Nordic Skiing Magazine :: The Master Skier

MID-SEASON
Your Aerobic Basement

Chad Salmela
Contributing Editor for The Master Skier

Chad Salmela is a former member and coach of the U.S. Biathlon Team. He is the coach of Men’s and Women’s Nordic Skiing at The College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota.

Master Skier Contributing Editor Abby Larson.

  Shut off the computer. Down a cup of coffee or diet Coke to stay awake. Rush to the car, daylight quickly fading. Breakfast and lunch weren’t great so you down an energy bar on the drive there.

  Your friends are waiting for you and you’re running late.You get to the lodge, jump out of your car. You’re only 15 minutes late so you hope your group is still waiting patiently for you. But lets face it, when you’re ready to go skiing, 15 minutes of waiting around seems like an eternity, especially when YOU’RE on time and you ski buddies aren’t.

  So you get to the lodge, see a pile of recognizable ski warm ups and duffle bags strewn around and under a few of the benches, and you know they’ve left you. Fifteen minutes late and you don’t even have your wind briefs on yet. Good move for your buddies, but stressing you out.

  Does this sound familiar?

  So if this is you, what are your first few kilometers going to be like? Anaerobic, that’s what. If you had one hour to ski and now you’ve got 40 minutes, will 40 minutes of pounding on yourself to catch your friends be the kind of workout you need? Not at all.

  Busy masters skiers need to SLOW DOWN when they begin training for the “big race,” at least in the beginning.

  Apply the principles of your job to your skiing. Nothing done well skips steps, so why hammer yourself just because you’re short on time? Your body doesn’t know that you’re trying to cram. It just reacts to what you actually do.

  I get questions so often from busy professionals asking about how to train for the Birkie, or some other big race, two weeks before it happens.

  The simple answer is you can’t train for the Birkie two weeks beforehand. At least not with a great amount of effect.

  If you haven’t done your homework, you can’t cram for a ski race. It doesn’t work. What you can do when you’re friends have left you behind is take a deep breath and go do your own thing.

  What most people don’t understand about training for endurance sport is that the body adapts very quickly to aerobic activity, yet my experience with athletes young and old is that most don’t have the patience to truly develop basic aerobic fitness. The main reason is that the level at which most people need to start “training” aerobically seems too easy for most people to consider it “training.”

  Christophe Vassalo, a good friend of mine who is the head women’s biathlon coach for France has his Olympic-medal winning team hiking most of their early season workouts because he finds it very hard to lay down the kind of base necessary for a season of training and racing at a higher pace of training unless they begin at a very basic level.

  Starting in the “basement,” the team increases their pace from a walk to a run, at the same pace, in just a few weeks. Anyone can understand how running at the same pace and effort it took to walk three weeks earlier is a good thing!

  How many masters skiers training for the big race will take the time to hike for three weeks before moving on to higher-paced training?

  Olympic Champion, Florence Baverel-Robert will spend much of her April and May walking half of her “running” workouts.

  I’m not saying that the key to a good Birkie is walking. I’m not saying that hiking is the key to the French women’s biathlon team’s success. My point is that even the highest-level athletes have to build a bedrock of aerobic efficiency from which to work. So why wouldn’t a 2nd or 3rd wave Birkie master skier?

  The fact is, most of us start training at too fast a pace. The result is that we do not bolster our ability to be strong physically and aerobically as we get closer to our goal and train harder for performance.

  Focus three weeks prior to “training” on building your aerobic basement. Jogging on the flats is fine, but walking up hills is necessary, even for many high-level athletes.

  If you have a heart rate monitor, run/walk a trail loop that takes about a half hour and mark your time for the loop. Try to run/walk this loop not faster than, say 140 beats per minute (it will be different based on each person) and time the loop.

  Keep training four to five times per week for three weeks at this low heart rate, then go back to your half hour loop, keeping your heart rate the same as always and test the difference from your first time around it.

  You will see a marked increase in your pace at the low-end of what might be considered “training.” Yet developing this part of your physiology will give you a much better platform from which to work towards your specific skiing goals with faster-paced training.

  If you build your aerobic basement first, the rest of your workouts will likely feel better, you will do more of your skiing and ski training effectively later on, and you will be running and eventually skiing at a pace that is efficient for good overall fitness.

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