Training Archive: AndrewIn the 7 days ending 2008-03-02:
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Sunday Mar 2 | ||
| Event: Vasaloppet 2008, Sälen-Mora | ||
| Cross Country Skiing race 7:40:00 [2] 90 km (5:07 / km) | |
| ahr:139 | ||
| Vasaloppet! Normally I don't write so much in these logs, but this time... well why not!
The alarm clock goes. I'm already awake and ready to get up. My body knows something big is going to happen. It's 03:45. Breakfast and a quick march to the buses to Sälen. It's a 2hr+ journey - mostly due to the ridiculolus amounts of traffic around the start area. Makes sense - 15,000+ people have to get there... Managed to sleep ok on the bus - or at least relax. My eyes would open now and again to admire the red lights of the traffic convoy ahead. The atmosphere was building up already. Arrive and stake out our places in start group no. 5 (not a bad starting group, thanks to doing a decent Halvvasan the year before). The Vasaloppet start was one of the strangest I've ever done. It went something like this: Speaker: "Now this is a very, very long race. You should take it easy in the beginning. There's no rush. Make sure to eat and drink a lot. And there's the start of the Vasaloppet!" I mean the guy basically talked right up to the start - no silence, no countdown, no warning! Weird. 15,000 skiers trundle off. I notice immediately that I have absolutely no kick whatsoever - this is going to be a tough race. I see several thousand in front of me as I reach the edge of a small dip in the starting area. The mass of people leads towards the bottle-neck - a steep hill, where the track width is reduced by a quarter. Basically the masses come to a stand-still and we wait, not so patiently, edging our way forward, being careful not to let anyone stand on our skis or poles, while being not so careful about standing on other peoples' skis and poles. This bottle-neck means that you lose approximately 5min per start group on your possible time. The hill is pretty serious. It's quite steep in places, and it's long - 3km and 200m of climb. Fight my way up the hill, scissoring most of the way, slowly. Get annoyed and stop for 5min to put on some red kick wax. Now I have the grip to start bounding up the hill... it worked well - I only noticed a few people moving faster. I've got strong legs... Unfortunately, I don't have such strong arms, required for double-poling, Which is mostly what Vasaloppet is about... Once we reached the top of the hill it was time for the relatively flat run through the marshes and lakes. To make matters worse, the tracks were very rough at this stage. Now, I'm ok when skiing in good tracks. But what little technique I have pretty much disappears when the tracks are worn out. There was pretty much only one rough track left. The others had all but disappeared. I made a tactical error here, which I only understood until much later. Before the next series of little hills, I took another 5min or so to put on klister this time (the red wax had smoothened out). Again, I could bound up the hills faster than anyone around me. But was it worth it? I paid the price later - something I really only understood by the time it was too late. After the second pit stop there was a nice long downhill - any opportunity to rest tired arms was welcome, and crouching down and letting gravity do most of the work was great. It wasn't all easy though. You had to concentrate fully on keeping your skis in the rough tracks, or avoiding piles of snow in the turns, where the tracks had all but disappeared. By the time you were at the bottom your legs felt like jelly from all the shaking. At least it was time then for your arms to take over. I got a nice rhythm going with eating and drinking. It felt right, although I'm not sure it was optimal. I'd take some sports drink in between the pit stops, and if I was feeling particularly tired I'd take a sports gel - wonderful, wonderful things! At the pit stops, I'd eat half a bun, and take two glasses of warm blueberry soup. Yum! It was impressive how each of these things gave a little extra kick, though I noticed from the numerous times I stopped to put on klister that rest also helped a bit... It was on some of the longer downhills that I understood why klister is a bad thing. The loose snow sticks to it like crazy, so you can bound up the hills no end. However when you reach the top all that snow reamins, and causes huge amounts of drag. If I was passing everybody up the hills, everybody was gliding past me on the downhills. And of course it meant that I had to put in extra effort when double-poling. It wasn't until the last 20 km were left that I fully understood this mistake. When I was leaving the pit stop one of my skis ground to an immediate stop, causing me to