One of my staple workouts is the six hour over distance session.  After experimenting with different durations of time I have found that this is the longest workout that I benefit from.  I can hold good technique and snappy movements for the entire workout and recover in about 48 hours.

Many people ask me how I can ski that long.  Physically, I’m just lucky I guess.  Also, my father took me on weekend warrior skis when I was growing up.  We would drive one or two hours to a ski area and he would pay our trail fees.  Then he saw to it that we got our money’s worth.  A typical saturday ski would be a three hour session in the morning and a two hour in the afternoon.   Sometimes this was repeated on Sunday.  I didn’t have to ski that long, I could have sat in the lodge or in the car.  This is what it meant to go skiing for me from the time I was seven until I was twelve.

Mentally I sometimes find long workouts relaxing.  Most people that hear about my workouts can’t believe that I don’t die of boredom.  However, I kind of like starting out on an OD knowing that all I have to do for the next six hours is ski.  I get into a rhythm and a half conscious state where I am always focused on technique but allow fantasies of race victories, past racing failures, and my girlfriend to flow in and out of my mind.  I tend to ski fastest when thinking about bothched race efforts.  I still get pissed off at myself for finishing second at the state xc running meet my senior year of highschool.  Thinking about that race is always good for a ten heart beat increase in intensity.

I classic skied six hours on August 10th and never bonked which is unusual for me.  I am crediting that  to the few days I had to take off for a recent sponsor trip.  The rest must have allowed me to top off my glycogen stores.  I was enjoying myself on the ski until about the four hour mark when  a hail storm came out of nowhere that dumped nickel sized chunks of ice on me for ten minutes.  Then the hail changed to pouring rain like I have never seen in New Hampshire.  It was so nastly out that I got several offers from passing motorists to give me a lift home.  If they had offered during the hail storm I might have taken them up on the offer but I can deal with rain.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 2:47 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.