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MID-SEASON
JUSTIN EASTER
Contributing Editor for the Master Skier
Justin Easter is the Head Coach and Director of the Summit Nordic Ski Club in Summit Country Colorado. He is an alumni of the Factory Team, and current Editor of SkiPost. He hopes to turn his love for the sport of Cross Country Skiing toward coaching athletes to find what inspires them.
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The author competing in the Super Tour
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I am a 59 year old master skier, probably average in aerobic capacity for age, maybe slightly above. Been racing for about seven years. I'm finally starting to realize the real value of interval training, how and when to do them etc. but I have some questions.
Today I did four 4 min. hill climbing intervals, one 8.5 min hill climbing interval and one 3 min. double poling milder uphill interval.
The average heart rate for each interval varied from about 165 to 172. (up to about 182 briefly on some of them). My observed max heart rate is 186 (actual might be a few points higher)
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1. Is it considered good training to vary the length of the intervals in the same session? As you can see, one was quite a bit longer, mainly because I got tired of doing the same hill and did a different, longer one.
2. It seemed like it took a long time for my pulse rate to come down (I was letting it come down below 111 before beginning another one). I didn't time it but it seemed like it took longer than the actual interval, especially in the latter ones. Maybe about one and a half times the length of the interval. Is this ok or does it mean I'm pushing too hard?
1. It is fine to vary the length of your intervals, but an adjustment in effort is usually necessary to get the most from each interval.
In personal training it has been very standard to do some longer intervals and end with something shorter and quicker.
As I said, it is important to know what you are looking to accomplish from these intervals (i.e. speed, power, endurance), and adjust your heart rate to achieve those.
Typically, a longer interval will be aimed at building threshold, so you will seldom do those to the point of near exhaustion. To keep that same mindset you will often see higher heart rate values when you are doing your shorter intervals.
2. I have found that recovery time is pretty closely related to my base fitness. If we start with intervals after not doing much of anything there would not only be a greater risk of injury, but also recovery between intervals would likely be longer.
Those first interval sessions of a new training year will usually have longer rest periods than some of the fartlek/rolling-interval sessions later.
Without knowing where your threshold is it is difficult to tell you if you are going too hard or not, but it does seem possible that you could be getting a little ahead of yourself with values so close to your max heart rate. If you are serious about interval training it is probably not a bad idea to get some type of lactate profile done.
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