Western REG (part 1)

This past week Alicia, Elena, Rogan and I travelled up to Park City for the Western Regional Elite Group (REG) training camp.  We were again set up in condos at the base of The Canyons Resort, which I learned was one of the three largest ski resorts in the country.  It doesn’t look like much from the base, but as we started running up the mountain for training the first afternoon, once you get over the first ridge the ski trails and peaks of the resort seem endless.  So does the winding, climbing single track.  The trails were awesome running, but I bet it would also be sweet mountain biking.  Just ask Alicia about that.

The second day was when the real training started.  We all piled into vans and headed to Soldier Hollow for some roller skiing.  If you think those trails are awesome in the winter, try flying down the hills and around corners on roller skis.  True, the paved trail aren’t quite the same super fast and crazy down hills that are on the Olympic race course, but when you are buzzing along on narrow strips of pavement, it seems fast enough.  And if you ever do get there in the summer to check it out, I have a word of advice.  Follow the DO NOT ENTER signs.  Myself and two other coaches went early to scope out a good loop that would be safe for the kids to ski, but we inadvertently skied past a do not enter sign and quickly found ourselves hurtling down a twisty hill like an out of control missile.  And then we exploded.  All three of us, ending up with matching missing patches of skin on our hips and elbows. 

When the real athletes showed up and showed us how to ski.  We did a 2 hr skate roller ski workout with some speeds and video technique work.  With all the chaos of packing 30 skiers plus coaches onto the trails, doing speeds, and skiing on some rocky roads, there was not a single fall or use of a med kit.  Good job guys!  For the workout we broke down into smaller groups that we would use later in the week to look at the video and discussion about technique.

The afternoon was a pole bounding intensity workout.  This was a combination of short fast intervals (15 sec) with a lot of recovery between each one (2 min).  On these types of workouts, the rest is important to be sure that our muscles are firing at the top end for each interval.  After the explosive stuff, the workout continued with longer (2-3 min) threshold intervals.

Each day we got to wind down with a nice meal from chef Doug and a team meeting to discuss schedule or hear talks from the USST nutritionist or USST member Andy Newell.  I’ll post later this week with more from the REG camp.

Happy training!