Monday, January 12, 2009

ONE PROBLEM

I’ve talked in the past about having those perfect training days when everything seems to come together. You know, you have a key workout planned, say a long run, and the weather is perfect, the kids are away so you have all the time in the world, you’re physically and mentally prepared, etc. Well that’s what happened on Friday – sort of.

With the 50K Birkie only 6 weeks away and my longest outing only being about 25K, I had plans to get in a long ski after work on Friday. The weather was great, the kids were at a birthday party, and I was ready to go. There was just one problem.

I forgot my skis!!!

Usually, I leave them in my car, but I took them out to wax and never put them back in my car. Given how far my office is from my house, I couldn’t just zip home and get them. By the time I got home I ended up just going for a run.

What a total bummer?!

Saturday I did get in a nice ski of about 24K – notice the conversion to kilometers when I talk skiing. During this outing I was eager to compare my V1 and Open Field techniques that I talked about in my last post. My experiment consisted of skiing a 6K loop of V1 and then skiing the same loop using Open Field - only using V1 for the hills. The first loop ended up taking about 24:30 and the second loop took just under 23:00. I wasn’t wearing a HRM to measure my level of exertion for each technique, but I’m guessing I was working about the same. If so, that means I can ski about 15 seconds/K faster using Open Field, which translates into 13 minutes over 50K. The 24K ended up taking about 1:40 – or 6:40 pace for those of you that like minutes/mile.

Now if I could just make those kinds of improvements to my running, I’d be set.

Under the category of “How did you spend your holiday break?” we have a little twist on my interviews. Working in conjunction with Down the Backstretch, I was able to sit down with 1968 Olympian Van Nelson over the holidays and talk about the good old days. Part 1 of that discussion can be found HERE. Part 2 will appear later this week.

Quote of the Day;

“I felt strong. I was strong. I was ready to get a medal. I just couldn’t withstand the conditions. We thought we were doing the right thing by training for the altitude, but we didn’t take the other conditions into account.” - Van Nelson

5 comments:

Kurt said...

yea that sucks. not like when I forget something for running and just pick it up at the store. running stuff is much cheaper and can you ever have to much running stuff ?

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, I can relate - a couple weeks ago I arrived at Wirth only to realize that I forgot my skis! It was early afternoon and I had the day off, so I actually drove home to get my skis, but would have rather not wasted an extra car trip when I could have already been skiing!

Good luck at the Birkie next month. It should be some of the best snow conditions for it in years!

Chad said...

Kurt, you can never have too many skis either - they just cost more than shoes.

Carly, nice to have another skier reading. Sometimes I think I'm alienating all my running readers. Maybe they like to read about skiing. I don't know. Are you doing any races?

Anonymous said...

I am former skier turned runner... and it looks like you are going the opposite, runner, now hooked on skiing and making it official with skiing the birkie!

So, I am not doing any ski races this winter, but I am doing my first WINTER running race (which I used to think one should only be running when there was not enough snow to ski on)! I'm planning to run the Winter Carnival Half next weekend.

Chad said...

Carly, yeah it sounds like we're going in opposite directions. I used to run the Winter Carnival Half every year. Now I'm not even sure I could run 13 miles. Good luck with your race.