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Glide Your Way to Fitness, Part 1 Nordic Skiing to Maximize the Winter Months Author: Adam Hodges Myerson It’s been cold this winter in New England. Really cold. On top of that, it was snowy. Really snowy. For stretch there, it was snowing every second or third day, with anywhere from 1-2 inches to 1-2 feet. I can’t remember anything quite like it. Being hearty New Englanders, though, no one really complains. The key is to make the best of the winter while it’s here, and the best way cyclists here typically do that is on the “misery sticks”. A bad winter for riding usually means a good winter for skiing. This one’s been quite bad, and so, quite good. Some of my training partners here have gotten somewhat serious about Nordic skiing in the past few years. Because this was uncharted territory for many of us in terms of actually training properly, some questions were put to me: how to cross over into another sport while applying the same methodology that was used in cycling earlier in the year? Until this point, we hadn’t worried too much about training for Nordic skiing, other than emphasizing technique. We'd all been at the level with skiing that the biggest improvement we could make was technique first, since we could rely on cycling fitness otherwise. Now that some of my peers were beginning to take ski racing seriously, to the point of doing dry land training instead of racing cyclo-cross, it was time to think about training a little bit. Here's my evaluation: First, it seems to me that all of the same energy systems you focus on for road cycling are applicable for skiing, but sometimes for different reasons. For instance, you might not think sprint workouts would have any place on the skis. But they absolutely do. You need to have a place in your workouts where you're building your maximal, explosive power. Not because you need to be worried about winning a sprint on the skis (though it happens), but because a) the movement of skating itself is essentially a repetition of explosive motions (muscular endurance), and b) you need to be able to pop over small hills while still maintaining enough momentum to move forward. On the bike, you can shift into your smallest gear and keep your power output the same. The point at which you'd tip over is pretty low. On the skis, there's a minimum power you'll have to put out just to keep moving forward. So, maximal power is an important aspect, and 15-second bursts, on the flats to work on speed (for the starts) and on the hills to work on strength, can be helpful. Let me break it down into a) energy systems, and b) periods or phases, to show how they translate from cycling to skiing: Energy Systems: Easy I find it hard to even do easy on the skis, because in order to simply move forward with my poor technique I have to go somewhat hard. If your technique is fair, you should be able to do easy as warm up, recover between intervals, and perhaps on your recovery days if you're skiing classical. For skiing, easy isn't a "training" zone like it is on the bike, since skiing doesn't require the same kind of pure endurance as cycling. Skiing endurance is more muscular endurance than aerobic endurance. Your longest race ever would be 3 hours, whereas with cycling it can be more than twice that. Light Light is your first real training zone for skiing. It's where you would do your endurance training, and you should be capable, at the end of your base period, of finishing 2.5 to 3 hours worth, to be consistent with a)what you'd have to finish in a 50K, and b) what sports science suggests is the maximal volume a human can finish. Not surprisingly, they're about the same length. Training in light also allows you the base level of fitness to be able to do high intensity training later and be able to recover from it quickly. Middle Middle has the same application on the skis as it does on the bike. For any races that are an hour or so long, you'll find that those are the events where your average heart rate should hover around your threshold heart rate. Middle is the zone where you work on that range. 60-90 minutes in a single workout is what you should be capable of finishing before you consider your base training complete. So here, you're talking about a 10-30K race. High Here's where we start to talk about anaerobic training. Any random minutes you spend over your threshold heart rate you can value as high, but more specifically, high is a 2-4 minute effort, with 3 minutes as the ideal length. So, in skiing, especially in a longer race, you know that you're going to be trying to stay right at threshold as much as possible. But when you hit the short, rolling hills, you're inevitably going to go anaerobic to get over them quickly, and then have to recover and settle back down at your threshold once you've over the top. Intervals in high of 3 minutes on, with full recovery in between, will help with that, and help improve your lactate tolerance with each interval. Submax Submax efforts are shorter anaerobic efforts of 45 seconds - 2 minutes. Again, where they apply to skiing is when you're popping over short hills. These are good to use in training for repeated hard efforts: minute on/minute off efforts. This is also where you start to work on increasing anaerobic power. Max/Sprints I explained this zone above in the introduction. This should give you a good starting point for considering the work you do on the skis, and how to quantify it in relation to the work you do on the bike. Even with these energy systems and training zones in mind, one important point to consider is that your threshold heart rate when skiing will be higher than your threshold heart rate for cycling, because you engage more muscles simultaneously while skiing. So, there are more muscles emptying the blood of oxygen, thus your heart must beat faster to transport that oxygen. Nordic skiers are known to have the highest threshold heart rates of any endurance athletes. That said, it may be difficult for many people to do a true threshold test on the skis. If you’re skiing for fun, your heart rate zones on the bike will work well enough, as long as you're aware that you can go right up to and just a little bit over the zone, and keep perceived exertion in mind. If you really want to estimate your true threshold heart rate while skiing, your best bet would be to evaluate some average heart rates for 30K races you were able to ski the distance strongly.