Sit down, class. I have something to share.

Skis Against The Atom (Amazon) is the World War Two story of specially trained Norwegian saboteurs that attempted to destroy a heavy water plant, preventing the Nazis from producing an atomic bomb before the rest of us lucky buggers.

There is a quote from an old man in that book while he was rowing an injured Knut Haukelid across a totally sketchy fjord in Northern Norway in the cold of February. He said “It used to be that boats were made of wood and men were made of iron. Now it’s the other way around.”

That saying has always stuck with me. Knut then effectively outran the Germans on skis with a shot-off toe, surviving unbearable cold, absolute starvation, and snow blindness to survive. Driven to the end of existence with the enemy in sight, some reindeer herding Samis picked his passed-out butt off the FinnMark and eventually handed him over to the good guys. He then returned to England to be debriefed and re-deployed for more underground active service in occupied Norway.

Hero? Check.

On the lighter side, here’s an excerpt from a historical check-up on langrenn.com about an aspiring ski racer named Oddmund Jensen who lived around the same time as the venerable Knut Haukelid.

Pop quiz, who can tell me what the following means:


Første økt: 3 timer felling, kvisting og barking.
Matpause ca 15 min.
Andre økt 3 timer felling, kvisting og barking.
Matpause ca 15 min.
Tredje økt: 1 time felling, kvisting og barking.

1-2 ganger pr uke la han inn en times løping/intervall.
Intervalltreninga kunne eksempelvis være 6-7 rykk av 1-2 minutters varighet med
rundt 2 minutters pause.


Time’s up.

Now, I’m going to translate the rest of the article soon enough, but let’s just have a quick look at the applicable situation. We’ve got a young lumberjack that wants to race with the best. He loves skiing and seems to have a knack for hard work. He hasn’t made it yet, but he wants it bad.

So what does that stuff mean? This is what it means:


First workout: 3 hours felling, limbing and stripping.
Food break about 15 min.
Second workout: 3 hours felling, limbing and stripping.
Food break about 15 min.
Third workout: 1 hour felling, limbing og stripping.

1-2 times a week he'd lay down an hour of running/intervals.
The interval training could for example be 6-7 rounds of 1-2 minute's duration with
around 2 minutes of rest.


Iron.

Think about it.

Search For Solitude

It still blows me away that I can wake up one morning in the off-season and am fit enough to decide to go on an 18 mile run through the mountains on a whim. Lake Solitude is at the end of Cascade Canyon, which is a narrow relatively low-lying (for the area) drainage with the Three Tetons towering 7000 above.

I wanted to make it to the lake for a while and new snow was coming that night, so this was the last day to do it. The snow gradually went from 1 inch at the car to six-eight inches over rocky terrain at 9000′, and eventually crushed my legs. I walked the last two miles out.

You know you’re getting a good run in when you stop seeing other tracks in the snow. Once I got back there I took a step back and said to myself,

“Amazing how fit people can do this. I mean I’m *way* back here.”

Running uphill for 9 miles at high altitude before turning makes for a hard workout, and I spent the entire run thinking about physical limits. I was mulling over some of the experimentation on physical limits I’d done two summers ago, along with a specific part of Thomas Alsgaard’s book. Read on for that.

Have you ever dared to push it like this?

Amount of Training

As an active racer I was quite close to one end of the scale. I trained relatively little, but with high speed. And on the National Team’s level I was probably the racer that had the most rest days, but at the same time I was one of them that trained the hardest. On the top level we often trained two times a day, but in the last two years of my career I started playing with three workouts a day. These periods lasted four days, and I had three such periods over the course of the training season. A little of the philosophy was to increase the training volume and provoke the body by driving it into total depression. To achieve this the best possible way, I thought it was important to come close to 6-7 hours a day. But if I should do it in two workouts, they would be long and so the speed must also decrease. That’s because if you are going to run for 3 1/2 hours then you can’t hold the highest speed. By dividing my training up into three workouts I could have shorter workouts with higher speed. The first workout was 2-3 hours, the second and the third around 2 hours.
…
The three workouts worked very well. it was like three days with three workouts a day, till I got sick of the sight of training equipment. Then I drove maybe two days more with the normal 2 workouts, followed by 3-4 rest days, or until I felt totally recovered again. This I did only for the training season, but no one that thought it was a good idea when I began, and after some amount of experience I proved myself right. The first year I layed down three periods with three workouts a day. The second year I had two periods before I got injured riding a bike and it fell a little apart. But it had an extreme effect. I felt that the tough three-workout periods gave a violent lift. If you want to be the best, you have to dare to become exhausted and drive your body totally into a depression. But if you want to be the best, it’s also important to dare to be tough enough to rest. The tougher you train, the more you have to rest afterwards. My philosophy is simple: train hard until you are exhausted – rest until you are recovered.

