Early snow sessions

The snow lasted longer than expected at Star Lake this week, giving us a total of 4 days of great skiing conditions. This volume week was looking like a tough slog at first, since we have been inundated with rainy, cold and dark weather ever since returning from our Lake Placid Weekend and mid-semester break. Instead, we were motivated by real skiing and took advantage by training more than planned...and that's a good thing!

Erin skiing into the Finland-esque sunset at Star Lake last week

We managed to get in skate skiing early, some classic specific strength mid-week, and even a rowdy game of speedball during out last day on snow on Friday. Everyone was feeling nice and tired from the real stuff, but in addition to noting how the muscles were responding, many were also noting that the transition to snow this year felt easier than ever. May have to take an in-depth look back at the training this fall and figure out what we did to make that happen, but I'm not complaining. 

After basically 4 days of easy distance skiing, it was time to get the hurt back on come Saturday morning. For the past few years we have been doing a traditional pre-thanksgiving workout at Mt. Arab, a small (2,500ft) "mountain" outside of Tupper Lake. The trail is exactly 1 mile in length, but all uphill and very steep in parts (stairs, cliffs, rock slides). Running up at a hard pace takes between 10-14 minutes. Since it's usually right before Thanksgiving when we do this, there is also commonly lots of snow, ice, mud and cold temps, so you really get that first frigid "lung burning" feeling of the winter season. This year was no different:

Will leads the men's team on trip 1...

...Erin leads the women...

...and Calvin, taking a nod from our men's team's favorite activity, goes "tree tipping" in the woods...

Now we are in for a rest week of nice easy training in order to get prepped for another big week in Canada coming up. After that it's all about prepping for the upcoming RACE SEASON!

Oh, and I'll put in another plug here since it seems to be growing and growing in popularity:

You can stay up to date with more photos and videos by clicking 'like' on the SLUSKI Facebook page, updated frequently!