Greetings! It’s been a long time since my last post, back when we were busy getting readjusted to skiing onsnow. Now it’s April, and we wrapped up the season last weekend in Sun Valley! From this vantage point, I can think back to across the whole racing season and beyond and reflect on some things I didn’t even know were happening at the time of my last post.
To be forthright, this season hasn’t been what I dreamed it would be. If you’ve been following our team’s results closely, you may have noticed my name slightly far back on some days and seriously behind on others. The good feelings I had all summer and fall gave way to fatigue in late November and December, and by the time we were racing Super Tours I was overtrained and struggling to recover from even easy workouts. December and January saw me string together some of the harder races of my career, and I spent the rest of the winter trying to dig myself out of that hole.
As challenging as the season’s been, I don’t want this to be a What Went Wrong post. Instead I want to use this platform to set a few good reminders for myself for the upcoming training year.
Take some real recovery in April
Last spring, following the end of the collegiate season, I took the last two weeks of March relatively easy (with a few 5 hour exceptions). April was spent simultaneously pondering the idea of Pro Skiing and biking, ski touring, and running my way around the mountain west. It was one of the most fun and gratifying months of the last few years, but I also ended up accumulating a large training load– close to 80 hours, or what you’d expect for mid-summer volume. When the beginning of the training year began in May I hit the ground running, never giving myself much of a chance to absorb the load of the race season and my April adventures. This year, I plan to take April much easier. My body needs a reset, a chance to fully recover and rebound from the few years of effort. I won’t be saying no to every afternoon skin or oceanside jog, but the places I plan to be won’t tempt me into a perhaps suboptimal training pattern. I’ll leave the running shoes in the closet for a little while longer.
Pay attention to my physiological markers
This is something I’m pretty excited about right now. In march I won a copy of Training for the Uphill Athlete in a treadmill race hosted by The Mountain Project, our local gym. The book goes in depth on training physiology and the methods used to first optimize the aerobic capacity, then the anaerobic, speed, and strength components needed for endurance performance. With a better understanding of how the body metabolizes fuel and recruits oxygen for endurance, I want to keep tabs on my progress throughout the summer using lab testing at MSU. This way I can steer my training in the right direction while also keeping tabs on energy levels.
Plan to supplement my mental health
I told myself when I committed to professional skiing that I wanted to have enough stimulus in my life outside of training and racing that when things weren’t going perfectly, I’d have something else to fall back on. For the last four years that something was my academics at Middlebury. Diving into full time ski racing was exciting, but also posed the potential for some serious performance dependent highs and lows. I figured that working towards a goal outside of skiing would help me maintain balance, keep up with my non-athletic skill set, and serve as a sort of escape from skiing where I could put my energy if things got rocky.
Long story short, I put a big effort into getting a research job early in the summer, but it ultimately fell through after a drawn out back-and-forth. I worked a couple of part time side gigs through the fall and winter, but nothing that kept me intellectually engaged and stimulated enough to keep the scales balanced when the skiing wasn’t going well.
Ultimately I had some pretty low times this winter where I was feeling down about my skiing, and all I could do to actually help myself was rest at home. Not being able to be outside training was the hardest of all, because that’s where I get a lot of my joy and motivation. I got through it thanks to the many close friends and teammates who have my back. But there were many hours that could’ve been much more enjoyable if they’d been spent focused on something entirely other than skiing. So I’m recommitting to creating that safety net for myself again.
Every day I get to say skiing is my job is a lucky day
It’s cliché and an amazing reminder to myself. Every time I wake up and get to go ski or run or race it’s a privilege. My ski racing career has taken me to the coolest places with many of my very best friends. Obviously it’s rewarding when the work and sacrifices pay off with good racing, but the process itself is pretty damn enjoyable.
Thx for tuning in. I’m very excited to take it easy for a while and then get back to training smart in a month or so! Until next time,
Willson
PS Enjoy a couple pics from the last two weeks
