Becoming an In the Arena Alumna

Having served two full years with In the Arena (ITA), Laura Valaas has elected to rotate off of the roster and, thus, to join the ranks of organizational alumni. ITA is deeply grateful for Laura’s 24 months of service and the youth work she generated in Anchorage and beyond during that time. Countless children —students, athletes, ski fans and supporters —have been lifted by Laura’s wisdom, guidance and input; and we all wish her the best in her preparations for the selection races to the US Ski Team that will compete in Vancouver in 2010.

If you would like to keep up-to-date with Laura –or with any of In the Arena’s alumni –please visit the Arena Athlete Alumni blog or Laura’s own site: lauravalaas.com.

Onwards and upwards.
And thank you for your interest and support.

Park City

I skate rollerskied some intervals around the Soldier Hollow paved trails this morning. Being back in Park city brings back a lot of memories of my race career. I've been here so often over the past few years it feels very much like home. It's odd how race venues make such an intense impact on my memory. Looking at the FIS website, I've only competed in 16 races here, it feels like more. Maybe because we did so many training camps out here.

The first weekend I raced here I earned 346.69 FIS points (if you don't ski race, that's really, really bad). The next year I came back to the same RMISA invite and finished with 177.22 FIS points (again, if you don't ski, that's much better). Two years later I won the same RMISA invite. My first, and, let's be honest, only, RMISA victory. I remember sitting in the little Homestead computer room with Tara Gregg and she said, "I think you won the race." I didn't believe her at first.

It is pretty cool to have one place stay the same and to be able to come back to it year after year and feel the hills getting less steep and the loops getting shorter.

Lake Placid, NY

I had a fabulous interval session the other day. It was hard, but enjoyably hard, what we call threshold. When I do threshold I get to stretch out the body and use proper race technique but stay out of the lungs-on-fire pain zone. Threshold is the interval type that makes me appreciate my fitness without questioning my sanity for deciding to be a cross country ski racer. (To quote Newell from the other day, "cross country skiing is really fun when you stop.")

We started in Wilmington and skied up the road toward Whiteface. It was the same road that was used for the Race to the Castle rollerski race last week but we started lower and never made it as far as the start of the rollerski race. From the four corners intersection there's still a fair amount of elevation gain to play with before you hit the race course.

We started staggered as we came in from our warm-up and Kristina Strandberg jumped in right behind me. We had a nice headwind and since I was leading and knew Strandberg was behind me I went just a little harder than I would have if I had been by myself so she wouldn't get bored. She came around and led the second interval. It was much easier to follow and draft and be able to relax into Strandberg's rhythm.

After two intervals we got in the van and drove back to the bottom of the hill where we changed into our skate gear and did two more intervals up the hill. Strandberg led the first & I led the second. It was almost like doing two intervals instead of four. There's a huge benefit in being able to ski with someone in a hard workout like that. It's been really nice to be out in Lake Placid working with a lot of different coaches & athletes and see how other people are skiing and training.

And despite how much we make fun of the tourists up here looking at the leaves turning to reds and oranges and yellows, it really is beautiful when we get a sunny afternoon.

p.s. We switched to skate halfway through the workout to simulate the stress of a duathlon race although I don't recall thinking I had to do any duathlon races this winter.

And so it begins...

Today I embark on the first journey of the season. Once this trip begins I may not stop rolling until March. And maybe not even then. The nominal reason for this trip is a training camp over in Lake Placid, NY, but I am going to take advantage of a rest week and take my time getting over there. The current plan includes brief visits to Yakutat, Gustavus, Sitka, Ketchikan, Prince Rupert, BC, and Nanaimo, BC, before ending up at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid and getting back to the hard core ski training.

I put Nanaimo on the list of places to visit because it's the birthplace of Nanaimo bars. Utter deliciousness. My traveling partner foolishly left the planning up to me so we're going to find ourselves in places like Nanaimo. If anyone knows of any other points of culinary interest that I should put on my list of to-visit places, please, let me know. I only happen to know about Nanaimo because my mom makes Nanaimo bars during the Holidays.

Two weeks in Lake Placid and then the race season will be approaching fast. Assuming I don't indulge in too many of Nanaimo's namesakes, I should be ready to hit the races hard. I can't wait. I stayed in Alaska ALL summer and I have been anticipating being back on the road. Back on the road, living from a bag, wandering from town to town, without a permanent address. That's home.

Oslo 2011

K: "Hey Laura, there's some building going up here. Apparently they're doing some ski thing."

L: "Um, duh, the 2011 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS are in Oslo next winter. I don't know if you know this, but it's kind of a big deal."

K: "meh."

L: "Well if I get to race there you can come back to Norway to watch and visit your friends."

K: "Sweet! You should definitely do this race."

My little sister is spending the year in Oslo and we had this conversation the other day. Then I signed onto facebook and saw that she had tagged me in the above photo. Which I thought was cute.

