|
|
PRE-SEASON
Tim Donahue
Contributing Editor for The Master Skier
Tim is a high school English teacher from Manhattan. He is a masters skier who has logged thousands of roller skiing laps in Central Park, where he runs a roller ski clinic.
|
 |
Suffering isn’t something I necessarily want to do. In fact, I orient all of my training around pushing the moment of suffering further away and tricking myself into thinking that it doesn't hurt. During the ten races I did the winter before last, I would guess that I suffered - to the point of implosively impaired bodily function - a total of less than half-an-hour.
By far, the most sustained moments of this came at the end of the Birkie, the longest race I had skied. On the 2k pond that begins at the 48k mark, I was against a rather strong headwind and as I watched people slowly gruel by me, I struggled to simply stay up.
That I was half-conscious and yet vividly remember this moment speaks a lot about suffering. In fact, that dismal moment on the pond has become a beacon for much of my training this season.
I was thinking about it in August, as I ran hill repeats, and I thought of it this fall, as I ended three-hour rollerskis with thirty minutes of tempo work.
Beyond being fun and energizing, training is a means of mitigating suffering while visualizing it.
If I want to improve, suffering is something I have to understand, learn from and embrace, and yet avoid as strategically as possible.
In that wonderfully intricate way that competitive Nordic skiing demands, a matrix of trivia to most, raising the threshold for pain comes down to hundreds of learned choices, both tiny and vast.
Working from Birkie example, for instance, I've learned that I shouldn't spazz too much in the beginning to swap places in my train of skiers, but that I should find a strong train and content myself to ride along with it.
I've learned that a hot water bottle at the 30k mark will be invaluable, and I've already gone to Target to buy the thermal lunch bag that will hold it.
I'll put another Gu on my waterbelt with safety pins this time, and I know these little things will change the way I enter that last stretch along the pond - what if, instead of losing ten places there, I gain ten?
These minuscule bits are the privilege borne from a wider foundation. Of course, that begins with reliable training blocks, nutrition, knowledge and care for equipment, the money to buy it, the climate conditions to use it, the yogic balancing between comfort and pain, and the like, all the way out to the sense of optimism needed to view the knife of suffering as a tool that serves rather than cuts - to be held not by the blade, but by the handle.
As the forefather of venturing into the woods, Henry David Thoreau, puts it, it is "glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look."
Ironically, this vast work of conditioning is all in service of the very simple, singular, raw moment of suffering, when it's you and the hill and nothing else.
Perhaps it's this purity of experience, when all else in the world washes away, that we seek most in pushing ourselves through all the training simulations of masochism. In this tribute against gravity, we learn the most about ourselves.
And it's those times when gravity can be ignored that mark the strongest races.
From my informal canvassing, it seems like people's best results hurt less, as if they have found a new level of spare fluidity.
One of the reasons I respect this sport so much is because it can't be defeated. If you try to manhandle slushy ascents, you'll lose to a quick, light and floating tempo. So in those races when the flagellating "C'mon, C'mon! " inner voice recedes to a song, or things I don't even consciously control, I feel like I'm striking a deal with suffering. One of those can make a whole season for me.
|
For more articles like this one, subscribe today to The Master Skier. |
|
