Rob Bradlee wrote:

Very interesting news! Thanks for pointing it out, Jay.

I talked with a woman who was a gold medalist (without drugs) for East
Germany in biathlon. She told me that they did almost exclusively high
intensity workouts with careful monitoring to make sure they were
working hard enough and then that they rested to recover. She thought
the idea of lot of long easy distance was ridiculous. She said the
American men (a decade ago) were training "like 12 year old girls".
Clearly there is more than one way to achieve excellence. I have a
huge personal bias towards LSD training because it's what I'm good at
and I'm bad at intervals. On the other hand, I know that I have my
best races after I've done a bunch of races close together like a week
at Natl Masters. I wonder what Carl Swenson's training year looks
like? Maybe all that summer racing is the best preparation for winter
racing.

Rob you have to take a look at the event that you are going to compete in
and adjust your training accordingly. Look at biathlon, they ski for 10min
and then stop to shoot for 1min and then skiis for 10min, doesn't this look
like "natural" intervalls to you? To me it does and this also reflect
the training methodes used. The problems with doing much intervalls is
the ability to cope with the intensity all the time, to have ability to
recover the body in a short time between sessions, othervice you come
up short with a overtraining syndrom.
LSD builds the base to do hard session uppon and i do think that Biatletes also
do LSD sessions in theire of sesoon to get the platform to cope with the hard
sessions later in the seasoon.

--

Forward in all directions

Janne G