Kris Freeman

Travelling is scary. We generally try to make a lot of room in Kris’s training program for travel days. There’s no better way to get sick than to climb into a sealed aluminum tube with a couple hundred strangers from all over the place all breathing the same recycled air. And if you don’t get sick, you can at least be pretty well guaranteed not to get any meaningful recovery. Travel is just plain stressful and uncomfortable. We always tend to treat it as a hard day - that’s why Kris didn’t do his final OD in Bend the day before flying back home.

As it turned out, the travel agent managed to get Kris first class seats all the way back. What a difference! A day expected to be stressful and uncomfortable turned into basically a day of rest. I talked to him this afternoon, after his two hour run with 45 minutes of sustained threshold intensity, and the word is that he felt much better than expected. He feels (and sounds) more chipper now than he did Sunday afternoon.

This probably sounds like a small thing - Kris had an unexpectedly easy day and now he feels pretty fresh - big deal! But it’s a very encouraging sign from my point of view. The bend camp was hard - ten days on snow, forty hours of training, including three five hour ODs. These OD sessions were the longest non-biking sessions he’s had so far this training season, and the overall load was high. Also, the training was almost all at moderate altitude. Also, it was three time-zones away from home, and Kris was living in an unfamiliar environment. Toward the end of the camp he was getting pretty tired. Pete noticed that he was dragging a bit after his second 5 hour OD session of the camp on Thursday. As Kris says - what do you expect from a five hour training session? His final OD went well, but conditions were deteriorating and it turned into quite a slush-fest for the last couple of hours. Sunday, his final day before travel, Kris did a 3.5 hour classic ski and it was the most difficult session of the camp. So, Kris was tired - as expected after such a hard training camp. In general I don’t expect guys training at this level to bounce back very strongly after just one day of rest, and especially not if the day of rest is also a day of travel (first class status notwithstanding). So, for Kris to feel “surprisingly” good today is very reassuring. And a bit surprising.

If you’ve read much of this log since we started up last September you’ll know that we’re often surprised and nervous about the kind of volume that Kris ends up training. He’s pushing things - trying to claim all available fitness gains - and it puts him into some strenuous loads. Often we’ve got to consider whether it’s getting to be too much. Most recently, Pete and I talked this past Friday about the wisdom of another five hour session on Saturday, only two days after the previous one. The one factor that keeps coming up is that Kris has never put himself into a hole with high volume training. He never once got sick, or showed signs of chronic overtraining during last year’s impressive build-up. And as Kris himself reminded me on Friday, that streak goes back much longer than just last year. He’s never, in his entire training history, gone over the edge on a volume load. He’s done it with intensity, but never with volume. So he’s earned a little latitude.

Speaking of which… After a three hour double-pole tomorrow, Kris will do his first experiment of the season with back-to-back ODs. Thursday and Friday will be back to back bike ODs - five hours on Thursday, and the possibility of six on Friday. He first tried back-to-back ODs last December and it seemed fine, although it was definitely a big increase in the load over what you’d expect from any single OD session. Given that he reached the point where he had to go six hours to maintain a training stimulus last year, we’ve got to come up with a plan to accomodate continued gains until we see evidence that the available benefits have been tapped-out. We all agree that it would be possible to go more than six hours, and that’ll certainly happen this year. But we think the back-to-back format might offer a better solution and less chance of overuse injury.