Return of the Blog
· Mar 2, 08:40 PM
As you may have guessed, I haven’t had much to say on the skiing or ski racing front for the last few weeks, so I haven’t bothered. The Owl Creek Chase was as hard and bad a race as I’ve had in a long time and I was pretty much ready to call off the season at that point. Well, really what I wanted to do was to hit reset, but the reset button takes 6-8 weeks and that would have left me in a good position to get ready for the last races of the year right about April 1 … just after the last races of the year. So instead, I’m in a bit of a holding pattern. Sort of reset, but mostly trying to give me the best chance possible to be fast in March.
A large part of the plan has been trying to get recovered, because my biggest problem this season has been recovery. Usually I like the second day of two-day weekends, or the second weekend of race series. Not this year. After floating a lot of possible explanations all season through January, the best one we (the collective group I’m analyzing training and racing with) can come up with is that I overdid it a little this summer and fall. Not overdone a lot I don’t think, but just enough so that every time I get a few solid workouts in and feel like I should be getting myself ready for a good string of racing I end up tired with no go instead.
Since Owl Creek I’ve been on the hour and a half a day/one intensity a week plan. It’s hard to say if it’s working. The Birkie was definitely interesting. Much slower pace than last time I skied it, and we brought a pack of 30 up to about 30k. It was a real mess skiing out there. Broken poles, people skiing like donkeys, impossible to move in the pack and all that. Basically everyone was waiting on Babikov, and it took him three tries to get clear, but he finally did. I was great until about 38k, then my triceps started to spasm. I skied the long gradual uphill to Bitch Hill basically legs only, drank my entire third feed, and then had to hammer over Bitch Hill. At that point my arms stopped seizing, but I’d shot my legs too, so the last 10ks were a matter of faking it. I made the cut for 2-9 when Babikov went, but it came back together on the lake and I had no game in the sprint. I kept telling myself I should be going faster, but just couldn’t do it.
I did my first post-Birkie intensity today, classic intervals. I haven’t gone hard on classic skis since the race in Aspen 3.5 weeks ago, and I didn’t feel real comfortable out there. Given that there are 3.5 classic races out of 5 in the second half of the month I’d best fix that I think. My legs are pretty tired now and I feel like I went hard. The idea is to take tomorrow off and hopefully bounce back well enough for a light speed day on Thursday. If that all goes well then I think a TT Sunday or Monday, another speed session before Canadian Nationals and then truly race and rest.
We’ll see how it goes, sure would be nice to finish with something decent.
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Keep enjoying the process, Brayt, let the results come to you. Thanks for the update and keep em’ coming, I was getting worried. Say hi to Special.
— m.wynn Mar 4, 06:59 PM #