Archive for September, 2009
Houghton “Get Your Nordic On” = HUGE SUCCESS!
The Houghton ski community is AWESOME!
Top View!
As you know, I moved back up to Houghton in May, and since then I’ve really been trying to get to know the community here. Well, on Wednesday, I met a ton of them! I ran a “Get Your Nordic On!” technique clinic for the American Birkibiener Foundation and Portage Health, and we had over 35 people show up! It was incredible!
We had all ages, all abilities!
The clinic focused on the very basics of good technique. We ran through a series of of drills, starting with basic body position and adding little bits and pieces until we ended with a complete stride. We did this for both classic and skate. It was a lot of information to absorb at once, but everyone was up for the challenge. There were smiles all around, and I think a lot of good progress was made!
Working on lateral weight transfer...
One of things that impressed me the most about the group was the sheer number of women who showed up. I counted 25, and that’s a ton! When I lived down in Hayward I was hugely inspired by the Ski and Tea women’s training group there. They get together once a week, ready to motivate each other, work hard, and do it with perma-smiles on their faces. With 25 women showing up for this little clinic, I’m pretty sure we have enough interest up here to do something similar!
Here’s a little video from the clinic, when we were putting together everything we had learned about classic technique, into a complete “ski walking” stride. HUGE thanks to Arnie Kinnunen at Portage Health, for promoting the clinic, and taking tons of great pictures and video!
Coach KO
I’ve got somewhat of a weird status up here at Tech. Officially, I’m a “volunteer assistant coach”, but what that means is pretty undefined. Basically, when I’m in town I just show up to whatever practices mesh well with my training schedule from Fish. So I’m not really still an athlete on the team, but I don’t really feel like much of a coach either. I’m just floating somewhere in between.
But this past weekend I got to pretend that I actually was a coach. The real assistant coach, Cork, needed the weekend off, which meant the cross country running team needed another van driver for their trip to Kenosha. Since that race is on the very sweet Footlocker Midwest course, and has a very nice policy on unattached runners, I was all in. Joe even gave me a sweet athletic department staff polo so I’d look all professional!
Ok, so I did race. I guess a really real coach probably would’ve been out on the course cheering and taking splits. But even though I eventually I want to end up as the head coach of some wildly sucessful collegiate program, I think it may be a while untill I’m willing to give up the trill of actually racing myself. Because really, that feeling is pretty much the greatest thing in the whole wide world.
Results HERE, although I’m not on them (I think I was around 19:18ish?). Apperently they don’t love the unattached runners all that much.
Free Technique Clinic
Just set the date for a “Get Your Nordic On” technique clinic, presented by the American Birkiebeiner Foundation and Portage Health. It’ll be at 6pm, on Wed, September 23rd, meeting at the Portage Health Fitness Connection entrance parking lot in Houghton. This clinic will be free of charge, and will go over dryland drills designed to teach and re-enforce the fundamental technique basics of good nordic skiing technique. That means it’ll be great for both beginners looking to learn something before they get on skis, and more experienced skiers who want a technique check up. It should be a blast, I’m hoping to get a good crowd from the always awesome Houghton ski community!
Been Awhile, eh?
Let’s just do a sort of random camp update style thing.
- the Ideal Market in Cable has some of the best pizza i’ve ever eaten.
- I’m not really sure if it’s been announced anywhere yet, but we have some new teammates on CXC. Rebecca Dusault is one of them, and she came out to Hayward for a few days this last camp. Compton used to be our big gun on the team, and i hadn’t really realized, when she went elsewhere, what a big hole it would leave. Not saying that Compton could ever be replaced, but it sure is nice to have a veteran tough skier chick who’s been there, done that, back on the team again. Not to mention, she’s awesome to throw down in intervals with.
- Another awesome tough skier chick? Igor’s wife, Nina Gavrilyuk. Holy moses, that woman can ski. I mean, like really really. She’s got like, 3 gold medals. And she brought them with. I touched them. And literally, got shivers.
- Nina and Igor have been getting on me about using my arms more. And I guess, it makes a lot of sense. I’ve got a total of four appendages…probably shouldn’t forget about two of them. So I’ve been really working on that a lot lately. And since the arms are connected to the core, I’ve been trying to think about using that more too. My mental cue is to just make sure i feel a contraction every time i pole. And not to leave the legs out, it’s been pointed out that i ride a very straight leg when gliding. “Bend your ankle more” is used so often as a technique key phrase that it’s almost cliche, but I guess it really is what i need to work on. Sigh…that’s a lot of things to think about.
- We did another speed block, our second and final of the year, and i felt much better this time. Only started getting really tired the day after we were done, on our last easy distance ski of the camp. Last time i was wiped out, so i guess that’s good.
- Last afternoon of camp we spent doing trail work on the Birkie trail. We limbed and cleared about 2k of trail, which doesn’t sound too impressive, but it sure takes a long time to do it. But it is nice that every time we ski that trail this winter, we’ll know we did a little to make it that much better.
Hmmm…what else? Not much from camp, but….
- One of our strength consultants, Steve Myrland, just sent me the sweetest list of key russian phrases, all spelled out phonetically. Awesome for dealing with crazy russian coaches named Igor! Thank you Steve, that seriously just made my day!
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