- Thomas Alsgaard, Best På Ski

Dare To Push It

I took two things away from this when I first read it two years ago.

The first was to get creative and think outside the box about intensity and volume, and to dare to add more intensity than others would suggest.

The second idea, which left a much deeper impression, was that you could train a lot harder than you think as long as it’s quality and you rest enough. Notice he said 2-3 rest days. TWO to THREE. Dig it.

“The tougher you train, the more you have to rest afterwards.”

This is where the three biggest keys for performing well came together for me:

1) Don’t be afraid to train as hard as you physically can.
2) Keep your body guessing by mixing speed and endurance into workouts, and micro/macro cycles.
3) Apply true focus and right motivation to ensure all this happens.

Number 3 is also called “commitment,” and is the most important. The more you really commit to a goal from the bottom of your soul, the more your body will respond through performance.

Dare to be exhausted. Dare to push it.

“Many people say that if you want to be the best in sport and in cross country, you have to train the best, have the best technique, equipment and training apparatus. All of this is important, but at the same time I think that maybe this isn’t the most important. Something bigger and deeper has to happen. The foundation maybe has more to do with attitude and culture than about specific details. I believe this is where the most important key lies.”

- Translated from the forward of Thomas Alsgaard’s book, Best På Ski.

I stand in the doorway, looking at the clouds. I wonder what it’s going to do in the next few hours? Will it be splotched and sunny? Will it rain a little? What about the wind?

With a little experience in one hand and some guts in the other, the giant stands at bay and sifts through the possibilities. Without moving beyond more than a solid base for almost a year, the light is pale but ready to flash.

Not so much snow on Cody yet. No new snow on the Grand. The canyons are still open, the mountain lions are hungry. Where to go, and how to go there…

Poof

One of my biggest pet peeves is sticky jam or juice between my limbs, so this grosses me out. How many of you girls can do this though:

http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/xav36c

Peace out – Pat

First thing’s first….

Boring workout hippy-drool

Thursday am: 80min Run up Death Canyon
Thursday pm: Reverse Happy Hour @ Caddy
Friday am: 40 min run + 50 L3/4 up+down Snow King
Friday pm: Stayed home, then went out
Saturday am: CycleCross. Killed it.
Saturday pm: Beer Hockey til 3am. I won.
Sunday: slouch on the couch
Monday: 25min “easy” up-hill moose-hoof bounding + 50min tempo run
Tuesday: 120min run up Cascade Cayon (epic)
Wednesday: Off
Thursday: 60 min spec DPole strength. it’s back

Two things amaze me about this:

With no goals or planning whatsoever, I find myself out somewhere pushing myself beyond belief. I mean today’s specific strength was HARD! I’m sort of just out to get it for getting it’s sake or something. Two hard days and a race followed by two long OD’s? Who does that?

The second thing is that even without deserving it I can get out there and knock out a couple of 120 minute mountain at altitude, *after* all this mayhem.

I can just here the gym teacher now.

“You know he’d be a hell of an athlete if he’d just apply himself.”

I feel like a raging bull without a fighter. Big healthy hams and all that. Ruff Ruff.

Frankly, now that the dust has settled I just don’t have a race to get all psycho about. The nor-tard thing isn’t exactly number 1 in my sights, chasing the invisible training partner through the rain and all. Some people sent some running links, gotta check them out (Thanks Dave).

What’s next? What’ll it be? Ideas? Pay $140 + entry to jump in the SuperTours and get my ass handed to me? No thanks. Resign myself to X-TERRA and masters’ nordic races? Find the trail runner within? Just give up and start working on my AA membership?

Yeah that’s right, next year I’m a MASTER. Stick it. Crap, that also means I’m a “blaster”.

I’m sort of entering a new athletic phase. I pushed it pretty hard year ’round for the last few years and learned a lot of what I wanted to learn about training and racing. I know I can run with the big dogs in the summer, and nordic skiing is a whole new animal now.

I’ve faced challenges head-on to the point where I’ve even had to have to courage to drop my goals in order to achieve them. As a result I’ve got a much stronger athletic head on my shoulders. Now it’s more about choice. Where do I want to go? What is worth it and what isn’t?

