You do you?
Since graduating high school I've heard countless coaches say, "You have to do what works for you."
"How should I warm up for this race?"
"Well, just do what works for you."
"How should I train over the summer?"
"Well, focus on volume and train your weaknesses, but bottom line you gotta just do what works for you."
I was often frustrated by this response. Although I enjoy the application of exercise science to training, and I like writing and analyzing other athletes' training plans, when it comes to my own training I just want to be told what to do, and then go do it. Certainly there is a certain level of experience that you need to achieve before you can confidently know what truly "works for you." And that threshold of experience depends drastically on the training aspect. For example: while a handful of races might give you a good idea about how you can warmup successfully (I like skiing really easy with a few impulses, then some chill L3 - often 3 x 3 min - and a few L4 accelerations into race pace), it might take years to understand what type of yearly volume load your body best responds to, or what ratio of intensity-to-volume you thrive under, or even how that ratio of intensity-to-volume changes during the course of the training year.
Through high school and college I learned a lot about training and how my body responds to different types of training. I learned about my strengths and about my weaknesses, and I addressed those weaknesses with different types of training. I learned how to handle my classes amid difficult periods of training and racing, and how to handle training amid difficult periods of school. I learned how to prepare for a race, and how to train over a summer. I learned how to adjust my strength training throughout the training year, and modify it for running or for skiing, for biathlon or Nordic. I learned a lot of approaches to training that work relatively well for me. However, I'm always looking for ways to improve, ways to adjust what I think works for me to find even better methods, whether it's by asking more experienced athletes about their approach to technique/ training/ recovery/ finances or examining how athletes in similar sports train. It's like the concept of the perfect answer to "what works for you?" is an unattainable asymptote, and I'm trying to get as close to it as I can by taking new approaches, learning new ideas, and cautiously testing them.
Finding what works for navigating the Nordic-to-track skis-to-spikes transition at St. Olaf in 2015.
As a second-year post-collegiate athlete, I've made plenty of training mistakes, many of which have made appearances on this blog and many of which I'm sure I haven't even realized I'm making yet! The cool part about making these mistakes in training is that it adds experience to my decision-making arsenal. The next time I'm asked "what works best for you?" I have a lot more things that I know don't work well for me, and that brings me closer to personalizing my training in a way that I know does work well for me.
In my last blog post I described how I underperformed in the August Jericho rollerski trials. I was upset and needed a chance to rest, reset, and then put in some serious, dedicated work. I needed to find something that wasn't working, and change it. And that is just what I did.
From August trials to October trials, I stayed in Lake Placid and trained. Week one began with a canoe trip in Lake Placid's backyard to recover, then week two was a medium-volume week which served as an opportunity to ease back into the training; weeks three, four, and five were titled "Lowell C. Bailey Training Camp," in honor of Lowell remaining in Lake Placid (as did Clare) while the rest of the A-team went to Germany for a Europe-based training camp (Lowell did the same in 2016 as his daughter Ophelia was just two months old at the time; he later pointed to those three weeks as some of the most key to his success last winter and so decided to once again skip the Europe camp this year). The Lowell C. Bailey Training Camp included two of what I think is the toughest workout we do on rollerskis (bounding workouts are in a league of their own): two 10km biathlon sprint time trials with ten minutes of rest between. The second time we did this workout we drove to Jericho for it, and I was able to generate my highest recorded lactate to date- a sign that I was able to push my body harder than I could this summer.
Week six was a recovery week, and I did my best to take the first part of the week to fully recover, and then I alternated a few biathlon intensity workouts of moderate difficulty with more adventurous distance workouts, including a canoe-run/hike-canoe adventure in the St. Regis Canoe Area Wilderness. Saturday of week six was the US Biathlon board meeting, and all the athletes were invited to the accompanying dinner, which was likely the only time I will wear a (non-lycra) suit this year! The dinner was actually really neat; we got to hear from many of the leaders of US Biathlon including CEO and President Max Cobb, Chief of Sport Bernd Eisenbichler, and board chair Bill Burke. The highlight, for me, was meeting and hearing from Curt Schreiner, a four-time Olympian and US Military veteran in the Iraq war. Curt was inducted into the USBA Hall of Fame.
Week six turned into a hard week seven early on Sunday morning with the legendary Climb to the Castle event in Wilmington (14 miles from Lake Placid), put on by the local ski club NYSEF (New York Ski Education Foundation). Climb to the Castle is an event I've long wanted to participate in- for many years "C2C" had attracted pretty impressive competition as the US Ski Team and US Biathlon Team would contest the event at the end of their September Lake Placid training camps. Unfortunately for me, none of the A-team biathlon members were up for racing this year, and the US Ski Team no longer holds their Lake Placid camp. I skied away from the field and painfully soloed up the mountain to win the men's field; I almost caught Jenny Bender at the line (the women started before the men) but she held me off to be the first to the line as we were struggling in a sea of lactate.
