Kris Freeman

Kris started the 5th training period of the year on Tuesday, and has come up to speed quickly. His Sunapee test this month will be on Saturday - the 18th, and there is no overload stimulus scheduled prior to the test. But that still left room for a five hour run with Justin yesterday.

The run was the latest in a series of positive indicators. Kris never felt like he reached depletion, and they ran a fast pace on tough terrain. Justin started complaining during the last hour (he hasn’t built the OD capacity that Kris has, so this long stuff is much, much harder on him), so Kris kicked the pace up to about a seven minute pace just to shut him up. Justin responded by coming by at a six minute pace. Kris figured that he might have 90 seconds of that in him, so he just tucked in and figured he’d wait him out. It didn’t take long - Justin looked back and saw that Kris was there and said “uncle”.

This is good for Kris - it’s important that he take his digs on Justin where he can get them right now. He hasn’t beaten Justin in a competition since before July 4th, and Kris is anticipating a tough go of it against him on Saturday at Sunapee. Justin is in undeniably great running shape - he ran a 14:55 5K a couple of weeks ago which is (I think) the fastest he’s gone since he was running really fast in college. Saturday will be interesting. Superior footspeed versus superior aerobic capacity. What was the big race a few years ago - Michael Johnson VS Donovan Bailey over 150 meters? Kind of like that. Let’s hope nobody pulls up with a hamstring injury.

With back to back ODs scheduled after the Sunapee test, this first week of the block is shaping up to be considerably large - about 31.5 hours. Today Kris said that he was feeling like a bit of a slacker - not training enough. A five hour day followed by two four hour days as he “rests up” for Sunapee just doesn’t seem like enough. Well, that’s a good place for him to be heading into this block. If that load feels small I think it suggests that the recovery week was successful and that he’s coming back up to speed quickly.

Pete Vordenberg and I have been in touch quite a lot recently regarding the lead-up to the competition season. As the season gets closer we need to pay more and more attention to the progress that Kris is making. And because the last Sunapee benchmark test was not good, we’re all looking forward to Saturday’s effort with a great deal of anticipation. I feel that it’s important to identify performance expectations for test like this in advance. Very little purpose is served by manufacturing a list of reasons for a poor test once it’s done. We got caught in a little bit of that trap last time around. Our expectation for this test is something in the range of 20:50. Anything under 20:35 or so would make us a bit nervous, and cause us to consider backing off the intensity build-up in the next month. Anything slower than 21:10 has to be considered unsatisfactory, seeing as he ran 21:07 in June. That’s a tough scenario to decipher, but given the training load that Kris has been carrying, we’ve acknowledged that such a performance would be met with the removal of some of the overload stimulus that Kris has been carrying. If he’s in the range of 22:00 then things have gone badly wrong and we’ve got to hit the reset button right away. Of course, we’ve got to weigh factors like weather, but that’s it in a nutshell. We’re all looking forward to Saturday.

Finally, Kris managed to hit the deck while rollerskiing today (I think it was today). It was toward the end of the session, his glasses were sweaty so he couldn’t see terribly well, and his ski came to a rapid halt in a crack in the road. Kris has proposed that a leading criteria for manliness is road abrasion on your heart rate monitor strap. If that’s the case, then Kris can expect company in the pantheon of “men” from Brayton who has accrued double points in the past couple of days.