October 10, 2008 – Welcome to the brand new SkiTrax Skier Diaries! I’m looking forward to starting up regular blog-type entries for the coming season and hope to have frequent updates as I travel, train and race around the world. I also feel that I should start with a disclaimer: I’m not an English major and my high school teacher sometimes wondered if English was even my first language – luckily for me that same teacher was really big into sports.

I plan to include some other sections with my diaries, such as Overheard which will include highlights of the random banter that goes on within the team. There are way too many humorous and/or ridiculous comments made by my teammates to let them go unheard!

Another section called In the Tape Deck will cover the music that I’m pumped on at the moment. (No, I don’t still listen to, or even own any cassettes, it’s more of a metaphor to avoid the ‘what’s on my iPod’ cliché). I hope you enjoy the articles!

September 2008
The last dryland training camp of the year is now behind me and as I look back, I’ve had one of my best months of training on record. To start off September I spent five days up at the Haig Glacier and was incredibly lucky to get some of the best skiing I’ve ever seen on the Haig. The weather and conditions can be sketchy there in September but thanks to a cooler than average summer and 50+cm of new snow in the previous week, the team literally had perfect mid-winter conditions. We skied hard wax every day and probably saw an average of 5cm of new snow each night! Storms would roll in later in the day, dump a few cms of snow, and we’d wake up to Bluebird conditions each morning…tough to beat! A special thanks to Joel and Jody for great grooming and even better food…four words: Sushi at the Haig!!! Incredible.

The main focus of the camp was to ski. Now you may think this should be obvious being as it is a ‘glacier camp’ but in the past the focus has generally been high volume – as many as four 6-hour days in one week – and the skiing really ends up just being a bonus. If you want to cram in a lot of hours at the glacier it usually means spending a lot of time doing (somewhat boring) afternoon runs and core workouts on the heli-pad. This time around however, we skied 2.5-3 hours every morning and with the exception of a short core session one afternoon, we had the PM off to stretch, relax and recover. (Well, there was also time to read the many gossip mags that were left behind by the previous group, and play epic games of cards and Monopoly.) For me, this was an ideal plan and I came out of the camp with a lot of great hours of technique work and most importantly, some fuel left in the tank for our next camp…Mammoth.

We spent a little less than a week back in Canmore after The Haig then the team hopped a flight to the ‘Biggest Little City in the World’ (Reno) on our way to Mammoth, California for some serious altitude training. The team has been going to Mammoth in the fall for a few years now to take advantage of the extreme altitude of the Sierra Mountains. The town of Mammoth Lakes is at an elevation of around 2,600m (8,500′) and you can rollerski from town up to almost 3,000m!

The altitude is deceiving though, the high tree line and decent sized town give you the feeling of someplace like Whistler but don’t be fooled – wait until you try to go for a run and your heart rate redlines before you’re out of the parking lot! Mammoth has proven to be an exceptional place to train. In fact, many of the best runners in the U.S. do a lot of training in Mammoth as well.

It’s not uncommon to see runners like Meb Keflezighi (Olympic silver medalist), Deena Kastor and Ryan Hall out pounding the pavement. There is almost endless rollerskiing and trail running and the weather can’t be beat. On the flight down this year I was reading an article in the airline magazine claiming that Mammoth gets an average of 300 days of sun per year, and I believe it. In the more than 60 days of training I’ve done in Mammoth in the past few years I think I’ve only seen two days of rain!

This year I opted to try a shorter version of our traditional camp. In the past, I’ve spent up to three weeks in Mammoth but this time around I was only there for 10 days. At such a high altitude it’s very hard to recover and very easy to get run down. In previous years I’ve just been too tired after the camp and have had a hard time to recover in time for the ski season so the coaches and I decided to try a shorter camp and see if things go any better through the rest of the fall. So far so good, I’m feeling pretty good and recently ran one of my fastest ever 10kms on the road! Soon the hunt for early snow will begin but until then it’s training as usual in Canmore and I’m happy to have some time at home before the hectic race season begins.

Overheard
“The second mouse gets the cheese.” – NST member Sean Crooks, perhaps wiser than his years…
“I didn’t know R.E.M. [the band] was from Norway” – NST member Sara Renner in response to new coach Arild Monsen’s taste in Norwegian pop music, which is at best a feeble knockoff of good American music.

In the Tape Deck
(This won’t necessarily be new music, just whatever I’m pumped on at the time)

– Track: King by Weezer, Also check out the rest of the Red Album, it’s pretty solid!
– Track: Electric Feel by MGMT
– Track: Tetris by DaCaV5
– Album: Pop Life, by David Guetta (Great training music!)
– Album: Good Girl Gone Bad [Reloaded], Rihanna
– Track: Paper Planes By M.I.A