Andy Newell (USA). © Nordic Focus file photo.

August 24, 2011 – For the first time ever this August, the USST men’s team had a solo trip down to New Zealand for a 2.5-week training camp. The goal of the camp was to bring all the teammates together to push one another in some long distance and interval training sessions and also work out along side our friends on the Canadian team.

During August, the NZ winter is in full swing and although it’s a pretty mild winter, the conditions and grooming at the Snow Farm are well worth the trip. With 30+ k’s of rolling terrain and prefect hard wax conditions for most of the days, I was able to log around 27 hours worth of training for the first week down there. Coming to a camp like this is a perfect opportunity for me to work on some threshold intervals along side my distance skiing teammates like Freeman and Tad and see how efficiently we can ski with one another.

So during the first week we were able to have two long interval days including one 5×10 minute session together. One of our other favorite workouts to do when we’re at camp is join up with the Canadian team and run a hard speed session. the more fast people you have around the better for workouts like this and it’s always fun to toe up to the line against Alex and devon and sprint it out. In a workout like this we will typically do 8 starts, 8 finishes, and 8 sprints on an uphill.

We also planned our NZ training camp to coincide with the New Zealand winter games which are a 3 race series that take place at the snow farm. this year saw the stiffest competition ever with our full mens team present along with the canadians, and a full Russian world cup sprint team. The first race was the 15k mass start classic with beautiful hard packed classic tracks and blue skies.

With a handful of world class distance skiers the pace was high but it was great practice for me to test my fitness and see if i could hang with the best. In the end Freeman pushed hard in the last 2k and the pack narrowed down to Freeman, Harvey, Kershaw and myself. Kris was able to hold the lead to the finish and I was able to sprint past the Canadians up the last hill to make it a 1-2 victory.

The placing in the race and even the points don’t mean a whole lot to me since it’s still August, but I was very excited to race a distance race and actually feel strong throughout the entire race which was something I was unable to do last year. So I was very happy about that. With two Olympic medalist entered the next day’s sprint was a very anticipated event, and ended up being a great workout despite heavy snow.

The Russians didn’t really push us as much as we had hoped for but it was still really fun to actually race full sprint heats and play around with some speed and a little bit of tactics. The snow and wind continued to pick up making conditions soft for the final, but it was still a strong showing by the American team with myself, Freeman, and Hamilton going 1-2-3.

After some big training weeks and two hard races I was pretty beat so I wasn’t too disappointed to hear that the final skate race was canceled due to bad weather. We were actually unable to ski for two days as the wind and snow picked up, but in the end the weather cleared and we were left with perfect skiing again for the last 3 days of camp. with all the racing behind us we really pushed the training in the last few days with a few 5 hour training days, and freeman even putting in a 5 hour OD.

Looking back I think it really was one of the most productive USST camps we’ve ever had and I’m really excited about the level of fitness throughout the team right now.

As we get into September the big hours that we are all training will begin to diminish a little bit as we begin to train more intensity and intervals. The next time the team will come together will be for a massive 2 week intensity camp at the Lake Placid Olympic training center starting on the 6th of September.