Here is a cross-section of the life of a collegiate cross-country runner (me) during last two days of training during preseason.  Classes start the middle of next week.  Enjoy

Tuesday

7am: Roll out of bed and ride my bike up to campus for a breakfast of oatmeal with granola and raisins, orange juice

8am: Ride back to the house, relax on the couch and watch an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (great show), prepare for workout.

8:45am: Head off to practice

9am: Practice time.  Interval workout.  Warm up: 21 minute easy jog (3 miles), dynamic stretching and form drills (10 minutes).  Workout: 6 hill repeats (one mile continuous uphill, mostly gradual with a few steeper sections), with easy half-mile downhill recovery.  Started easy, 5:11 and picked up the pace each interval from there finishing in 4:50.  Ran solo.  Kept pace relaxed and under control, however practiced finishing hard while tired on the last one and pushed the last quarter mile. Post workout recovery drink.  Cool down: 15 minutes of easy jogging (2+ miles), dynamic and static stretching (40 minutes).  Total mileage: Just under 14 miles. 

12pm: Head out to lunch; bowl of cereal, turkey sandwich, bowl of pasta and banana.

1pm: Back down to the house to relax.  Fixed up the house with roommate.

3pm: Snack; PowerAde and orange

3:45pm: Head off to practice

4pm: Practice time number 2.  Stretching (20 minutes), form drills (1 hour), core and strength (40 minutes).

6:30pm: Dinner; Large salad with rice and chicken, bread, granola sandwich with honey and banana, green tea

7:30pm: back down to the house to hang out with teammates.  Movie 

10:30pm: In bed and asleep

Wednesday

7am: Wake up, breakfast on campus; oatmeal with Grape-nuts, banana and brown sugar, orange juice

8am: Back down to the house.  Another episode of “Curb”

8:45am: Head off to practice

9am: Practice time.  Recovery run:  easy 7+ miler.  Dynamic stretching, form drills (15 minutes), strides on the track in spikes, static stretching (30 minutes).  Post workout recovery drink.

12pm: Meeting

12:30pm: Lunch; pasta with vegetables, apple juice, cereal, apple

1pm: Another meeting (exciting, eh?)

2pm: Back to the house to take a nap

3:45pm: Head off to practice (things starting to repeat themselves aren’t they?)

4pm:  Practice time number 2.  Form drills (40 minutes), core (30 minutes), static stretching (25 minutes).  Normally would do another run at this point (5-6 miles) but taking a “down week” in mileage this week.

6pm: Dinner on campus; large salad with rice and salmon, bread.

7pm: Back down at the house, hang out with teammates

8pm:  UFC fight night.  Diaz is the man.

10:30pm: In bed and asleep.

Repeat.

Getting back to training with teammates has been a great change of pace following an entire summer of solo efforts, slowly nursing myself back to health and cautious about over-exerting myself before being fully recovered. After last year’s… “mishaps” I sat down to reflect on what went right, what went wrong, and what I had learned from my trials and tribulations. The most important thing you can do after a… less than stellar year… is to learn from your mistakes and realize what you can (and cannot) do so that it doesn’t happen again. Through this self-reflection I was able to truly understand my goals in life, increase the fire burning within, and make my accomplishments and path to fulfilling my goals taste just that much sweeter. In order to do this, I have changed a lot in regards to my training over last year. These changes include mandatory days off regardless of how I feel, greater variation in week to week training loads, and greater emphasis on the purpose of each training session: train hard when it counts (races, intervals, up-tempos, etc.) and most importantly easy when necessary (recovery). Every day must have its purpose, as everyday is a chance to take you one step closer to success. I am currently focusing exclusively on running, something that is normal for me at this time in the year, and the miles are being to effortlessly fly by.

The return to college life has been smooth and painless as fall classes don’t start until the end of the month and other students and incoming freshmen don’t arrive for another week and a half, leaving the entire campus empty to just us preseason athletes, providing for a great location for some solid training without the hassles, commotion and distractions of normal college life. This upcoming week my training goals yield an 80-mile week (in six days due to Monday being an off day) with only a few easy workouts, so things are looking good. My coach and I have decided for me not to race in the season opener this weekend, trading it instead for some more quality training. The rest of the Dartmouth boys are looking great and all are anxious to see what the first race brings, with the older guys preparing to show off their summer fitness and the freshmen boys searching for how they might stack up with the rest of the team.

Until next time,

Ben

Here are a few photos, as I go from snow, to desert, and back to snow again…

Arizona: nice hot desert, perfect for trail running

Teammate Greg Haines logging in some miles

Yours truly after a pleasant 15 miler, two days before getting sick

The reality I returned to once back at Dartmouth

Scenic 16 miler in Vermont

The way I usually work the transition is to start during the tail end of my ski season, slowly adding recovery runs before and after races. These jogs are there for two reasons –mainly to prepare myself for the upcoming track season, but also for recovery, as I usually end my season with big races. Light jogs are a great shakeout method to clear lactic acid built up by racing as well as to loosen up the tired and sore muscles. After the ski season ends, I gradually increase my running over the course of several weeks. This particular year I took three days off after returning from Italy, allowing my body to fully recover before taking a single running step. Running just over 30 miles for that first week (of four days), my body was able to get the hang of the abuse I was throwing at it in small doses. I made sure to keep the pace slow and steady, making sure to not over work the muscles and I am very strict about stretching afterwards. After a few days of this, my body had already rapidly made the change over. The following week is one of mileage in the high 50s with one easy up-tempo session to add a bit of speed, as well as one day of rest. After that, if everything is feeling good, the third week back to the sport will be up to 70 miles with three up-tempo workouts, and well, by the fourth week I will be fully transformed from skier to runner.

