It’s September. The leaves are changing in the mountains, and your fitness is excellent right now. Perhaps it’s the best it’s ever been. You’ve been lucky: the schedule worked out well, the injuries stayed away, and it was a great summer.
Now the weather is turning, the mornings are crisp, and snow kissed the peaks before Labor Day. You’re excited to skin, to ski, to adventure in the backcountry, but you’ve been here before. Last year was similar. You felt great, fit, and ready in September, but by the time the snow was good, somehow you were out of shape. How do you make this year different?
Transitioning between seasons and sports in the mountains is tough. We can’t maintain the specific summer fitness in the winter because there is too much snow. While we can certainly ski into June, it’s impractical to try to maintain ski fitness year-round. The single-track is so good, why would you?
SEA Badass Christena Ward crushing some single track.
There are many ways to get off-track in the fall, and the best ways to transition are not necessarily the first that come to mind. When discussing this transition, I like to use the analogy of your body as a car. You have an engine that produces energy and you have a transmission that turns that energy into motion. A good engine is fairly universal in endurance sports; if you can breathe hard while mountain biking, you can breathe hard skinning. But unfortunately for us mountain athletes, the transmission is sport specific. The same cardiovascular system that propels you to great heights in the summer will shred your legs to hamburger after an hour once you switch sports. Right now, if you jump right into ski imitation training (power hiking, running uphill with poles, rollerskiing, etc.), your transmission would certainly improve quickly, but since you can’t handle the volume of training (hard to keep going on hamburger legs), your engine will start to lose horsepower.
In order to maintain your engine and maximize your transmission building, slowly start adding very high intensity ski imitation. During this transition, decrease intensity but maintain volume of your summer sport. One ski imitation interval session every three days for three weeks is a good rule. This gives your specific sport muscles time to regenerate between sessions to prevent injury and get maximum effect from each workout. Meanwhile, go out for long fun low intensity workouts in your summer sport keep the volume high and the engine firing.
After those three weeks, ramp it up by doing three ski imitation sessions per week, with one of them long, and the other two high intensity. Maintain your long run ride volume. In this fashion you will gradually increase your sport specific volume, maximizing your transmission improvements.
Once you’ve worked through these six weeks, take a recovery week by dropping overall volume by 30%, and dropping the intensity a bit in those hard workouts. This will ensure a strong, healthy body before you move to a full training load in week eight!
While this plan may be counter intuitive, and unlike anything that you’ve done before, a dedication to building the sport specific muscle slowly, while enjoying the fall single-track will find you on the first snow with strength and fitness unlike anything you’ve had before, starting your winter fit, healthy, and ready to skin!
Joe Howdyshell is the coach and owner of the Summit Endurance Academy. He spends his time racing in jorts, drinking beer, and nerding out about exercise physiology. Want to raise your badass quotient by 5 points? Email him. Joe@SummitEnduranceAcademy.com