It reminded me that work is busily being accomplished on the 2011 World Champs venue and, in fact, they've been working on it ever since they won the bid. I am, hopefully, going to show up to the 2011 World Championships and stay there for one week training nearby and then two weeks at the championships, then they're over and all the athletes go their merry ways. The organizing committee, on the other hand, is working on this as a full-time job starting last year and ending well after I'm snuggled back into my own home in America.

The amount of work that goes into organizing and running an event is staggering. I am so grateful that people are willing to do this and to do it well. I can't even imagine having to sit down and think out all of the needs of an event of that magnitude-- the needs of all the athletes, coaches, waxers, staff, physicians, attaches, then all of the race organizers and volunteers, the sound system requirements of the announcers, the wiring needs of the timing crew and of the film crew, the comfort of the spectators. And before all of the people show up needing things the actual, physical venue needs to be built-- ski trails, stadium, ski jumps, waxing areas, housing, parking lots, WADA testing area. It is unbelievable.

I feel so lucky to get to enjoy the hard work of so many people every time I show up to a starting line.

Speeds

We did some skate speeds down by the Kincaid Chalet on Friday. After I had finished my speeds I was skiing back down the road. Bart Dengel still had a couple speeds to go and as I was starting my cool-down he took off V2-ing in front of me. Now Bart was really hammering these 30sec speeds and as I watched him an entire scene recreated itself around him-- snow, pin-flags outlining finishing lanes, phantom competitors (two on his left, one on his right), a finish line just over the crest of the hill.

It was only the access road to Kincaid, but he was skiing with such a purpose it was no stretch of the imagination for me to put him into a race. Now THAT is cool, that is how you should train. To really train for ski racing is to be able to hear the cheering of spectators during your intervals, it's being able to feel the elastic of your bib across your ribcage. To really be able to train is to feel like everyone is watching your splits on the big screen even is you're the only one who will look down at the time on your wrist watch at the end.

There should be such a purpose that your teammates can recreate a race around you as you train.

IAAF World Champs

Two of my In The Arena teammates competed at the Track & Field World Championships in Berlin this week. I am so proud of both of them!

Mike Hazle threw the javelin 78.17m.

Zoila Gomez ran the marathon in 2:42:49.

Click on either of their names to read about their experiences at the World Championships!

Eagle Glacier August 10-16

I had my final glacier camp of the summer this week. I'll let the photos do the talking. Don't forget you can click on each photo to enlarge it!
coach-athlete meetings on the glacier.


Stretching party.


sling load
Mark Iverson
Becca Rorabaugh
Kate Fitzgerald

Rollerskiing and Realskiing

We had our first rollerski race on Saturday. Even though it was super low key I realized that it had been forever since I'd put on a race bib. All this training sometimes gets in the way of racing! I set a PR by three seconds. Which is a very small PR, but still my fastest time over this course so far! I would also like to point out that there were more girls racing than boys. I'm liking the gender equality that I'm seeing these days in skiing.

The type of rollerski is listed along with the results because rollerskis can have drastically different speeds depending on the bearings and the wheels.




Sunday we head into the glacier for another week. Hopefully we have some snow.

This photo is shot from down glacier. The facility sits on the ridge in the middle-left of the photo and the ski trails we use go from there off to the right. We stay high up on the glacier because once you get closer to the foreground the slope gets much steeper and the cravasses get much more intense. The ash has made for some unique melting this summer and you can very clearly see how variable the weather is up there. The patches of white snow are where there's been snowfall recently. When we're out skiing we can go from sunshine to snowstorm or white-out as we move around the course.

Kincaid Adventure Camp

Since school was out for the summer, I helped out with the Kincaid Adventure Camp down at Kincaid park. It's a camp for local youth with three different week-long sessions, each focusing on a different zone of the outdoors. One week focused on terrestrial life, the second on things that fly, and the final week on aquatic life. The really cool thing about these camps was that the main focus was outdoor recreation so our goal was to be active while exploring the outdoor world.

On one of the days we were paddling the kids were super jazzed up to get out into the lake. We had to go over all of the water safety and how to paddle talks first.






The kids were psyched to finally get into the water, practice their canoeing strokes, and explore the riparian zone from the water side.


After they got comfortable with the canoes, we let them "upgrade" to kayaks.

It was super fun to get involved with another activity during summer break, hanging out with kids is a refreshing way to see the world!

Eagle Glacier Photos July 2009

I had my second of three weeks on the glacier this last week. Because of the ash cover from the Mt. Redoubt eruptions the landscape took on an eerie appearance. Skiing 20+ hrs over the week gave me plenty of time to focus on my technique and wonder at how the ash changed the melting patterns of the glacier snow. Thankfully we had the pisten bully up and running to clear a path through the ash for us so that, for the most part, we got to ski on precious white snow.

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!