WHAT YOU GET

You’ve heard of “You get what you pay for.” Well after skiing last weekend’s Birkie, I realized it’s really “You get what you train for.”

As soon as I put R-cubed on my calendar I knew this year’s Birkie experience would suffer. There’s only 10 weeks between the two events. If I focused on skiing all winter, there wouldn’t be enough time to build up towards R-cubed. Hopefully the tradeoff is that I suffered for nearly 3.5 hours on February 26th instead of suffering for 12+ hours on May 6th.

The good news is that I’ve been running quite a bit lately. I’ve run as far as 26 miles and have put together weekly mileage in the low 60s. So I should be able to ratchet things up rather quickly for the next 2 months.

Even though I had a lackluster ski season, I’m still learning a bunch of things about the sport. For example, I’m starting to realize that runners and skier have different mindsets. My coach explained it this way; runners tend to pour out their energy evenly throughout the course of an event, whereas skiers (and bikers) tend to go hard over and over while recovering on the downhills or while drafting. That’s something I’m going to have to work on in the future. If I want to perform any better I can’t ski scared for 47K and then pick up the pace when I hit the flat final 3K.

This may tie in with the previous lesson, but I think I have to be more explosive, which means I have to work on my upper body strength. Perhaps adding a double-pole workout once a week would be enough.

I wonder what I could do if I actually laid out a training plan that included tempo and marathon-paced type workouts. And I definitely need to race more prior to my goal race. Without these things prior to the Birkie, it’s a recipe for conservatism – and slow times.

Quote of the Day;

“That's why it is a great trip. The anticipation, the planning, the what if? When you’re out there, you are the people they want to talk to. It was my best adventure of all time.” – ‘Double’ on R-cubed