With abundant snow for the first time this year, our recent Junior training block was better than ever. Without a key race during the past week, it was a great time to get in some additional volume and focused workouts before we’re hit with 4 big weekends in a row (Lake Placid, Craftsbury, Craftsbury, Dublin). The amount of skiing everyone put in, from long cooldowns after high school races to morning sessions in the bright sunlight, and even subzero skis under the lights, shows some serious dedication and a love for the sport. People just want to ski! We’ve never had a group this excited to just be on snow training, and in a recurring theme my statement after a 3 hour ski at Trapps on Sunday was simple…”you are all really good at skiing” and sometimes that’s all there is to it.
The week ended with two great days in a row. On Saturday some of the group got in a mass start high school race at Hard’Ack, while another group braved a -10 start temp (that thankfully warmed to the low teens quickly) at Craftsbury. The Craftsbury group got in a really solid workout prepating for classic sprint racing which we’ll see at the next Eastern Cup. It’s a format that’s quite tricky as you need to nail the balance of going fast but also not skiing frantically in the classic technique.
Everybody did a solid warmup and then one lap of the Craftsbury sprint course in reverse direction (up the Moss climb, because it’s great for classic) with a finish that resembled the Lake Placid course for the coming race. This first round was one racers every 15 seconds, just like a sprint qualifier. We then took a break of 25 minutes for people to do a mini-cooldown and mini-warmup to simulate what happens on a larger scale on sprint day. Next up was 3 rounds of head-to-head racing, where everyone went off mass-start style. While it was more people than a typical sprint heat of 6, it was ideal to get everyone racing in a group. Between heats tactics, wax, pacing, and mentality were discussed, and so trying different approached yielded a lot of good learning.
Here are some video clips…these show the qualifier, the first heat, the second heat, and a bit of the VERY end of the final heat!
But we weren’t done with big ski days for the weekend, as the next day at Trapps saw practically everyone in the ski world out to play. Our Juniors had a huge contingent out for a long tour, where the goal was 3 hours of skiing. The final piece of volume training before everything gets cut back in these busy race weeks.
We couldn’t ask for a better day, and clearly many MNC Masters (and the UVM team) were thinking the same thing. We skied up to the cabin and down to the Stowe Nordic trails including super fun narrow winding trails in addition to wide groomers. After a quick swap to skate skis most ended with 3 hours and over 20 miles/30 kilometers total.
The sun was bright and the trees were snowy, so I thought for this one instead of a fast-paced action edit it would be better to put some nice clips together in slow motion, and create the kind of video you’d want to play on a loop in the background of your living room…or something to watch when it’s 95 and humid out in July and you are dreaming of winter!
