May 27, 2010 – Twitter-Twatter…I just read that tart cherries are a natural jet-lag remedy. Yes, it’s tart cherries you want to select, as they have high levels of melatonin, which helps to regulate your circadian rhythm and also helps to induce sleep. Tart cherries (1/2 a cup) or two tablespoons of any cherry juice concentrate will get the job done. Just take either of these one hour before you want to sleep on the plane or for the next three nights after you arrive at your foreign destination. Give it a try.

Kalla Takes on King Jarsofaks, the Great Trotter

In a match race on July 3rd, distance to be decided, Sweden’s Charlotte Kalla will race the country’s greatest trotter in the history of horse racing, the now retired Jarsofaks. Details of the race are still to be worked out with Jarsofaks running on bare ground and Kalla roller skiing on a specially made roller ski track, so both can be side by side. Jarsofaks, the 14-year-old Swedish cold-blood trotter, holds world speed records, while having put together a career record (the most wins) of 201 race wins out of a total 234 races. This should bring about a fair exchange of kronor on July 3^rd.

CCC’s Female Talent Squad Program

This is a totally new program on the women’s side and I give Cross Country Canada full credit for seeing the weakness in it’s women’s program at this time, as either talent is in a low cycle or the women just aren’t training. What skiers need to be doing with their training is quite easy to figure out – it simply comes down to doing the right volume or the right number of hours. I’d be surprised if there are 5% of those ladies selected to the talent squad that are within 50 to 100 hours of what other internationals skiers of their age would be doing. I think one of the weaknesses of the LTAD program here in Canada is that it does not specify an actual hours-of-progression schedule for either the men or women that is age-related.

I think these ladies, who are 16-18 years of age need to be doing the following number of hours. Age 16 yrs-500 hrs, 17 yrs-550 hrs, 18 yrs-600 hrs…of course all of this in concert with a great training program designed by the athlete with her coach. These are international hours that will have these skiers at least on a level playing field with their female competitors from other nations, like Norway, Sweden, etc.

Regarding the mentor program, I am definitely in agreement with this concept, but I would do it with a core group of only recently retired skiers. I see current senior team skiers named as mentors and I think they have more than enough on their individual plates to get themselves on an international footing when it comes to their programs. I don’t think they need any more distractions or traveling, especially around to regional camps or compromising time for recovery and proper training.

I would take the five retired ski team skiers on the mentor list and organize them into a group – try to get Beckie Scott involved – and put together a program that is developed into a manual, or a series of papers for the skiers to be able to reference. It could be a FAQs paper. Then have a visitation program by a couple of the mentors for each regional camp. An even better idea could be a national camp in Canmore, Alta. in early summer where all of these ladies could attend and be assigned a mentor, along with testing and an appraisal by the National Training Program and its expectations.

Charlotte Kalla Again

Talking about training hours, she is going from 750 hours this past year to 770 this next year. These are numbers she and her coach have agreed upon. She is 22 years old and we know what her international racing season was like this past year, being capped with a gold and a silver medal in Vancouver.

Canadian 2012 Tour de Ski
The opportunity for Canada to host a Tour de Ski event in the 2012 season was turned down by Cross Country Canada due to the lack of potential financing.This opportunity has been on the table for over a year and Lumina Consulting did a study to determine the feasibility. According to a report on the study, “The president of a consulting firm [Ken Davies, president of Lumina] hired to study the feasibility of a Tour-style race said that the plan for the event was “as good as it gets at this stage, without having final exact locations.”

Davies, as Chairperson of the Alberta World Cup Committee, the would-be organizing committee of the proposed 2012 Tour de Ski event, then declined the offer. Sort of a strange situation – the president of the company that confirmed it was an ideal offer is also and the Chair of the committee that turns it down – I’m scratching my head!

”Having organized the Tour de Ski for the past four years, FIS Race Director Jurg Capol acknowledged that CCC would be taking on financial risks by hosting a similar event. But he said that a certain degree of uncertainty in the planning process was unavoidable, which race organizers must to be willing to accept.

“You need the spirit to go for it, even when everything is not fixed,” Capol said. “It’s always easy to find reasons not to do it.” The 2012 Tour de Ski appears to be the last chance to land that race format in North America until at least 2015 – Capol said that FIS would not consider holding another TdS in Canada for the next five to ten years. “Maybe after that,” he said.

I thought CODA and VANOC both had legacy funds to help with these international ventures and that both provinces would also help out. Television would add to the pot and if they could time the events (9-11 am) to be prime time in Europe and Scandinavia this would double the marketing exposure. In 1995 Thunder Bay used such a strategy to help pay for the FIS World Championships. I’d like to think that Canmore and Whistler would have the marketing spunk to make this happen like T-bay did. I’m sure FIS could have opened up some company doors or helped to initiate things in the front offices of interested ski companies.

CCC still lacks the international accumen and strategic thinking at the administrative and board level which I’ve said a few times over the last few years.

Edmonton

This city befuddles the hell out of me! It has a population of over 700,000 people and a metropolitan area of a million people; financially it’s an up-beat city, as the staging area for those large scale oil sands projects and the big diamond mining operations in the Northwest Territories. Yet with all of these people, lots of snow, a well organized ski program, and the largest mass start race in Canada, this place should be gushing good talented skiers on the National Team scene. But it’s not happening – any thoughts?

Northug

I’ve been watching Petter Northug all spring, and I’d like to know when he is going to stop racing or just take a break. He sure knows how to stay in the news and is everywhere – talk about a marketing machine, his sponsors have to love him. I know race organizers do, as they claim when he comes to their race, the field increases by 2-300 racers and the crowd size just explodes. You’d like to think he has to slow down a bit soon – but his name is in langren.com every day with something always happening in an exciting big way.

Talk to you soon.