Welcome to period twelve of training for cross-country skiing, – the month of March.
We now have our target competition behind us, but we should not hit the couch and put up our feet for the rest of the year. This is an excellent opportunity to use the training you did throughout the last year with a spring race or two. Feel free to shift weeks around to accomplish this.
While we have snow, we should take advantage of it and have fun training with less focus on being ready for the big day. If your fitness was good for the big day, keep riding that wave. Is there another ski marathon or a multi-sport event like a sea to ski that might be an exciting adventure? If your preparation was off on the big day, it might be time to start training for next year.
March is also a great time to go out for some enjoyable spring skis, either hitting up morning crust for a cruise or going for fun in the sun with pleasurable afternoon slush ski using some skins. Have fun enjoying winter’s last gasps. Whatever you are up to, keep training for another 4-6 weeks before taking some downtime to recover from the year of training.
ENJOY THE LIVE RECORDING OF THE 2023 SLUMBERLAND AMERICAN BIRKEBEINER
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Each period, we will end with this advice since it is so important:
As you plan your weeks and evaluate your training, give some thought to how you use the training plan. It is written to be a blueprint and a guide for your training and is not written knowing in advance what conflicts you may have with training in any given week. Many weeks can be done as scheduled. However, if you have to swap days or weeks out on account of your non-training life, with good planning, it can be done with great success, provided you are giving thought to the swapping.
When it comes time to plan your training week, sometimes it’s helpful to know which workouts take precedence over others. This is particularly useful if a skier has other obligations outside of skiing (work, personal life, etc.) that may interfere with the amount of training one can devote during the week. Thus, adjustments must be made.
For example, let’s say you have a week at work where you are going to have heavy time demands and stress, and the schedule says it is the third week of the period, which is our big week. It may be best to hold off on the third week and swap it with Week 4 – our easy week to recover, and then maybe make a slight adjustment in Week 1 of the following period.
You can also swap out days on account of life outside of your training plan. Just remember, as you do that, it is ideal to follow a pattern of hard followed by easy for the pattern of days.
To make adjustments to the plan that won’t dilute the integrity of the training program, we have a few pointers for planning a training week.
Read the advisory on scheduling workouts: http://bit.ly/workout-substitution
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