Kris Freeman

Last year Kris started the World Cup season with expectations of being in the top thirty. In his first start he was 18th, and we were all satisfied. This year we’re looking for more. Kris doesn’t want to go over to Europe looking for top 30s - he’s going over looking for top tens. As Pete put it recently, we’re not sending anybody over to train through the first period World Cups. If he goes, he’s going ready to race.

Kris has just shown that he’s got the fitness right now that he had when he went to Europe last November. Actually, he might be just a bit behind that mark, as his November test last year was most likely slowed a bit by snow on the course at Sunapee. But he’s not far off. There are about eleven weeks to go before it’s time to hit the race season. Kris needs a three percent capacity gain to match the winning time in the World Cup opener from last season. We need a plan.

Actually, we’ve got a plan, and if you’ve read Justin’s post from earlier today you might guess at what it involves. Last year the explicit goal in Kris’s preparation was to reclaim a high level of aerobic base fitness, and to build stability into the fitness profile. Kris trained right up to the start of race season with almost all of his training stimulus focused on aerobic fitness development, and specifically on building oxidative fiber mass by training the oxidative capacity of FOG fibers. So far this season his focus has been the same. He’s made similar gains but started from a higher level and has reached a very high level of fitness earlier than last year.

Justin has mentioned how clear it is that Kris can get faster on Mt Sunapee “once he starts training the ability to produce, clear and tolerate race-like lactate levels.” The best phrase I’ve heard to describe that suite of capacities is “lactate mobilization”. It comes from a German document that Dick Taylor sent me (in translation) last year. Incidentally, this is also the document that describes training volumes on the order of 1200-1600 hours which may have been the source of reference for another Caldwell in a recent Fasterskier.com article.

Lactate is curious stuff. We generally associate it with pain and limitation because of the muscle acidosis that is associated with high lactic acid concentrations. But lactate is also fuel - partially metabolized glucose, the by-product of anaerobic glycolysis, and a useful substrate in its own right. There is ample evidence that skeletal muscle can metabolize lactate, but it’s reasonable to expect that such a capacity needs to be trained. And in the end, high levels of acidosis ARE a limitation. I like the term “lactate mobilization” because it implies that lactate is something that we might want to mobilize, both into and out of active muscle fiber.

One way that lactate mobilization might be useful is in making more muscle glycogen available during a given effort by opening up stores in muscle fibers that might not be capable of full aerobic metabolism of the fuel. If, in a particularly hard effort, fast-twitch fibers are recruited and burn muscle glycogen resulting in the production of lactate, then the vast majority of the energy stored in that glycogen is subsequently mobilized as lactate. Lactate is how the body moves fuel.

The plan, then, is to concentrate on Kris’s ability to utilize this fuel, and to utilize it at increasing levels of concentration. In fact, this has been built into the training plan all along. In order to build the capacity to utilize lactate as fuel we assume that the muscle cells must be exposed to a certain level of acidosis for a certain period of time. This is why the only intensity efforts that Kris has scheduled have been sustained in nature - 45-55 minutes long. These sessions occur once a week during most of Kris’s training blocks (not during recovery weeks). They have, through this point, been “threshold” sessions, targeting lactate concentrations near 4mMol/l - certainly not close to race levels. They’ve been basically maintenance sessions with some neurological patterning goals built in. They haven’t been targeting capacity gains (generally you need more frequent stimulus to make big gains).

At this point in the season the sustained lactate concentrations start to get higher. As the Fall progresses they will turn into full-blown race practice sessions. These are quite effective at addressing the ability to produce and clear (mobilize) lactate that Justin mentioned. But we’re also looking for some tolerance - the ability to continue operating at high levels of acidosis which begin to disrupt the various complex chemical processes that comprise aerobic metabolism, and which also start to trigger various neurological shut-down mechanisms. In order to target tolerance we’ll have to turn to interval training which allows an athlete to train unsustainable metabolic loads and push the boundaries of their top-end fitness. Tolerance intervals are powerful things.

There is a line someplace between capacity and tolerance where, instead of building additional fitness your training starts to whittle away at reserves in the process of refining the whole package. Tolerance is a powerful tool, in that it open up access to peak output levels that were previously inaccessible. But the height of that peak is determined by the capacity work that built it. The act of claiming great race fitness is an act of undermining base fitness. The fitness profile gets increasingly unstable, it’s harder to stay healthy, and harder to predict when it’ll all come together for a good effort - although the good efforts can be great. So - we’re not looking to walk too close to that line for the very start of the race season. The guys who surprise you in the World Cup opener (or West Yellowstone) and then disappear by the beginning of January have probably been flirting with that line. But we’re definitely looking for some lactate mobilization, and enough tolerance to ski the last five K of a fifteen about forty seconds faster than last year.

Kris is just about to complete week one of his current three week block. This is another big one at 90+ hours in three weeks, like the previous two. The training is more specific, and the sustained intensity sessions are harder. Once this block is over there will be a somewhat awkward four week gap until the October 1 start to the USST Lake Placid camp. Kris can’t train a 90 hour three week block without a recovery week afterwards, and he can’t start the Lake Placid camp right on the heels of another three week block. So the next block will be a little different. After about a five-day rest period at the conclusion of the current block, Kris will start a 16-day training block with less of a volume focus and more of an intensity focus. During that period he’ll have seven intensity sessions and two ODs. At least one of the intensity sessions will be a benchmark test (perhaps a run up Mt Lafayette which he’s done before), and two are likely to be sustained bounding intervals. The others will be structured sustained rollerski intensity sessions. Volume during this block will be about 24 hours per week, down considerably from the 30+ that he’s been sustaining for the last three blocks. It’s generally necessary to reduce volume to accommodate additional intensity.

At the conclusion of the 16-day “intensity block” Kris will have another short recovery period, and then he’ll join his team-mates at the OTC in Lake Placid. That’ll be a good opportunity for Pete and the other coaches to assess Kris’s fitness, and fine-tune the load for the final three-week block which will start with the start of the camp. Kris will have the opportunity to train some sessions with the sprinters, which is a great way for him to stretch himself in the department of speed development. And he’ll have an opportunity to train some more high volume. That final block will be a step-up in volume from the short intensity block that comes before, and the combined volume/intensity load will be the highest of the year. Then he’ll have a couple of weeks of lower volume training to sharpen and prepare for travel and racing.

Well, that’s the plan, anyway. Subject to revision as circumstances dictate.