I hope everyone is having a great summer so far. My training has been going better then ever, and I feel like I have been gaining a lot.
I just completed a hard week of training up at the Haig Glacier. The Haig Glacier is located in the Kananaskis. Every summer, skiers will head up there to train and get a chance to be on snow. We stay at a base camp located about 1 km down from the actual glacier. It is about an 18km run into the base camp, while a helicopter flies our gear in for us. The camp is actually quite luxurious. We sleep in bunkhouses and there is a fully equipped kitchen where we eat and hang out.
Our biggest volume weeks of the year are usually done at the Haig. Happy to say I met my goal of achieving 22hours of training this past week. Everyday we were skiing by 8:30am. We had great conditions the entire week. The weather stayed cold at night, but was bright and sunny every morning. After each ski the routine was to head to camp for a quick lunch followed by a nap. Then we woke up, played a little Frisbee golf, and ate dinner then back to bed. Occasionally there would be a short core workout in the afternoons as well… Yes I know VERY stressful.
As an athlete you have to be careful when training at the Haig Glacier. Lots of athletes make the mistake of training too much or to fast. Because you are training at such a high altitude it is very easy to “burn out”, putting your race season in jeopardy and potentially your entire ski career. For this reason coaches will make you do a lot of monitoring. For example, each athlete will take a “rusko” test every morning. This is basically recording your heart rate for a couple minutes right when you get out of bed to make sure there is nothing abnormal, indicating that your body might be fatigued. Coaches will also measure our blood lactate levels while we are out skiing. This is done by poking our fingers and taking a blood sample that is then read by a small machine. This ensures that we are training at the right speed.
After a couple years you start to get the hang of how your body responds and how much you are able to push. I think everything went well for me this year. I am now on a couple weeks of rest and recover before I do a couple small tests to see where I am at and what sort of improvements have been made.
base camp
teammates Brooke and Shayla ski on the glacier
Alysson, Marlis, Kate and I doing some double pole sprints
girls doing an afternoon core session
the team
