Hello!
Reid here, checking in this summer to talk about volume training. These summer months, especially once we get into July and August, are all about building base for our season. As cross-country skiers, our training is designed to progress throughout the summer, building our efficiency. As we get into July and August, we are for the most part building a base for our season, but also building specific strength and technique work so we are skiing efficiently.
One of my biggest training philosophies is too not get so caught up with hitting my exact hours for a workout. I like to think of my training plan as an actual plan rather than a command, because plans can change, and you must adapt. As a younger skier, I have gotten caught up with following my training plan to a tee. Now I like to find a balance between hitting my hours while still getting quality training. I ask myself if cutting it short or going longer makes the session more productive. I try not to get worried about these individual sessions and would rather make up time on to another workout later that will make my training higher quality.
Many of you probably already know this or have heard it before, but the best things you can do during volume training is keep the easy workouts easy and hard workouts hard. It can be easy to go just a bit too hard every training session but doing that over hundreds of hours in a year, eventually you will get fatigued and find yourself in a hole. Since I spend so much time training in L1, I try to take advantage of these hundreds of easy training hours. If two athletes train the exact same hours, but one is skiing lazily, never working on technique or skiing efficiently and the other spends every second working on strength, technique, and quality training, than that can be the difference in results once the season comes around. Since most of our hours are in L1, this makes our technique work during this time so important. It can be easy to use decent technique while we are going very hard, but as soon as we get tired in a race, we revert to what is comfortable and ski like we do for most of our training! As someone with far from perfect technique, I think about this a lot and try to spend every session skiing as well as I can, working on things, so that I never fall back into bad technique in a race.
As July comes to an end, the BSF Pro team and myself are ramping the training hours back up after a recovery week last week, so I will be thinking about efficient skiing a lot. Stay tuned for the JBTR rollerski and running race this next weekend and if you are also signed up, good luck!
Stay cool,
Reid
