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Old August 15th 03, 12:20 AM
Ken Roberts
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Default LT Training for Lance, Why Not Nordic Skiers?

It's not clear that this is a "bike versus ski" thing. It's easy to find
bicycle training books that say "no more than two hard workout days per
week" to train for endurance-distance racing.

Aren't Lance Armstrong's goals rather different even from most other elite
_bicycle_ racers, namely: "win the Tour de France". Does that mean that he
doesn't have to worry much about winning any _sprints_?

Seems to me that winning the whole TdF is completely different from winning
a World Cup ski race: different course design, different team strategy,
different single-day distances, etc. (Could anything like a TdF mountain
stage be _legal_ under World Cup or Olympic ski rules?)

I seem to remember someone claiming that modern World Cup courses (e.g.
Soldier Hollow) with lots of hill climbs which are steep but not long
(compared to TdF) tend to reward anaerobic "tolerance": Go hard climbing
up, accept the lactic build-up, then recover on the downhill. Seems like
this anaerobic "tolerance" capability would be even more important for a
_mass_start_ elite ski race on a modern World Cup course. (then throw in
the new world Cup race formats: sprints, 2-person relays . . . )

Seems to me there's reasons enough for some training in high-intensity,
anaerobic zones : _above_ LT. Sounds like that would require lots more
recovery time between workouts, even for an elite athlete -- so not 3 or 4
times a week.

How that all translates down for us citizen skiers with non-elite bodies on
non-World-Cup courses, who can say? Wasn't there some guy who wrote for
citizen racers, and advocated as optimal training something like 3 near-LT
workouts a week?

Ken



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