Searching (and dreaming) for snow

First off, I'd like to direct your attention to our SLUSKI Sale page, where we are offering up some deals on old team gear like jackets and hats...cleaning out our closet and hopefully using some of the funds to support current team purchases like wax, uniform stuff and offsetting trip costs.

Check out the website here:

https://sites.google.com/site/sluskisalepage/

You may recognize some of the 'models' of these fine products!

With the leaves all gone and the days getting colder, the time of year has arrived for snow to be on the back of everyone's mind.

Webcams from numerous ADK snowmobiling sites (thanks to Kyle for spreading the word about those) have been taunting us with a few inches here and there in the mountainous regions, and we're not-so-patiently waiting for a promising report of lake-effect powder in the hills. The excitement for the first real skiing of 2013/14 is building.

I have the Star Lake gas station on speed-dial, if that says anything about the subject.

It snowed a few flakes this morning, enough for me to get out the old waxless boards and cruise around the fields for a few minutes...

Unfortunately it is disappearing rapidly, and until the ground really freezes and the days turn as cold as the nights, we'll be sticking with dryland training. We've been steadily checking off our list of 'best and most challenging fall workouts'. Here's a few photos from recent training sessions:

Hard bounding at Higley...a predetermined loop with hard bounding on the hills and L3 running everywhere else. Many laps, many trips to the pain cave. Very old school and Scandinavian, this one! 

We've been staying active in the gym, incorporating new exercises like the Swedish reverse-bench press (or "bench pull"). This one is all the rage in the ski world, though I don't think the director of the Fitness Center was psyched to see us setting up a bench so precariously when she happened to walk into the Varsity training room this day...

Another solid workout is specific strength repeats at Higley. The closed roads allow for lots of group skiing and, in this case, towing. You can't see it from this show but Meng is actually pulling Matt Dier up the hill via a series of bicycle tubes attached to his water belt. It's easy to see why these drills are effective: not only does it incorporate specific muscles for skiing, the towing aspect allows you to get comfortable putting your body weight in a nice forward position.

Here is an unfortunate shot of the second rollerski Will has broken this year...this time during a town line sprint near Parishville. Will is working on planting his feet a bit more forward instead of landing on his heels, and here is a great indicator of why! He got tripped up while springing and put all his pressure straight onto that back section, snapping it straight through. He claims he is switching to aluminum skis from now on.

Lake Placid Training Weekend

We woke up early Saturday morning to drive down to Lake Placid and cap off a big volume week with two great days of training. It was another perfect cloudless weekend, and everyone had a great time and put in some large hours of training, for some first-years perhaps the biggest week of their ski career yet. The next time we train this much in a single week, we will be on snow over Thanksgiving Break!

Saturday morning's workout was an uphill L3 continuous double-pole up the hill on Route 9N from Elizabethtown to Keene. It was between 45 and 60 minutes of on-time, with a great gradient; steep enough to maintain good threshold pace, but gradual enough to carry speed and feel the flow. At the top of the hill the team switched to running gear and climbed nearby Hurricane Mountain, making for about 2:45 of total on-time.

Here's Kate mid-way through the DP portion of the workout. Hurricane Mtn, the endpoint of the workout, is the grey bald summit far off in the distance, in the center of the frame.

Guys team on the summit of Hurricane. Thanks to the nice family who took the photo and emailed it to us!

We checked in at the campsite and set up some of our gear before grabbing lunch and heading to the ski jumps mid-day. We got to check out the ski jumping national championships at the venue, which are always cool to see. They line the jumps with a grassy astro-turf substance and we it with sprinklers, enabling the ski jumpers to use the hill just like they do in winter. 

That little dot in the middle is a ski jumper flying off

Kyle hanging out with a hay-monster, or whatever that thing is...

We headed back to the campsite after the jumping activities and hung out enough to take a quick snooze or play some card games, and then headed out to Franklin Falls for an easy 1 hour skate ski with some agility drills and relays. Agility drills are the new "it" thing in the rollerski world lately, or at least the US rollerski world. We've been doing them for as long as I've been here, and it's cool to see it more and more. Lots of pictures are always being posted online from US Ski Team camps and whatnot, so there's a lot of sources for new ideas and challenges. The 180 is definitely the most exciting, but there's plenty of challenging obstacles. 

Since we had a straight road to work with (as opposed to the SUNY Canton parking lot, where we did some earlier this year) we added a new aspect and made the agility course an out-and-back ski, with two-skier head-to-head showdowns. It led to plenty of craziness.

Kate and Taren duking it out

Phil and Calvin hitting the 180-spin to backward-skate section

A slalom straight into a sharp lefthand U-turn leaves Matt in the grass

After a delicious dinner at Lisa G's (I think we ate them out of free bread) we settled in for the night with nighttime activities like campfire stories, s'mores and (in the case of most of the guys team) headlamp-powered tree tipping. 

