weanswer@skipost.com

Here is a quick note from Saab Salomon Factory Team skier Tad Elliott who is at U23 World Championships in France.

Hey this will be rushed, internet is crazy expensive here. Around 15 dollars for the week. So, great flight over. Watched the new Kevin Costner movie on the big touch screen in front of me. It wasn't worth watching. I ate dinner slept for 5 hours straight then ate breakfast. Very Nice. Staying in a room with Noah Hoffman. Its a nice room, small with a kitchenette. It has bunk beds and they are so narrow a sleeping bag zipped up would hang over the edges. I might just sleep on the floor.

The hotel has crazy good food. Four course meals and at the end of the first night six different cheeses, around a pound each, with bread to go with them. It was awesome. Coffee is not so good. Good thing I have my French press. Pat Casey (US Ski Team Coach) already hit it up with me. He hates bad coffee but likes mine. So that means I should have some fast skate skis this week. He also looked at my training plan and liked it.

The town is small but we are stayin thirty meters from the stadium. So that is nice. Salomon International is here so new boots and skis coming my way once they get here, just got the email about it. Very Nice. "Rocket Skate skis" they said they are fast, but I will use my white ones for now. Reminds me of skiing in Colorado here. Cold snow and mountains surrounding us on every side. The skate course is really hard. There is a climb that would be like skiing from Boyce Lake up to the top of the North Loop but this climb is about 300 meters longer. Awesome for me. Snow should stay pretty consistent too.

The Russians are staying with us and so are the Finns, Canadians, and maybe the Swedes. Russians not so friendly, Finns crazy friendly. The area really is like Durango. Hard hills and downhills not really flat ever. Pat Casey and I get along great and he even skied WITH ME today, he commented on how I was the only one he has skied with lately that has gone the proper speed. Every one else way too hard. Feeling good and ready. Everyone else is doing these long day trips. They would be fun but I have been keeping it chill. I will email you later with how my training is going. Should be a good time.

By: Justin Freeman
Saab Salomon Factory Team

Level five, which I wrote about in my last article, is about improving race performance by working at a higher pace. Level three, which improves racing by working at a lower pace, is the natural complement to this training. Physiologically, the major goal of level three training is to improve lactate threshold.

Your lactate threshold is the point at which lactic acid starts rapidly accumulating in your muscles. If you can do a treadmill test and plot speed versus lactate, your threshold is the point where the curve suddenly becomes steeper – the graph’s inflection point. Improvement in lactate threshold can take several forms. You can increase the speed at which lactic acid starts to build, or you can increase the heart rate at which lactic acid starts to build. These improvements could either increase or decrease the concentration of lactic acid in your blood at the inflection point.

I explain the various effects training can have on our lactate curve to emphasize that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Just assuming that your lactate threshold occurs at, say, 85% of max heart rate, or at a lactate concentration of 4 mmol/liter, can lead you to train too hard or too easy. This doesn’t mean that using heart rate monitors or lactate monitors is a bad idea, but it should remind you that information from external monitors is only so useful. Finding level three means combining this information with your own perceptions of how hard you are going.

When describing level five I tried to avoid the word interval. With level three, talking about intervals is completely inappropriate. One of the most annoying and contradictory phrases people use to talk about training is “level three intervals.” Level three is a pace that you can maintain for 30 to 50 km; aiming for such a pace for only a minute or two at a time will inevitably lead you to go too hard, and in the event that you avoid this pitfall you likely won’t get much benefit. Level three is also not something to be done when coming off of a cold: you are either healthy enough to train hard, say 30 minutes level three or 4 by 5 minutes level four, or you should stick to easy distance with a few unstructured pick-ups.

Level three efforts should be continuous and should range from at least 30 minutes to about an hour. The pace, as I wrote above, is somewhere between 30 km and 50 km race pace, and is also the fastest pace you can sustain without feeling lactic acid start to accumulate in your muscles. Personally, I find it to be the most psychologically challenging pace to maintain; it is fast enough that you want to slow down, but at any point you also have the ability to sustain a significantly faster pace.

One way to ease yourself in to long level three sessions is to break them up. If it sounds like I am waffling about level three intervals, well, maybe I am. I find it useful, early in the season, to make only half of my level three sessions continuous efforts. The other days I use five or ten minute intervals with 20% (one or two minutes) recovery. The shorter blocks of going hard are much easier to manage psychologically, and the very short recovery prevents going too hard. I must emphasize that while I find this a very useful tool, I consider it as a crutch that helps an athlete transition to “real” level three training, which includes only longer unbroken efforts.

