Testing

Like any school, in the school of skiing we undergo periodic testing to gauge the effectiveness of our training. There are as many different protocols for testing fitness as there are ski teams and training groups. Everything from the most basic time trial to the the most sophisticated physiological testing is used. With my APU training group we opt for simpler testing. Over two days and three workouts we run through a series of time trials and intervals over set courses. We'll look at our times, heart rates, and blood lactate levels at the end of each effort.

This morning we did two max efforts, both about 90 seconds, one an uphill skate and the other a flat double pole on rollerskis. This gives us a chance to see how our high end speed and fitness is developing. This afternoon we'll do a 30min threshold workout skate rollerskiing to measure our aerobic fitness. Finally, tomorrow we'll do a L4, or 5k race pace, interval set of uphill bounding with poles. Using a combination of skate rollerskiing, classic rollerskiing, and bounding gives us a good overview of how our ski-specific fitness is developing. Although many of us do some running and other races over the summer, we don't use those as an official gauge of how our ski preparation is going since the ski and run systems are different.

So far I'm about par for the summer in our tests, but I feel good about my training and my fitness and sometimes when all the official testing is done that's the best indication of how your preparation for the season is going.

Back to Alaska

Happy Fathers' Day and celebration of the summer solstice! I returned on Friday night from our first week long on-snow camp at APUNSC's Eagle Glacier training facility. We take advantage of this Alaskan glacier to maintain our snow-feel and ski-specific training over the summer. We'll be up for three weeks total over the summer: one week each in June, July, and August. Following are some snapshots from the week:


Due to low cloud cover, Alpine Air dropped us off lower on the glacier than our facility is located. So our coaches drove down in the Pisten Bully and picked us up as we arrived. This is one of the college students on our team, Kate "Fitz" Fitzegerald, getting a ride up on the back of the Pisten Bully. Fitz has improved so much in both technique and fitness since we started training together three years ago. It is really cool to watch our whole team improve over the years.

Some of my team down at the intersection where we drop clothes and water bottles and meet for speeds or intervals.

Because of the Mt. Redoubt eruptions this winter we have a layer of volcanic ash over the glacier. This has caused a REALLY fast melt rate, last year we had many many more feet of snow depth up here. It also makes the snow dirty and abrasive to ski bases. While it's not the classic glacier beauty, the ash does play an interesting visual dynamic across the snow.

The APUNSC Team out playing a game of speed ball. Or maybe they're just playing follow the leader. Usually it's foggy like this, so for all the moments that you can actually see farther than 400m, there's hours of not knowing what's happening outside.

Laura Valaas, ready to ski.

There are moments skiing out here when I am overwhelmed by the natural beauty. Watching the way the clouds move in and out. We're skiing on the top of a mountain and we get the rapidly changing mountain weather.

One of the markers for the finish of an interval was a Coke can next to the trail. I've never been so glad to see a can of coke each lap and I didn't even get to drink it! (I'm sure someone did though.)

This was a sign Duser put up on our mirror. What a nice note to brush your teeth to in the morning.

Becca Rorabaugh, ready to ski.

The one glitch in our camp was that on the second day the Pisten Bully broke down. So for the entire week we classic skied on snow machine set tracks. By the end of the week I was starting to worry about overuse injuries from the repetitive motion but I think we all made it through the many hours of classic skiing unscathed.


I do love my klister skis!

After returning on Friday we had the weekend basically off to recover and get refreshed for another training week starting on Monday. I took a trip to explore some more parts of Alaska. Alaska is unbelievable, you can get out into wilderness so quickly from Anchorage. And it is beautiful. I love having the training opportunities up here and then having the adventure opportunities on my days off.

This is one of the many beautiful examples of a medial moraine. When two, or frequently more, glaciers merge their lateral moraines combine to form a ribbon of debris tracing the path of the glaciers down valley.

On this trip we went out to explore an ole gold mine. We tramped around on old trails finding slag piles, steam pipes, mine shafts, old leather boots, and all kinds of abandoned mining equipment. It was so cool to try to recreate in our imaginations how the mine functioned and what life was like here for the miners.

Hydro-electric generators, circa 1912. These things look pretty sweet, if I had a water feature in my yard I'd put in some hydro-electric generators for electricity. Why did we move away from this type of free energy?

On to the next adventure!

To Broken Top Mountain

Heading out on a crust ski! Mt. Bachelor is in the background but for Sunday's crust ski our destination was Broken Top, to the North of Bachelor. I spent the previous week doing some on snow training down in Bend, OR. Most of the training was technique or intensity focused but some days you simply have to get off the trails and enjoy the mountains!


Laura Valaas, ITA Athlete Brian Gregg, & Kristina Owen taking a photo break.

Crossing Todd Lake, Broken Top barely peeking out above the horizon.

We paused to regroup once we neared the edge of the trees and finally had a clear sight of our goal... that bowl under the peak and above those moraines that look like pinball arms.



Slowly, the mountain came closer.



and even closer, over playgrounds of snow.



When we made the top we could see the multicolored bands from red to yellow and back to rock-colored undulating through the peak.

Jamie Bronga & Sadie Bjornsen just finished their first year of NCAA skiing and are going to be training together in the beautiful Methow valley this summer. They got the summer training season started off right with a ton of skiing here in Bend under the watchful eye of their coach Scott. Go get it done, girls!

See those tiny dots in the middle of the snowfield?



...they're skiers!

