Kris Freeman

I went mountain biking with Kris this afternoon, and really kicked his butt. Well, it wasn’t soooo much of a butt kicking, but he did have to get off the bike a couple of times where I was able to ride technical sections - the most technical trails that I’m capable of riding, and have ridden countless times. I played the home course advantage in order to not get destroyed during Kris’s second session of the day. Part of the strategy was to give him a very short break after his first session of the day - a skate roller ski intensity workout. That - the first session - is where the beating occured.

There are some pretty decent roller skiing roads near my house. The route Kris used today is about 20K with some significant climbing. It starts at about 1200 feet elevation, and rolls up to about 2000 feet over the first 10K. Then it drops back down to 1400 feet and climbs back up to 2000 feet in the last 3.5K. Kris did this route as a sustained skate intensity last summer in a little over 57 minutes. Today he was a little over 54 minutes. That’s a beating.

To be fair, neither of these sessions were flat-out pace efforts. Last year the instructions were to build quickly to a sustained 5-7mMol/L pace and hold it. Today the instructions were to sustain a 4-6mMol/L pace, and to throw in random accelerations or gear changes. Actually, they weren’t totally random - I followed him in the truck and honked when I wanted him to “shift up” and then honked again when I wanted him to “shift down”. The idea is respond to an external stimulus by accelerating from a sustained high pace, and then recover at pace rather than slowing down.

So the sessions weren’t quite the same, but the juxtaposition was encouraging. On the same road, making a similar effort, he went a lot faster. And more importantly, he looked a lot faster. Kris can haul ass in those mid-lactate levels. At times the accelerations weren’t totally apparent because I threw him some pick-ups at high speed (on flats and slight downs). While the tempo didn’t pick-up in these cases, the speed did increase.

Today was the 11th day of the current training block, and at the conclusion of the day Kris had trained 48.5 hours in those 11 days. That’s a little better than 4.4 hours per day on average - a bit more than he’s sustained in the last two blocks. As we discussed training it became apparent that it wouldn’t take much to put the training volume for this block at something in the 96-98 hour range. Just run two more back to back OD sessions in the next ten days, and then train four hours a day for the remaining six days. We decided to play it a little more cautiously than that. Kris has already surpassed his aerobic gains from last year, and he’s got very little to prove on that score. We’ve got doubts about the gains available from a further increase in the volume load right now, and my cautious nature makes me wary of the possibility of overdoing the load. Kris already dodged a bullet in that regard. There is little question that Kris could put in a 98 hour three-week block - or even a 100 hour block. But that’s not on the agenda for this season. It’s time to turn the focus to making capacity gains further up the lactate scale. Kris only has one more sustained intensity session this period, and we’re not willing to risk compromising the quality of that effort for an extra few hours.