Kris Freeman

Kris travelled out to Bend for a USST on-snow camp on Thursday the 17th. Things have been going well out there. The goal was to go out and put in a lot of time on snow. There are no intensity goals - only volume goals for this camp. The week since he has arrived looks like this:

• 18^th 3.5 skate, 1.25 Kayak in PM
• 19^th 3 skate, 15 minute race paddle (PPP)
• 20^th 3.5 Classic
• 21^st 5 hour skate
• 22^nd 3.5 Classic
• 23^rd 3 classic / 1 hour run
• 24^th 5 classic

That’s 29 hours. Tomorrow he’ll take a very easy day - only two hours of skiing. Saturday will be another five hour OD, provided recovery from today’s session is sufficient. And Sunday will be a three or three and half hour ski, and a short run in the afternoon. That’s about eleven more hours, for a total of 40 hours in 10 days of training. That’s not quite like the 90 hours in 20 days that he had last September, but it’s a lot of training for May.

Anybody would be justified in wondering why Kris should be training so much now. It’s only May, afterall. The answer is pretty simple. Last season Kris realized capacity gains for five straight months with an emphasis on volume. The gains don’t come from punching the clock - they come from specific sessions. Those five hour ski sessions are there for a reason, and the reason is that the capacity gains in OD sessions come from time spent after depletion. The real workout is almost always under an hour - but it takes four hours of skiing (at this point) to start the session!

As we expected, Kris’s time to depletion and his workloads have come up very quickly this training season. Every marker, including his Sunapee benchmark test, indicates that he is at least one month ahead of last year’s schedule, and probably a little more. This is a good thing - the training season is short and we already know that Kris is capable of making volume-based gains for the next three months, at a minimum. It wouldn’t bother us a bit to see the capacity gains in response to increased volume taper off sometime later this training season. That never happened last year. There is plenty of high-end intensity stimulus that we can throw at Kris to take up the slack. But one thing is clear - we’re looking for gains in every training period. Kris is doing forty hours in ten days in Bend because that’s what it takes right now to stimulate a positive response.