I would like to say a word about training modality and technique. Level five training, since it is primarily neuromuscular and therefore motion specific, is only effective if it is done in a skiing motion (skiing, rollerskiing, possibly bounding). Level three training can include running, and perhaps even cycling or other activities. But level three provides another opportunity to work on efficiency. You are moving close enough to race pace to really work on race technique, and you have plenty of time to try out new variations. Perhaps your climbing V-2 is weak; a level three session is the best time to push a V-2 farther up every hill than you want before switching to V-1 (on a level one day you might go too hard this way; on a level four day you are focused on skiing fast, not just skiing right).

Finally, as I suggested with level five training: go out there and do some level three. Level three efforts are a great way to satisfy that late spring urge to train fast. They also teach patience, practice the primary pace for master skiers who focus on marathons, and can help build efficient technique.

Wax Recommendations for the weekend of 1/23/09 - 1/25/09

New England

Great Lakes

Mid West

Rocky Mountain

Far West

Waterville Valley, NH
Saab Salomon Factory Team member Justin Freeman will be hosting two clinics

Feb 15 at 10 AM (subject to change)
Skate technique and training clinic.
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Marquette General Health System Noquemanon Ski Marathon and mBANK Half Noque
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Marquette, MI

Updates:

Two small changes in the race course should be noted by racers this year. From the 24 to 21K portion of the trail, racers will be rerouted to a new section of trail (for this year only) due to some logging in that area. The reroute will feature a gentler, more undulating terrain. Also, we are happy to announce our completion of the permanent reroute around one of the two ponds between the 9km and 8K portion of the trail.

Race entries are still available by calling 906-370-RACE, picking one up at an area ski shop or visiting  www.noquemanon.com. Registrations will also be accepted at the Ski Expo on Friday, January 23, from 5pm to 10pm at the Superior Dome.

For more information on the Marquette General Health System Noquemanon Ski Marathon and mBank Half Noque, contact Nikki Dewald at 906-235-6861.
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CXC is happy to work with SkiPost in offering the following products to
help make this year faster than last! Your purchases and support will help
shape the future of Nordic skiing in the US.

TRAINING LOG FOR ENDURANCE ATHLETES. LOG IT! - NEW
Provides a template for recording daily training throughout the year, broken into 13 four-week periods, interspersed with photos and stories to inspire your training. Take advantage of the introduction to help build a plan for your season, then record and adapt your training over the year as your fitness progresses. The log is written by US Ski Team member and with forward by US Ski Team head coach Pete Vordenberg.

CXC ACADEMY (WEB BASED) – NEW
Training plans for high school, Junior Olympics, college, elite, masters and Birkie skiers with daily workout examples. Video of technique progressions, ski specific workouts, interviews and other useful materials.

“CXCAcademy.com is one of the best things to happen to XC skiing in the United States. Anyone who participates is truly rewarded with excellent training programs and technique examples”.

CROSS COUNTRY TECHNQIUE FUNDAMENTALS (CD-ROM)
This CD lays the foundation for both Classic and Freestyle techniques on which we can build a consistent technique program that will continue to develop great cross-country skiers for years to come.

WAKE UP! IT'S TIME TO TRAIN (DVD)
70 minutes of exclusive interviews with US National Team coaches, drills and
technique, fitness testing, sports physiology, core strength, training volume, intensity levels, race footage, and much more.

X-COUNTRY (DVD)
The inside story on one of the toughest sports around by top World Cup racers.

COMPETITIVE CORE TRAINING - REAL TRAINING FOR REAL ATHLETES (DVD)
Competitive Core Training provides the exercises and workouts that will help athletes of all ages, abilities, and sports develop a strong, flexible core that is essential to athletic performance and success.

Visit the CXC Store at:
www.cxcstore.com
and CXC Academy at
www.cxcacademy.com
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Ski and Tea
is a women's year-round ski-specific training group in the Birkie Trail area (Cable, Hayward, Seeley) founded by Linda Cook and Juli Lynch. Our group goal is to have every woman who comes "Be and Feel Successful and Proud To Be a Skier!" We are a mix of abilities and ages with a motto of "No Woman Left Behind!" Our first day of training together was January 4, 2008 with 8 women showing up. We now have over 104 women on the mailing list for our weekly newsletter.

The next clinics scheduled are:

January 18--Ski and Tea Hosting Clinician Heather
Zimmerman - More advanced Ski Technique for both Skate and Classic.
Location has been changed to the North End Warming Hut, Cable, WI. on
Randysek Road.

February 18--Wednesday before the Birkie - Ski and
Tea Hosting Clinician

Caitlin Compton - Race Strategies and Packed Snow Skiing Tactics.
Location will be 00 Warming Hut, Seeley, WI. There will also be
instruction for beginners, intermediate and advanced ski technique.
This clinic will be assisted by several CXC Elite Women.

Contact Linda Cook for registration information - lpcook@chibardun.net