What mountain town do you think is the most athletic in America? How about over the pond? We’re talking about good endurance training and racing, including running, hiking, mountain biking, and nordic skiing. I’ve heard lots about Bend, OR. What about the Salt Lake area? Versatility and challenge are important.

What do you think makes a good choice to you? A combination of elite athleticism balanced with otherwise enticing cultural energy? Is it grass-roots races won by local hard cores getting it done every day? Are your local hard-cores the best in the country at what they do? Tons of sponsor-patch-clad egos that you just can’t wait to crush (thereby joining their ranks…)?

While maintaining a curiosity for the rest of the country, I’ll nominate Anchorage, AK for the plethora of summer races fueled by long sun-lit summer evenings. While winter training in the dark can be tough, if you can manage to get fast enough there will consistently be one of the strongest pack of elite nordies in the country waiting to eat you up. Once the snow making magically appears at Kincaid the scene will see another change for the positive.

So, for the sake of sparking a flame war I’ll say:

“Anchorage is the best racing town in America. You just can’t beat the Chugach Range training in the summer. Everyone else should just pack up and go back to England.”

Anchorage Runners Calendar
Alaska Mountain Runners
Anchorage Ski Race Schedule

Let’s here it. Or are you too bored not to comment?

Today I went for a run and did some more job snooping. Pretty sick stuff for a blog entry huh?

Everything right now is all about changing context, which is both refreshing and nerve-wracking. I need a new job to get into a different mentality through the day, and I need to mix up my training too. Today I hiked ran up Flat-Top with Patrick Conway and realized that I’ve never done any hiking in the winter time in Anchorage. The snow was not very deep and it was pretty refreshing to do some running and to tromp through the snow on the way down. I’ll have to do more of this.

Tomorrow I’ve got a few goals, and one of them is to do some planning for this and next week to help squash some interesting stuff into my training schedule. I’m sitting around wanting to train, but getting in the car and skiing in the same place time after time isn’t cutting it. I’ll try mixing biking, running, and hiking all together, and with an emphasis on point-to-point routes.

Thinking back a few months it struck me that I was feeling very fast and fit on roller skis in July. I was also training 13-15 quality hours on a big week. While this is obviously a little backwards, it’s interesting that during that time I was running and hiking and hardly roller skiing at all, and it was a ton of fun. Hmmm. Yes, Grasshopper, very good…

Since I left my iPhone in the car during the hike I don’t have any pictures. Here’s an image to help a bit; Two guys, 1.5 feet of snow, 40 degree rock and shale slope with minimal vegetation going up 750 feet. It’s snowing an inch every three hours and is 20 degrees. We cranked a bunch of screws into our shoe soles and ran and hiked for 60 minutes on a trail travelled by one to two people before us. A random choice of a downward route put us into a small drainage and out onto the same road from which we started, body and mind felt good afterwards. Fin.

First Race this weekend – 10K skate @ Beach Lake.

Although spending three whole days standing still outside in a weekend avy coarse was exhausting, I did manage to eek out a 60 minute skate session with some L4 intervals. They were a little more intense than normal, but I have heavy experimenting to do. Observe:

#1 L4 felt like crap @ 3:55
#2 L4 felt more like crap @ 3:49
#3 L3 slowed down, felt good @ 3:55
#4 L3/4 started slow ended faster @ 3:49

WHAT THE HECK?!?! This pretty much sums up my skiing ability.

What I’m learning from this is that no matter how hard I push I’m going to get the same results. Words of wisdom would be nice here.

It was long past dark when I finally got out on my skate skis, so I thought I would use the moon-lit conditions as an exercise in zen by trying to work the corners well in the low light. I put my head lamp in the snow on the one impossible fast corner, but otherwise tried to keep my balance intact to react quickly. If anything the exercise was fun, and moon-lit gnar at high altitude is never a bad thing!

The Herd

We’ve got a huge – I’m going to call it a herd – of local civvy skiers doing intervals every Thursday here in Anchorage. It’s kind of incredible, actually. Tonight there was around 25 people, meaning a pack of eight fast guys skiing very hard in amazing conditions. The new group is totally home-spun by Trond Flagstad, the UAA head nordic coach. His idea is to tap momentum from the community with people that want to just get out there and ski hard, kind of like the norwegian club model…and hey man, I’m kind of interested to see how this group does in the local races this year. Some of us have placed fairly well in the past, so if any of us washed up full-time job types beat any of you club guys this year, the smack talk shall not cease!

Tags: intervals, legs, makeithurt, skating, technique, Training
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