Even though we’ve escaped the darkness of northern Scandinavia it has been a tough couple days for me here in Switzerland. The hack I picked up after the sprint in Kuusamo turned into a head cold that has been pretty hard to get rid of. My energy level hasn’t suffered too much but my nose has been clogged up, which for an athlete can be very frustrating. After taking an off day I went out skating yesterday to try to get the blood moving and to get a feel of how the sickness has affected my body. I didn’t feel great, whether from the cold or the new training altitude, so I kept it short and easy. This morning I went out for a skate ski again and was feeling a little better so I put in a few speeds in the stadium. Right now it’s hard to tell if I will be able to get any starts in this weekend but I’m taking it one day at a time and keeping it optimistic.

I will head out striding tomorrow morning and test some skis and hopefully get some light intervals in. Doing intervals the day before a race is a training technique that a lot of world cup skiers seem to be adopting these days. It’s a good way to wake your body up and to get an idea of how you will pace the different sections of the course. I know it’s something Freeman has been doing lately and he will be throwing down some intervals tomorrow as well. I think the key is to ski into them a little bit and keep the majority of the intervals in the threshold zone without pushing the lactic acid so high that it will affect you the next day.

I will be using tomorrow’s intervals as an indication of whether or not I’ll try to start the 15k classic the next day. As a sprinter, my opportunities to start distance races on the world cup is limited by the schedules a lot of the time. That’s why this past week has been so frustrating for me. It’s not too often I get the opportunity to start two distance races in consecutive weekends, and illness has already kept me out of one of them. If I’m unable to race on Saturday I may not be able to get in another individual distance race until Nationals.

Regardless of whether I get the bib on for the 15k or not, we will for sure be starting a relay on Sunday and that could also be a chance to get a distance race in. It has been a team wide goal this year to try to step up our relay contention. I know we have the skills to be competitive its just a matter to putting together the puzzle pieces and linking together a good run. I think myself, as well as the other sprinters on the team will begin to step up our 10 game over the course of the year but it’s just a matter of getting the practice in. As sprinters I think we have the ability do well in the relays because we’re used to skiing in packs and accelerating at key moments. But I guess only time will tell. I know it’s a team goal to be a relay medal contender by 2010 so we will definitely be putting some time and thought into it.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 8:10 am and is filed under world cup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.