We were up early again for day 2, a long easy ski-walk/trail run up the left side of Whiteface and down the right side via Esther and Marble mountains and the Flume trail network. The day was strangely hot and muggy for a mid-October day, but the thick air seemed to bring out the fall colors even more. We had a few issues of separation and getting lost (think arrows made out of sticks at intersections) but that's bound to happen at least once every fall...

Amazing colors and conditions for a hike with poles

What began as a hike finished with a trail run among the golden forests of the Flume trails

After the traditional stop at Lakeview Deli, the ride home was silent with passed-out bodies slumped across the back seats of the vans. We couldn't have asked for a better combo of location, weather and motivation to finish off a big week of training, up to 18+ hours for some of the upperclassmen when all was said and done. 

We have no official practice this week, as most SLU students head home on Wednesday for mid-semester break, a much-deserved rest period to recover and absorb the last few weeks of great preparation.

Great fall training!

Things have gone great with fall training so far. We've finished all of our typical testing events aside from the River Road 7.5/10k skate TT, which is more of a group race than test. With a young team on both sides that came on strong late last year and really started to turn a few heads, we had some high expectations for the returning class. What’s impressive is that this ‘returning class’ basically consists of the entire team, as Kelsey was our only graduating senior. In fact, Eric is our only senior this year, and he is training and studying abroad this semester in Vancouver, BC.

Eric in British Columbia

That means the training group this fall has a unique sense of camaraderie: they all put in the work last year, they all are putting in the work this year, and they will all be putting in the work together next fall as well. That leads to a pretty strong team unity: there is not a lot of BS this season…workouts feel distinctly more professional in nature. This team knows what they are capable of, and they are driven to achieve some ambitious goals.

Kate and Taren, L3 intervals at Morgan Road

That doesn't mean this year hasn't been a ton of fun already, with plenty of games, eating challenges, inside jokes and running humor like the petty “married-couple banter” of Phil and Kyle. What also helps keep thing fun is breaking records, because going fast is the most fun you can have with this sport. That’s why we do it, after all…

Coach Terko giving some apparently hilarious directions at a workout

So I will not write out tons of numbers here, and instead I’ll direct you to our team archive of testing results going back many years. You can see the overall archives for each event, with the times and names from this year in bold. You can also click the tabs at the bottom to review some previous tests from year-to-year, and see averages. 

SLUSKI Testing Archive

Some highlights?

6 men under 10 minutes in the 3k. Average time of 9:59. Possibly a first in school history for both.

Erin Perryman has been on a roll, most notably shattering the DoublePole test record and setting herself up to be the first female under 9 minutes in the coming years.

Erin crushing the DP test. Big gains in all areas this year, watch out for this one

And the most exciting performance of all: The men’s race at St. Regis. This is the quintessential SLU test, a punishing 30-35 minute uphill mountain race. Tom Lepesqueur has held the men’s record of 29:21 since 2006, also the only time in race history under 30 minutes.

Team atop St. Regis

This year, the Meng Dynasty ran the mountain in 28:34 to destroy that record, and he was followed by 2 freshmen: Blaine Ayotte in 29:08 and Calvin Swomley in 29:09, making a simultaneous record-breaking by three skiers. What’s more, sophomore Phil Marshall came in at 29:23, narrowly missing the previous record but putting four racers under 30 minutes in a single year.

Of course, the success was cause for celebration in the form of the inaugural St. Regis Hotdog Cart challenge. The road at the base of St. Regis Mountain is a long winding stretch of quiet road comprised of trees, hills, lakes and…at hotdog vendor cart. Meng attempted to eat one fully-loaded kraut dog in 28 seconds in honor of his 28-minute Regis time. The result?

Fast times and fun workouts are always a sign of a fit team, but good weather helps also. We've been so lucky this year to have an amazing stretch of classic fall patterns here in the North Country. A day of rain will be bordered both before and after by week-long stretches of 40-degree nights and 70-degree cloudless days. Humidity is a non-factor, and t-shirts have persisted long past their usual season here. 

“Cali weather!” Meng is always saying. After spending this past summer out West myself, I can attest to the motivational power of endless sunny days and beautiful surroundings. In this case that means foliage on an exceptional level. I’m quick to point out nearly every day the fact that while basketball teams are inside and football is running drills on grass with lines on it, we get to experience all of these colors and settings firsthand. Rollerskis have been like scenes from an L.L. Bean catalogue, and that makes it so easy to get out and get fast every single day. 

We're headed down for an overnight camping trip in Lake Placid this weekend, my second annual team-bonding trip. It may not be up to the same caliber of going to Canada to watch a World Cup ski race (last year), but it's looking like another great stretch of days to be in the mountains.