Last week I completed my first glacier camp of the summer with my APU team at the Thomas Training Center on Eagle Glacier.  It was supposed to be an 8 day long camp with a 50/50 split of skate and classic skiing. Once we got started however, there were some problems with the grooming equipment, and there was more volcanic ash in the snow than predicted, so we ended up classic skiing almost the entire week.

At first, I was apprehensive about the effects of classic skiing every session for a full week.  I was concerned that my feet and joints might get overworked.  As the sessions played out however, I found it was actually quite beneficial to be able to be so submersed in one technique and my body actually held up pretty well.  I guess this is what they did back in the old days anyhow!

This camp was mostly focused on distance training, with a few speeds in most sessions.  We did intervals once at the beginning of the week and one session near the end.  It was a nice relief to ski a little faster in the slow and soft snow conditions (also great prep for Whistler conditions).  One day midweek we did an over distance session of three hours.  In the afternoon we played a team game of speedball, which turned out to be way more fun than I imagined.

By the end of the week, I had 24 hours of skiing under my belt.  The initial plan was to fly out, but the clouds were hanging in thick and even after holding out until the very last minute, I ended up hiking down with the team.  My legs were quite sore from the downhill by the end.  Yet it was a really fun way to close out the camp with everyone in high spirits and quite silly at the bottom.

I’ll have three weeks of dryland training until the next camp.  A perfect balance.  Here’s some pictures from the camp.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.