Climb to the Castle on a rare blue sky seventy-five degree morning.
Photo by Liam John.
Weeks seven and eight saw a large contingent come to Lake Placid for training. The A-team was back in town and was joined by the National Development Group athletes. As Lowell was gone for the first few days of this camp and had been the namesake of our last camp, I titled weeks seven and eight in my training log as "Tim Camp" in reference to Lowell's counterpart Tim Burke. I felt that I had made a lot of progress in my fitness while the other athletes had been away, and I was excited to have them back to train alongside them to both test my improvements and identify new weaknesses. The biggest training benefits I receive from training with these guys are learning from these guys' technique and trying to keep up with them on the shooting range and while rollerskiing transitional sections (transitions are currently a weakness of mine). Plus, having a big crew of biathletes staying at the Training Center is always a lot more fun.
Following Russell and Tim during intervals up Schaffer Road out of the Keene Valley (with van ride down between intervals) with a big training group during Tim Camp.
Midway through week eight my friend and roommate Paul Schommer returned to Lake Placid. It was the first time I'd seen Paul since August trials- we jumped into living and training just as if he'd never left. Of course, we talked a lot about the previous eight weeks - Paul had been to six countries across central Europe, Scandinavia, and Birkieland in the Midwest US; I had only ventured past nearby Keene, NY on two bike rides plus the one time we did our 2 x time trial workout in Jericho.
And this is what brings me back to learning "what works for you." Paul expressed how much the Europe trip did for his training and racing - he had the opportunity to ski on snow, race with the best athletes in Germany on rollerskis, interact with the Europe-based USBA coaching and wax staff, and, perhaps the best of all, race the Birkie trail on foot in Cable, WI. Paul handled the travel with ease. In fact, the travel invigorated him. I, on the other hand, felt that training in one place for that entirety was just what I had needed. While Paul fed off the travel, putting in work and capitalizing on the unique aspects of different venues, I fed off the grind of being in one place and putting in the work. Being in one place allowed me to invest more in the local community and avoid unnecessary travel. For me, travel is not invigorating. Racing fast is invigorating, and I want to do everything I can to race fast. Sometimes that means traveling to optimize your training. Sometimes that means traveling to get to a race in a faraway land. But for me these past two months, it meant staying put and avoiding travel altogether.
My staying-put paid off in my fitness. Week nine concluded with another round of rollerski trials races in Jericho. My ski times at the October trials improved by over two minutes from August nine weeks prior, and I went from skiing over 1:40 back of the fastest time to skiing under 40 seconds back of the fastest time (Sean Doherty, who skied the fastest time in all three 10km sprints at the trials, also sped up from August to October - as did most athletes). My shooting was another story, and will be the focus of my next push before December trials in Mt. Itasca, MN (I missed six shots in both races).
Pushing the envelope on the final loop at Jericho October trials.
Photo by my talented mother Karen Brown.
With my parents after Sunday's race. Thanks Mom and Dad for coming out to cheer.
Photo by Paul Schommer
Ironically, I traveled home to Minnesota right after October trials to help coach a training camp with the Loppet Nordic Racing (LNR) junior team in Cable, WI. Then it was right back to Lake Placid, where I'll train for a month before we begin traveling for the racing season. Hopefully I can master the art of staying healthy and recovering while traveling so that it works for me come winter!
I'll always be traveling; it's a necessary part of competing as a biathlete. However, this fall I got a bit closer to that unattainable asymptote, the answer to "what works for you?" in regard to balancing travel during the training season. Training in one town, dedicating myself to the grind, and avoiding unnecessary travel - that works for me.
Learning what works for you in your training, in your profession, and in your lifestyle is a process. In regard to training, learning your individualized needs is part of the athlete journey. It's never too early to be a scientist and analyze aspects of your training. Take note of patterns in your training, rest, sleep, nutrition, and lifestyle that seem to optimize your alertness, fitness, and performance on race day. Try replicating them, and see if you can find a consistent formula that "works for you." I've been blessed with some amazing coaches throughout my years as an athlete- from Piotr Bednarski at (then) Go! Training and (now) LNR to Christian Zimmerman and Anne Rykken at Minnehaha; Steve Dolan at Princeton; Tom Jorgenson, Phil Lundin, and Dave Griffiths at St. Olaf; Sten Fjeldheim and Shane McDowell at NMU; and the current USBA staff. Each one has encouraged their athletes to discover their own individualized needs, and each one has fostered a successful athletic program, whether that success is a state, national, or world championship. I don't think that it's a coincidence.
