Club member Roy Young is one of the UK Nordic Ski Team Coaches. There’s no snow around so surely Roy has his feet up… Not really! Here’s what he’s thinking about at the moment:
Last Monday we were doing lactate testing in Stirling with the oversized treadmill – so getting results while doing classic rollering. Really interesting – but also good to get a chance to stand next to the guys as we working on ski efficiency – so you could make modifications and try them out there and then.
This morning was speed work with Alex and Youngy in the winter conditions down at the ski centre (winter jacket, hat and gloves while giving video feed back). Later on its going over training with some of the guys.
Muzzy has only been back for a short period and joined us in Sognefjell (great description on Young’s Blog). He’s looking really powerful and is working with Team Viedekker which is probably the premier private team in Norway. This is another great opportunity both for Andrew and for the team to get more insight into performance. He’s living up in Trondhiem so that he can go to University there – they have a great system that has allowed many of the best Norwegian athletes to train/compete and do their degree. (You could argue that we have the same with Fiona looking great after 2 years at Cambridge). I think Muzzy scores with the facility and number of guys to go out training with on his doorstep, but Fiona has been a real star in the way she has trained and performed in the last 2 years as well.
Youngy will be moving to Lillehammer in August. He will have good training partners there and is going to maintain his connection with NTG Geilo for some additional camps.
We are planning a snow tunnel camp just before the students go back to uni, some altitude in October and then first races at Beitostolen or Brucksvallarna (depending on the athletes qualification).
The season looks like a toughy – not many Juniors with Calum I and Scott opting for biathlon – we are hoping they will be able to do some XC races as well. But a good number at World U23s and then the biggy being the World Champs at Val di Fiemme; which was an excellent venue when we were there with Tour de Ski (maybe not as big a crowd as Oslo but very definitely enthusiastic and they like to get in about the racers on the steep hills, like a mountain stage in the Tour De France). In between we have the test event at Sochi – aiming to take a small group to race and survey the place.
Talking of Sochi. We are working with BSS and BOA on the criteria for 2014, the qualification period has opened but as we have no one (that I know of) racing in the southern hemisphere. We are waiting to have a meeting with the, now infamous, OQS Panel from BOA (Olympic Qualification Selection). I think this is the same for all of the winter sports, so we will have to wait to get date which may now be after London (although I hope not). If the FIS qualification was done now we would have 3 quota spots (1 male 1 female and 1 for having someone in the top 300 in the world). Hopefully, we can get to the point where we meet the harder British Standard (we will be asking for a higher criteria than FIS does) and are able to select 3 athletes by Dec 2013. Probably going to do a short blog on the process of setting the standards in the near future.
Next outing for the seniors will be the summer camp in Aviemore – we will be missing a few because of the Olympics but we also have a Brit who lives in USA joining us.
For BNDS its a EYO year. The qualification standards for this is harder than before so we are hoping some dedicated camps and race camps in the early winter can lift them. They found the races in Finland at easter quite tough but learnt a lot from it so we hope they are putting this into their summer training.