While if everything goes right, I will be back to full running strength in four weeks, my racing season won’t start for another month, and hard interval sessions won’t be for two or so more weeks. The delay of these events is to make sure not to put unnecessary strain on the body so early in the season. Extra time stretching and sitting in the ice bath are preventative ways to help reduce the risk of injury in this highly-sensitive time, and cross training is used in addition to the running to make sure my overall fitness stays high.

Transitioning from one sport to another, whether from skiing to running, or from football to NASCAR, needs to be done with caution and care, closely listening to your own body and making sure you are not pushing yourself too hard, too early. Just remember the race season is long, and your body will come around in time, just be patient and believe in the plan.

This here is the stadium. It was pretty small and the mass start was… interesting, but still very impressive for only having eight days to pull the whole thing together. The stadium was practically non-existent when we first arrived and workers were frantically dumping snow in the ravine to widen the stadium.

The rest of the course consisted of switch backs up and down the surrounding hillsides. Tight turns and hard granular snow (at least in the mornings) lead to many crashes and broken equipment. The snow started off as bulletproof, but as more teams arrived to the venue and the midday temperatures started pushing the mercury towards 60 degrees -the snow quickly transformed into soup by the time the men’s races went off.

Here was one of the hardest things to deal with. Not only was the venue at altitude (1700 meters), covered in sloppy snow, and smelled of the fine essences of cow dung, but lack of winds allowed for the heavy onset of the inversion from the nearby towns and cities (mostly due to wood burning stoves). This pollution began settling down in the valley, causing many athletes to wake with sore throats. The inversion got so bad that we had to go down to the local hardware store to purchase dust masks to help protect ourselves.

Even with the inversion, it is hard to say anything negative about this beautiful place. Nestled in the valleys of the Alps, we were surrounded by acres and acres of apple trees. I guess the area that we were in is famous for their apples -as they should be -for the fruit from these trees were beyond delicious. The community was so serious about their fruit, that as prizes for the skiers on the podium, each was awarded a box full of locally grow apples. This picture here is one of the many apple tree fields we flew past on a train ride to Bozen.

Not only was the countryside filled with apple trees, they were also littered with ancient castles as far as the eye could see. It was pretty neat to see dozens and dozens of castles in the surrounding hillsides and to think just how much history we were being apart of. There must of been epic battles between neighboring feuds.

Unfortunately war is something that they are used to in Northern Italy. Here is one of the many pillboxes that was built during WWII and strategically positioned amidst the farmlands. After skiing one day we went to investigate. It was wild to see one of these fighting fortresses up close. The entire front was riddled with bullet holes. Climbing inside and exploring deep into the levels of the fort, you would get an eerie feeling of the history of the place and how many lives were changed or lost in the very place we stood. Northern Italy has actually be fought over so many times, that while we were officially in Italy -the locals (especially the elderly) saw themselves as distinctively German and German was the local language.

Speaking of history -on one of our rest days a few of us took a train to Bozen to see the one and only Otzi. In this picture we are walking through the old crowded streets in search of the famed iceman. Otzi, or the 5000 year old man, is the oldest human ever discovered and was found sticking out of a nearby glacier. Supposedly he was murdered at age 46 -shot in the back with an arrow. Besides his assassination, Otz (as his closer friends refer to him) has shown the world how people lived back in the day as he was discovered with all of his possessions and DNA analysis was able to figure out where he had lived at every point in his life. Yeah a little nerdy but hey it was interesting.

Well besides all that fun stuff the trip consisted of a bunch of easy skiing and hard racing. Here the troop gets ready to go for a training ski. Lack of snow at lower altitudes made finding snow away from the crowded race venue difficult, but we found a few peaceful k’s of groomed snow here and there.

And well, I can’t go any further without mentioning the awesome display of dominance that the U23 gals of Liz Stephen, Morgan Arritola and Taz Mannix showed in the 15km freestyle race. With under a kilometer to go all three gals were in the top 5 and looking good. Unfortunately some bad luck plagued us on a particularly nasty turn, and only Liz was able to escape unscathed and went on to an incredible 3rd place. Watching the American flag being raised later that night at the awards was nothing less than spectacular.

While Liz was our only one on the podium, everyone did a fantastic job racing and things are only on the the up and up. Thanks to an amazing coaching staff, and our killer, yet handicapped, waxing crew consisting of big Broken-legged Ben and Gimped-back Gibbs, the athletes really had the best entourage available.

So with that, I just want to say thank you to everyone on the trip -you all made it great -and to everyone else for supporting and helping our athletes not only ski at, but to be a fighting force at the international and championship level. So yeah, thank you. And now for a few remaining photos of the trip…

Simi Hamilton deep in concentration during the relays

Simi and Mikey Sinnott cruising around a nearby Swiss town

Liz Stephen showing her game face

And finally -not too bad a scenery, eh?