together for a camp so we can hammer on each other a little bit more. It’s definitely one of those workouts that is better to do with some other people. Then this afternoon we went for a recovery ski, and tomorrow morning we’ll start our two day trek back to the US. Having this training block of winter was sick, but it’s time to get back to the warmth and the sun and enjoy the last few weeks of summer. 

Cook, Newell, YT striding        photo by Torin Koos

Thanks to Torin we got a few pics from the past day or two. The weather has been pretty nasty for the past 48 hours but we’ve been getting some good snow. Yesterday afternoon we had a complete white out at the snow farm and you could barely see ten feet in front of you. Luckily we had a run on the schedule in the afternoon so we were able to head down to Wanaka and run around the lake. But it also meant fitting chains in the dark on the way back up. life is good on the rock. 

view of the foggy ski trails

fitting chains on the way back up the hill

chillin in town

road to the snow farm

Sorry it’s been so long since my last post. Things have been crazy the past few weeks, but now we’re finally in New Zealand with a little bit of time on our hands.

I’ve spent the past three weeks or so training in Park City trying to get in some altitude before heading down under. This was one of my first times trying out the ‘live high train low’ theory of training and I think it went really well. I spend the first half of my time in PC just under 8,000 feet and then the last half at about 8,600. During these three weeks I was still doing a lot of intensity so I ended up spending a lot of time doing intervals at SoHo and even heading down toward SLC for some higher speed workouts.

After testing last week I think spending that block of training at a high altitude was a good idea. I was able to have some of the best tests ever both on the tredmill and on the strength side. 

With testing out of the way we made our way down to New Zealand on Friday. Even though it takes like two days of full travel to get here it’s really not that bad. The only crappy experience we had was while we were trying to leave LA on our way to NZ the air conditioning was broken on the airplane and there was some other mechanical problem on top of that so we ended up sitting on the run way sweating our butts off for almost two hours.

Other than that it was ok… except we’ve been here for two days and Cook still hasn’t seen his ski bag yet. He’s be on the phone trying to track it down and I guess it’s still in LA for some reason.

The first two days of skiing have been great. We started it out with some basic distance and then today we had some speed and we’re heading down to Wanaka for some strength this afternoon. The Canadians are here training and Paul Murry of Australia is going to train with us for a little bit, so we have a good crew. Sorry for no pictures today, I’ll try to get some up as soon as possible. I literally packed in 10 minutes on my way here and managed to forget the charger for my camera, and the power cord for the play station. Tragic. But I’ll try to borrow someone’s camera and get some pics up. Later