(Rob Bradlee) wrote in message oo.com...

I talked with a woman who was a gold medalist (without drugs) for East
Germany in biathlon.

My Instant Sports Trivia Retriever comes up with the
name of Petra Schaaf - did I win a million bucks?:-)


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.

1. They had presumably built a solid base (in previous
years; during the summer) before embarking on this kind
of program.

2. They didn´t intend to compete at distances longer than
7.5 or 10 km.

3. They had constant medical supervision which probably
cannot be matched in very many places these days.


She thought the idea of lot of long easy distance was ridiculous.

Easy and easy. IIRC it was Torgny Mogren who once pointed
out that the idea is not to work long at "fat-burning"
intensity, unless your purpose is to burn fat.


She said the American men (a decade ago) were training "like 12 year old
girls".

The XC or the biathlon guys? I may be wrong, but there was
a worldwide revolution of sorts in the importance of skiing
speed and how much and how hard top biathletes could and
should train and race.


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.

Me, too. It´s like: everyone knows that it takes hard,
interval-type training to produce a postive training
response, but for some, if not most, people it is quite
necessary to train in order to train: as a study group
of one, "intervals + rest" didn´t work at all for me.

So, even if it may lead to people asking me "Don´t you
have a day job?" or "Don´t you have a life?", I think
I´ll leave it for others to follow these shifts in, eh,
latest research or fashion:-)


Anders