KO & LAV's Super-Awesome-For-Girls-Only Ski Camp

Stina & I hosted our inaugural training camp this weekend for girls in the old-enough-to-roller-ski-but-young-enough-to-respect-us age bracket. We had a small group but it allowed for great customization and we got to work with each of our athletes (I feel so proud to be able to claim athletes as mine!) on what they needed to focus on. This was a good thing because we had a wide range of abilities. But ALL the girls were super tough and up for whatever we suggested. I love having tough girls around!

KO & I have a very spontaneous style and I felt a little guilty for subjecting these girls to our whims and impromptu decisions but they took it in stride. All-in-all I think we accomplished our goals for the weekend: have fun, teach some technique, inspire, not kill anyone. We also managed to go over some topics sitting around and while we were out trainings such as goal setting, college & skiing, coaches, training hours & types, boys (come on, we're not that mature that we're not still giggling about boys).

We have a long list of things we should do better if we repeat the camp. Actually, for just about any activity I pursue I have a long list of things I could improve upon, so there's nothing new there!

For the year...

Today is the final day of the 08-09 season. Monday, April 27th we start training for the 2010 season!

Number of races: 35
Kilometers raced: 317
Pairs of skis raced: 8
Workouts Skate skiing: 89
Workouts Classic skiing: 102
Number of times I went for a run: 185
Hours spent doing activity defined as "other": 72
Times I went rollerskiing: 63
Countries visisted: 5
Number of entries in my morning HR chart: 0
Percentage of my training that was ski-specific: 60%

Everything we did last season is now officially base for next year. It's time to build the next level of fitness, take our technique and improve it, and train with a purpose once again.

You can always check out last year's recap too.

Ridge To River

-Sadie Bjornsen came over Friday night and took me to the airport. I flew all night and Saturday morning
-Valerie Valaas and
-Susan Valaas picked me up from the Wenatchee airport. After some time at home I borrowed
-Tom Feil's surfski and ran the Wenatchee river (dumping TWICE). Later, picking up my registration which
-Biosports had sponsored and taken care of, I finally made it home to find
-Chad Gregg,
-Aleeta,
-Simon, and
-Tara Gregg had not only brought food to our house but were cooking us dinner. Entertainment was, as usual, provided by
-Kirsten Valaas and her posse. It was a frantic, frantic day and I was starting to get frazzled so I was glad to have my
-Dad and my
-Mom around to keep my calm and make me feel like everything would go smoothly. Sunday morning was race day. After sleeping through my alarm (due to not sleeping Friday night) I headed up to Mission Ridge. Until the car had a mechanical 2miles from the parking lot & we unloaded our gear and a white
-F-150 pulled over and we hopped in the truck bed.
-Hugh Owen took my xc skis and poles up the chairlift for me in his ski bag. I set up my exchange zone and ran into
-TJ Owen on my way to the start and she rubbed some jet stream into my skis. At my xc-alpine exchange
-Sean graciously stepped in at the last minute and baby-powdered my alpine boots and pulled open the tongue so I could get my feet into them. Sweet boots given to me by
-David Tewell and skis borrowed from
-Michael Hansen. At the ski to run exchange,
-Aleeta had my shoes and even had a gel with the top torn off for me already. Mid way through the run
-Mark Broberg caught me (as usual) and gave me a good pace for the rest of the run. I was super psyched when I heard my old running coach
-Kelso cheering. At the run-bike exchange I was super happy to see
-Emily Martin with my helmet and
-Barb Braley with a stool for me to sit on, my bike shoes and my beautiful time trail bike. I caught
-Broberg and teased him about putting a 13 on the cassette on his wheels which I had on my bike so I wouldn't be able to peddle down the (long) hill. It wasn't a 13, but I was using a sweet set of his wheels. Then we hit Saddle Rock and stopped talking. And then he pulled away from me. At the bike-paddle exchange, the lovely miss
-Kari Koos had my shoes for me and picked up the front of my boat and ran full tilt into the Wenatchee River, handed me my paddle and sent me on my way. My mom had my lifejacket for me. Of course the lifejacket and paddle were borrowed from
-someone-who-doesn't-know-I-borrowed-them and the boat belonged to
-Greg Harnish and was one of the very coveted Futura IIs, which are nice and fast and I couldn't have flipped it if I'd tried. Post race a cold, stiff & soggy LAV got a ride home to a shower and dry clothes from
-Barb Braley.

I did, incidentally, win the race (Max Christman, one of the junior nordic skiers in town won the Overall!!!) but before you tell ME good job, count the number of dash marks in my race report. And those are only the obvious contributors on this particular day.

Ski Clinic

On Saturday some of the elite skiers who were in Anchorage coached at a youth ski clinic at the Hilltop Ski Area sponsored mainly by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, Alaska Chapter, as a vehicle to educate young athletes about, as you probably guessed, asthma and related issues.


We broke into small groups to ski with and talk to the kids and then reconvened as a large group for some obstacle course competitions and a game of speedball. Above, Kristina Strandberg demonstrates some skating technique.


Speedball is one of the standard ski-games. For this game we had two soccer balls, one ski per skier, and no poles. This set of equipment minimizes the severity of the inevitable collisions. It's a melding of ultimate frisbee and soccer-- you can either dribble or throw but not run with the ball. Then again, as far as rules go it's the kind of game where rules can change on a whim.


There was also race video from the World Champs playing and we signed posters for the kids. It was really fun to see how excited the kids were about skiing and how engrossed they got in the race video. Are these kids going to take home these posters, hang them up, look at them, think about skiing, start identifying as a skier, and become a skier? I don't know. It's certainly possible. I could see that possibility at the clinic. I could see that seed being planted and that the kids thought that being a skier was something super cool.