Now I’m thinking about what kind of goals I want to set for the future. I love hard training, but bridging that gap from no-where to pro skier alone without much background SUCKS. *HARD*. In retrospect I should have joined the APU masters program to get some technique coaching and at least give me some people to stomp every now and again. Going and doing some camps would have been a great idea too. The CXC summer camps would have been a great option.

As far as nordic skiing, living in Jackson Hole pretty much puts me in the dead zone. Everyone here’s an alpine ski bum, the roller skiing blows with only a few hard-capped bike paths, and skiing at Trail Creek gets a boring after a couple of months.

So what now? I’ve spent the last year sort of cleaning out the cobwebs and taking a breather. Now it’s more down to making a choice of what to do next. I want a few clear goals that have a definite end.

The current plan is to backcountry and nordic ski here at altitude to have fun and keep general fitness, and then race Crow Pass in the summer…this time to win. Based on previous experience, I should be an aerobic beast after a winter of hiking here.

Man, if you let this blog thing go for a few days you just end up summarizing what would have been a few good fleshed out topics.

First off, I’m settled in Jackson Hole, and living in my van while traveling the country is over. I wanted to add a note about what it’s like just living and training in your van.

Training Bum Logistics

If you quit your job and all the other BS in your life because you want to get out and train more every day, the answer is that you can do it. There’s no mysteries about it, it’s totally possible.

If your car is paid off (mine isn’t), you don’t have to pay rent to live in it. Having a built-in kitchen is key, and little things like keeping everything perfectly clean really helps keep the lifestyle sustainable.

The only thing that is tough is the social aspect. You won’t have the social base provided by a team or a job, and further you won’t have a location and place to associate yourself during the day which can leave you very ungrounded. You will be a true nomad.

But, none of that matters if you are aspiring to improve your athletic performance. If you have goals, you can meet them in this way. If all you have to do is get up and train a couple of times a day, you can sure as hell do it living out of your car like those thousands of dirtbag climbers out there. It’s glorious.

I think if you are starting out learning out to train and what it means in your life, this is the way to do it. Don’t be afraid, just go do it. Get up and walk out like Jerry McGuire (prolly without the chick) and move on.

Mountain Biking in Sun Valley

Soon after arriving in Jackson Hole I found myself driving to Sun Valley to go mountain biking. I haven’t been into biking since high school, and it was a total blast! All that aerobic work kept me way ahead of the other guy that rides all summer. How cool is that?!

Moosecross Cyclecross

Last weekend there was a cyclecross race over the pass in Victor, ID. It was tons of fun! it was my first bike race ever so I entered the beginner class, and ended up top ten. Considering we were wearing costumes i thought we would be pounding beers and taking jumps the whole race and probably not even finishing, but I obviously haven’t learned anything about myself.

Even after two hard 90 minute workouts and late nights the two days before, I hammered the course from the beginning and totally destroyed myself. I snuck behind and someone and drafted for the road section for all but two laps, and was able to stay fairly consistently relaxed the whole time. A strong kick at the end and the race was over.

I think I should do more mountain bike racing.

Skiing, training, I did x y z intervals, blah blah blah. I’ll write something meaningful soon enough.

Whatever you do, don’t go here (actual google maps data):

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=526+7th+St,+Rapid+City,+South+Dakota&sll=43.47849,-110.755517&sspn=0.008797,0.016501&ie=UTF8&layer=c&cbll=44.081101,-103.228876&panoid=OIikWPUbD8lJlNK5z_JcyQ&cbp=12,305.17,,0,30.75&hq=&hnear=526+7th+St,+Rapid+City,+Pennington,+South+Dakota+57701&ll=44.081682,-103.228848&spn=0.008709,0.016501&z=16&iwloc=A

I had a crazy dream last night that Fischer completely redesigned their classic line to include a long super skinny shovel that swung 270 degrees and was two feet high like the front of a rail on Santa’s sleigh.

It tapered down from normal width at the toe to 1/2″ to reduce air resistance. I thought I’d wait until West Yellowstone to try it out before asking the powers that be if I could have one. Woah.

The one other guy in Jackson Hole that could have understood why I own lycra is moving to Whitefish, MT to coach juniors full time. Well, kids, this is a preview of what you’re in for:

Best of luck with that progressive ‘board stuff. See you in West.

“He doesn’t think of being a skier as a ’sacrifice’”

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Who wins for first in-town snow accumulation in the country. Here’s us right now (Oct 4th, 11:55pm MTN)