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POSTED IN 01/10
Noah Hoffman
Contributing Editor
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I’ve always trained fast. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to feel like I’m doing something while I’m training.
Maybe it started with my first time in endurance sports when I was in 6th grade. That year I joined the cross-country running team. There was no middle school program so a couple of my friends and I were permitted to run with the high school team.
We were 11 year olds chasing big upper classmen on sixty-minute runs.
I ran with the high school team during 6th, 7th and 8th grades. The first time I realized that my training was different than that of other middle school athletes was before one of the last races in my 7th grade year.
I’ve almost always done the majority of my training alone, so I had no reason to feel I trained fast, or too fast.
There were a few instances when I got reference points. For instance the summer after my junior year, Tad Elliot and I went with our coaches, Jason Cork and John Callahan, to a US Ski team camp in Park City as invited observers.
We watched and were awed by Andy Newell and Torin Koos doing a treadmill test.
We weren’t allowed to watch anybody do a strength test, but heard about the “very advanced” force plates they used to measure power output.
We were allowed to do a double pole with the A team. I sat in behind Newell, Koos, Chris Cook and Andrew Johnson for two hours, trying to match their tempo and the speed of their hand return. I never said a word to them the entire ski. Never even told them my name or what I was doing there.
The pace was high, but not that much faster than my normal training pace. I recently learned that they referred to me as “the kid who trains way too fast and hammers all the time!”
At the Regional Elite Group (REG) camp in Sun Valley, the same summer as the US Team Camp, I went on an over-distance run on what I now know as the Fox Creek trails.
I recall being extremely frustrated by what I thought was the very slow pace set during those training runs. The other participants were walking the uphills! Who walks during a run? That is not training! That’s like hiking with my mom, or maybe even worse.
The fact that way-faster skiers, such as Matt Gelso and Reid Pletcher, were perfectly at home going that pace didn’t enter my consciousness. I had not the smallest inkling that slowing down might actually be beneficial to me.
Earlier this year the US Team suggested that I slow my Level 1 (L1) training pace. I was not very open to this idea. In fact, I fought it. In fact, I think I’m still fighting it, although hopefully I have made some progress.
I started out trying to prove that I didn’t need to slow down. We started lactate testing almost every distance session. I “willed” my lactate to be under 1mmol when I was going fairly fast so I could say, “see, I am in L1”.
Eventually the coaches started talking among themselves so that even my main coach, John Callahan, told me, in certain workouts, to go out easy. I finally wrapped my head around the idea that I was going to do this thing, I was actually going to slow down. It never occurred to me that it might not be that easy.
In certain workouts, I committed to keeping my pace slow. No matter what my intentions, though, inevitably I found myself speeding up, especially when going uphill. I would look at my monitor and find that my pulse was much higher than where I wanted it to be.
In a team workout, where there are athletes on faster skis, who just feel like going faster, or who are supposed to go faster, the whole group would find itself speeding up. I still struggle mightily to let the group go ahead.
Then there’s the running thing. More than anything else, I love to run fast. I can’t stand that old shuffle where you kick a bunch of dirt up with every step. And I really don’t like walking during a “running” workout.
I’d like to think that I’ve improved in keeping my focus during L1 workouts. There are definitely some OD runs where I know I’m going to run the whole thing, regardless of my heart rate.
There are also team workouts, especially when I’m at camps with the US Team, where I’m going to stay with the group for the whole workout, no matter what my heart rate.
All of that being said, I will go out on L1 workouts where I stay consistently in L1. Keeping easy workouts easy is something that I know I need to work hard at now and for the rest of my career.
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