Of all the aerobic sports in which I've been involved over the years, skinning uphill and skiing powder is by far my favorite. All of the others have a degree of fun to them but nothing like skiing. Swimming laps, in particular, really seems like work. The only satisfaction I found with it is the sense of really moving through the water well when I was fit. But it ain't powder skiing. Some might argue that breaking trail while skiing is certainly work but you are then left with a route that, when done well, is appreciated by all that follow.
The rhythmic nature of skinning is as satisfying as the others (swimming, running, cycling, nordic skiing) but once you get where you are going (the top), you have to go down. And this is where back country skiing trumps all comers. Now, some mountain bikers might argue that a fast, technical downhill run on a well-built trail is pretty damn fun and who am I to argue that? But that ground is damn hard and it rarely hurts to crash in powder.
The reason I bring this up is that these facts confound my training for ski mountaineering racing. It's not like I just go out and do laps everyday. I get to ski powder and challenging lines when I want. Proper management of endurance training involves controlling the temporal (time) and intensity variables to optimize performance. You can plan your training time and workouts all you want but a week of good snowfall is going to totally screw your plans. The truly neurotic, obsessive-compulsive types (most athletes) mind training volumes as if they were planning brain surgery. I like to be careful but I've been know to increase my weekly volume 25% when a big dump arrives. Not typically recommended for optimal performance come race day.
Last week was one of those weeks. Since I only trained 5 days you would think I could keep things under control. But an attempt on the Grand Teton Tuesday and a big day on Saturday trashed any intentions of restraint. It's crazy how the hours and vertical creep up. The funny thing is that, in spite of the volume, I actually felt great by the end of the week. I was actually going to do more on Sunday but when I added up the hours to that point (17+) I decided to just cruise up to the Pass and do a couple of easy powder laps. But it still was 4 hours and yet I felt like I had done nothing.
This kind of fitness is very interesting and fun to have. The last time I felt it was training for LOTOJA a couple of years ago. The slow but steady accumulation of training miles creates a kind of fitness that the less dedicated will never experience. For me, the arrival of this condition is always a surprise. It's as if I suddenly just have it. Then all the work, hours and sufferable interval sessions are worth it. You hope its arrival coincides with some competitive event that you're gunning for. That is the Holy Grail.
I might get that lucky this time around. There is a race in Aspen next weekend that has about 10,000 vertical feet of climbing and should take about 5 hours. If I'm lucky and taper well, maybe I will be able to put this form to good use. I'll let you know.
In the mean time, I thought I would share the week's effort with everyone. There is nice heavy weighting of easy volume, somewhere around 80% of total training time. I was lighter in the threshold work simply because one of my intensity days was spent trying to climb and ski the Grand Teton. I got plenty of the dreaded zone 3 work that day but given the nature of the up coming race, this may not be a bad thing entirely.
Zone 1/2 - 81%
Zone 3 - 15%
Zone 4/5 - 3%
Total Vertical Ascended - 28,224 feet
I have also included the data from the big day out on Saturday. Again, mostly Zone 1/2 stuff and not particularly fast. My partner was game but the time out got the better of him at the end and we slowed a bit. Still, 8.5 hours of anything is plenty. We managed nearly 11,000 feet of climbing.
