Once again I’m writing from Lake Placid where training continues to progress. However, every now and then a week of recovery is needed and that’s exactly what this past week gave me. A 50% drop in hours feels like a world of difference! Now that the batteries are recharged for a new training period, I look forward to jumping back into a full training schedule tomorrow.

The big story of this past week was a trip to the Mt. Washington area to visit some long lost friends from Williams College. We accomplished everything from jolly trip to Storyland, hiking up Mt. Washington, clay tennis matches, to even a bit of chainsawing. I want to send out a big thank you to the Kantack family for their great hospitality! Check out some of the photos (courtesy of Keith!)—more are found on the Williams blog.

Robby Cuthbert, me, and Keith Kantack

I only have a couple more posts left in my series attempting to answer the question: What makes the Norwegians so fast at skiing? So, to continue that series this post looks briefly at specificity (trenings fordeling), or the percentage of ski specific training that takes place in Norway. This is another one of those subjects that seems a hot topic for debate. Again, there is no definitive answer to how much specificity is correct.

Robby and I skiing into Crawford Notch State Park

My first training camp in Folldal with Team Statkraft Lillehammer provided me the first taste of how much ski specific training I would be doing during my time abroad. As a percentage, I did over just over half of my total training on skis/rollerskis. Again, this was a big difference from what I was used to. In summer months from years before, I was spending about a quarter of my training on skis/rollerskis. Of course, during the winter months the percentages were quite similar.

One other difference worth mentioning was the increase in specificity with intensity training. Almost all of my intensity training last year was done on skis/rollerskis. I had a few running, bounding, and biking intervals, but about 90% of my intervals were done on skis.

This extra time on rollerskis during the summer months made a dramatic difference in how I felt once we started skiing on snow. I seemed more confident on real skis almost immediately. Of course, there is a big difference from rollerskis to snow, but my body felt more ready for the transition.

Getting in some sawin’ strength…

The general idea that I picked up from my trainer, Tobias, was that skiers should strive to ski as much as possible, while keeping a balanced training plan. Some food for thought can come from looking at sports like swimming or biking, where athletes spend almost all of their training in the pool or on the bike—very sport specific.

This is not to say that skiers need or should to do the same. A good example of why we need to think carefully about specificity in regard to skiing are the possible troubles that athletes can run into. In the past two years, a good friend of mine ran into issues where his legs simply would not recover from large amounts of skate skiing. The past season for this athlete was less than satisfactory, and in order to recover from this overtraining/overreaching several months of rest and rehab were needed.

All in all, specificity is an important aspect to skiing. Striving to do as many ski specific motions as possible may be a correct approach. So, in my opinion the key lies in finding the right balance physically and mentally.

Visiting hardworking Caleb at Storyland

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 6th, 2009 at 3:37 pm and is filed under Norway, Training. 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.