Training High in Park City
With fall starting and the season just around the corner the Nordiq gold and silver team headed down to Park City for volume training. Park City has the appeal of great roller skiing and some serious elevation. This allows me to get some additional benefits to my training efforts from the lower amount of oxygen in the air. This was my first time training at elevation in a while after my injury. Getting to be in Utah was my first time getting to ski in the US! (At the last camp I was sick and missed out when the team last went down to the lower 48.) I was fired up to get to train in a new place as always and my personal focus was to get volume in before I returned to Canada and got on snow.
Getting a chance to be in Park City as a big team was super fun. I was a week late to the party due to still recovering from lingering sickness but it was important to ensure I was healthy before going up high. Due to my late arrival when I got to the accommodation, the boys escorted me to a tiny closet with a single bed. The mattress touched each wall and thought this was where I would be staying for the eternity of the 2 weeks. I caught Graham Ritchie holding back a chuckle as he left the room. But as the joke went on and it got later in the day I began to think it was not a joke. Which I was fine with. The bed was cozy and I had no issues with it other than the fact that the pillow was the size of a washcloth and I had nowhere to put my bags because Tony’s stuff was spread all over the floor. After having a talk with Graham he said that he HATES it when people touch his stuff. So I just had to pile up my bags in the corner of the room making sure my bags don't touch his bed as Graham specified. But this just made me think it was even more of a joke. At dinner, they confessed that it was not my room and I had a proper bed with Sasha Masson and Oliver Leveille. They really added the final touch by saying my stuff couldn't touch Tony’s stuff. Very gullible of me but I will try and be more prepared next time.
Here is the inevitable sickness update from this camp: Just as the camp started some sickness started circulating around the girls half of the team. Immediately as the colds were showing up over the team I was scared that I would come down with something else again. As my coach Tormod famously said to me before the camp:
“It is with sickness like injuries - the best sickness you can have is the one you never get”
Luckily only one person from the guy's team came down with the sickness (Graham) and was quickly isolated so no one else from the guy's team got it.
Overall I really enjoyed the training in Park City. Every day we skied in new areas and there were so many roads with unforgiving climbs. My favorite ski was called Cottonwood / Guardsmen I believe and we started close to the SOHO Nordic center and climbed up Cascade for a bit as a warmup then continued up this steep long climb. No joke, it was definitely the longest and steepest climb I have done on skis, at the end of the workout which for me was 3h. I had climbed 1500m. On other days we did similar climbs but none as steep as that one. We did intensities in Soldier Hollow, another best day! I really enjoyed the sweet track and the intervals that day felt like I was finally starting to acclimatize to the altitude. Following SOHO we did intensities in a neighborhood in Salt Lake City where there was yet another huge climb so we had to stick to striding the entire time. It went super well for me personally and was a great way to end my camp.
To wrap up the camp we played a beach volleyball game against the biathlon team who also happened to have a training camp at the same time in Park City. We had courts across the street from where we were staying so it was the perfect rest day activity for us! We got all our practice time throughout our camp for our face-off on the last day when we played the biathlon national team.
Thanks again for reading. Chat soon!
Tom
