And it's November
· Nov 9, 04:59 PM
We’re a week in to November and for the last two weekends we’ve done classic roller ski time trials. It’s starting to feel like race season is around the corner. Last weekend was the mock sprint relay in Tetherow, and today was a 10k in North Rim (the pavement in the developments is nice, and the traffic is pretty much non-existant). In between I had a pretty easy week where I’ve been working on energy management with moderate success.
For those of you that haven’t done it, the sprint time trial workout is about as hard as it gets. 3×3 minutes with 3 minutes rest, followed by a 20 minute break, then repeat. That second round is pretty brutal. I had a pretty good day all told, felt really strong on the uphill double poling and striding sections, and pretty unspectacular on the faster double poling. I was particularly pleased with the uphill double poling – I’ve been working on some new DP timing the last month and it seems to be going pretty well. The video makes it look like I’m keeping things a little higher and more forward, which is a good thing.
I didn’t have quite as much snap today as last weekend, but the 10k went alright. I’ve been struggling a bit for the last month staying on top of my energy levels (something I was pretty good at through the summer), and it’s been frustrating to wake up on days ready to feel good and be tired. That’s what happened Friday when I was in the lab for a failed VO2 Max test and I was hoping for better today. The good news is I didn’t wake up exhausted, but I wasn’t overly full of life either. Anyways, I decided to play it conservative during the TT and it seemed to be a good compromise.
The first two laps (we did four, alternating between an outer loop with one big climb and an inner loop that was two-thirds of that climb with the final third coming after a downhill rest) felt incredibly easy, which is a sensation I’ve been getting frequently during the first 10 minutes of intervals, and then things got hard pretty quickly. I skied pretty solid and relaxed on the second two laps and had a little energy to burn over the top of the hill on the final lap. That was good enough to let me finish with some strong false flat uphill double poling.
Right now I feel a whole lot better (and a lot less useless) than I did last weekend, which I think I should take as a good sign. I probably didn’t work as hard today as last weekend, but things seem to be looking up. We’re going to do an on snow TT the end of this week, which should be another good test. Maybe I’ll have the ability to get after it a little earlier then. But maybe I don’t want to be too sharp too soon.
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