For cross-country skiers, the year essentially can be split into three seasons. Clearly, the competition season during the winter is what many refer to as our “season”. Equally important, however, are the offseason in April and the training season from May to November. The beginning of the training season, as many of you know, can involve two challenges:

Beautiful training for both on-snow and dryland. Yes, for some reason our coach had us do a bounding workout.

1. The first challenge is to get the body in training shape. After a winter with very little distance training or strength, followed by an April of rest, base training starts to feel pretty darn foreign. Each workout “first”, i.e. first strength session, first rollerski, or first running interval set, brings its own rude awakening: deep soreness, torn skin and blisters, or lit up calves. And after a week or two I’m always reminded of the first feelings of long-term training fatigue: that blah feeling that rarely dissipates from June through August (until the heat lifts and the training volume decreases).

2. The second challenge is gathering enough motivation to accept that I’m going to do it all again. That is, accepting that I’m really going to do another year full of painful workouts, another year with month-long stretches of feeling beat down and tired, and another year of accepting the uncertainty of what’s to come in regard to results or life beyond biathlon. It’s an honor to be an athlete, no doubt, but the honor comes with it’s own set of challenges, and I always find I’m wrestling with these two at the beginning of the training year.

Things getting weird at the end of the training camp

Starting the 2021 training year in Bend, OR softened the difficulty of these challenges for me. I joined the US Biathlon Team for a training camp from May 10 – May 28 in Bend with the purpose of starting the training year by skiing on-snow. My specific goal was to reinforce good technical habits so that I can do a better job of bringing those habits from my on-snow skiing to the rollerskis. Bend, a city of 93k outdoor enthusiasts, lies at an altitude of 3600’ and receives an average annual snowfall of just 34 inches. Yet nearby Mt. Bachelor sits 30 minutes away at a base elevation of 5700’ and boasts an average snowfall of 462”. They get so much snow that the Nordic center doesn’t need to manicure the trail base during the offseason (or so I’ve heard anyway)- roots and volcanic rock are easily covered by swaths of snow by winter. And with most of their snow typically coming late-season, Mt. Bachelor is a popular, and considerably reliable, destination for cross-country skiing in May.

From the first day of camp, however, I realized that there was a side-benefit to training in Bend that perhaps outweighed even my original purpose for being there. The place is an endurance athlete’s paradise in the month of May. Yes, the east is awesome, but can I interest you in on-snow skiing in the morning followed by 70-degree mountain biking in the evening and no black flies? Did I mention no black flies? OK, I’ll stop rubbing it in! I’ll admit, my favorite month in Craftsbury is September (read: black fly AND deer fly-free), and I much prefer the sea-level training that the east has to offer. But the experience of kicking off the year in Bend really did lower the barrier of challenges 1 and 2 above. I was back to enjoying the training routine rather quickly.

Then again, maybe there is something toward taking the hard road. I find myself wondering if being in Bend made me “soft” in any way. I love to hit the training grind and I think in many respects that the mental fortitude developed from, say, suffering through rainy May sessions can be channeled into a beneficial attribute for an XC ski racer. My experience with injury two years ago no doubt strengthened my drive and my tenacity, for example. And so I look forward to returning east and getting back to it. Who knows though, maybe I’ll have saved up some tolerance for dealing with annoying weather when it inevitably arrives in November. Oh, November…

Until then, I hope to see you out on the roller loop this summer!

Jake Brown

GRP Biathlon

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