Kris Freeman

Kris went after the second week of the training year with a vengeance. Monday was pretty easy - a three hour skate on roller skis. Tuesday was a 2.75 hour run with 45 minutes of sustained threshold (his first threshold session last year came on June 6th). And on Wednesday, acting in direct disobedience to my suggestion, he did the 100 mile bike loop that he wasn’t able to finish the week before. No problem.

That’s where the vengeance part comes in. Kris doesn’t like being beaten, and it makes him especially angry when he gets beaten because of a stupid error. In this case it probably didn’t help that I told the world that his mom came to pick him up. Heck, most of us haven’t had to call our moms to pick us up in a long, long time. Is it obvious that I’m rubbing this in? Anyway, Kris had to put that episode to rest, and he did it the only way he knows how - by going out and setting the record straight. He rode his 100 mile loop, averaging 19.0 miles per hour, and it felt fine. He didn’t have to call his mom, and that’s the last you’ll hear about that on this site.

Last year Kris and I were both constantly impressed with his rate of improvement. He made big gains throughout the training season, and the capacity gains that he saw in training were confirmed in benchmark tests. Last week, as he started the training year for real, Kris was a little surprised that he had to start out at a lower level than he expected. But the change from week one to week two has been huge. He did the same 2.75 hour double-pole session Saturday that he did the previous Saturday, but went four miles further. He trained 25 hours, including a threshold session, without difficulty. This year we’re going to work on being a little less impressed with the training load. Afterall, as good as the results last winter were, they weren’t what we hoped for. This year we expect to see more.

As a coach, the thing that makes me most nervous is that we haven’t really touched the ceiling. At no point last year did Kris reach a training load that he had difficulty recovering from. He’s got to do more and harder training this year, but we don’t really know where the limits are. So we’ll continue to look for benchmark improvements, and we’ll continue to incrementally inrease the load. By the end of May Kris will be at least a month, maybe two, ahead of his fitness from last year. It’s reasonable to expect that sometime during September or October there is a decent chance of a setback. We’ll have to be vigilant.

On May 16th he’ll do his first benchmark hillclimb up Mt Sunapee. Last year on the same date he went up in 22:16. His best time, in early November, was 20:49. On the 17th he heads out to Bend for an on-snow camp with the USST.