lurch forward. I jumped onto the other ski, which ground to a halt. I ended up 'stumbling' forward from ski to ski for about 10m. I had to stop and scrape off all the ice which had formed on the bottom of my skis. Now, I don't have the technique or strength to get up hills quickly without grip. So I felt like I needed klister. What was the trade off? I might have lost a few minutes per hill having to scissors up instead of bounding. However, putting on the klister took at least 5min each time (around 6 times). So I'm losing time by putting on the klister. Add to this the time lost by reduced glide AND the waste of your strength and I was clearly losing time! It's a lesson for next year... Some tricks to get around all this? Instead of using klister, I could have used a wax for wet, 'corny' snow. It doesn't work as well, but might have been good enough to help me bound up the hills. The other trick is to leave part of your kick zone wax-free. The idea behind this is that you roughen it up with sand paper, and that gives you grip. I found that the wax would smoothen out after a while, and you basically had no grip within 45min or so - but that is what wet, 'corny' snow does. The sandpapered, wax-free zone would continue to give you grip. I was thinking that you could have two such zones - in between the kick wax area and the glide wax area. The other tactical error was that it was worthless changing track if you caught up on some slow skiers. Since there were pretty much no other tracks, it was impossible to get past them (add to this the friction caused by lots of klister outside of the tracks) and I didn't have a chance. You are far better off staying behind them, and getting past them later at an appropriate opportunity. For the last 9km in the tracks gradually became more slushy. Poling became heavy. Your mind concentrates on finishing. Your muscles protest. You start getting cramps. But then you see the church spire and your spirits rise. You then see the 2km left sign and your heart sinks... You keep pressing on. You think you are getting nowhere poling in the slush, but nevertheless there is progress. You turn the last bend and see the straight to the finish. And whatever energy reserves are left are used to maintain your pace, increase your pace, and cross the finish line... Jenny had a fantastic race - she had 6hrs 30min, and placed 80th among over 1000 girls. The fastest girl was about 4hrs 45min I think. And Jenny would have lost about 20-25 min on the first hill, plus another good bit time having to deal with bad trails. I reckon she should try for within an hour of the leader next year! Although the tracks and snow-conditions were hell, and I wore myself out completely, it was still all fun. I could definitely do this again. There's something nice about doing the actual race. And I think I can get a whole lot better - I only did three weekends of skiing before Vasaloppet! And there was no snow in Stockholm this year - the first time since I moved here (and, typically, the year I decide to do Vasaloppet...). I learned some tricks too - save time on changing tracks counts for 10min +. Saving time on waxing/klister amounts to at least 30min. Trying to get into a better start group (I could maybe get into start group 4...) counts for 5-10min. Yes... I could do this again. Next year... http://www.resultat.vasaloppet.se/vasaresult/do/se... | ||
| C • nice one 6 | ||
Friday Feb 29 | ||
| Cross Country Skiing 1:16:00 [1] 17 km (4:28 / km) | |
| ahr:129 | ||
| Cross Country Skiing - Classic, Went for a little warm up before vasaloppet with Jenny. Skied up to Eldris and backfrom Mora | ||
Wednesday Feb 27 | ||
| Running 1:13:00 [1] 10.5 km (6:57 / km) | |
| ahr:137 | ||
| Steady Run, Norra Djurgården, taking in a lot of the hills, and ending up at KTH Hallen. | ||
| Strength 40:00 [0] | |
| ahr:107 | ||
| Strength Training, KTH Hallen | ||
| Running warm up/down 11:00 [1] 1.8 km (6:07 / km) | |
| ahr:134 | ||
| KTH Hallen to Hjorthagen | ||
Tuesday Feb 26 | ||
| Running warm up/down 36:00 [1] 7 km (5:09 / km) | |
| ahr:138 | ||
| Warm Up from Hjorthagen to Bosön, with some spurts towards the end | ||
| Running warm up/down 5:00 [2] 1.2 km (4:10 / km) | |
| ahr:148 | ||
| Warm Up - more spurts | ||
| Running intervals 34:00 [5] 6 km (5:40 / km) | |
| ahr:159 | ||
| Intervals. This was interesting. A test of speed control. Got a note with 30 numbers from 0 to 6 in 2 rows. Speed for 200m should be your current 3km speed (39sec for 200m for me) minus the relevant number on the note. The rest is the number x 10sec. (If 0 you get 10sec). For the first set I was bad - for the most part I was too fast. For the second set I got it together and kept the times better. | ||
| C • Wow 2 | ||
| Running warm up/down 10:00 [1] | |
| ahr:133 | ||