Birkie breakdown 2004, or Mark Ernst is right
This year's Birkie was supposed to be a breakthrough year for me. In previous years I had the grand goal of making the third wave while training less than 150 hours per year. It was to be gradual improvement of technique that would do the trick for me. In fact, in spite of years of less than adequate training, I had worked my way from my worst starting wave in wave six to wave four. But I wasn't going to improve on that, so last year I decided to find out what it would be like to take my skiing and health a little more seriously.
First of all, in November of 2002, I had gone through a long arduous streak at work, on top of a number of years of inadequate training, and found I had gained a little weight. I bought a scale. It was shocking, 254 pounds. I had never been any sort of elite athelete, but this was heading down a path of horrors that eventually could have kept me from doing many of the things I like, besides eating anyway. The ski season, in spite of the shortage of snow that year helped a lot, but there was a long ways to go.
Last spring I bought a new road ready bike. I liked enough I started doing club rides. By June it looked like I was on a pace for a 250+ hours training year, the most I had done by far. I continued that into the fall and then took part of Mark Ernst's hill bounding workouts. 25 pounds lighter than that day in November. But what seemed to be the thing that would really push me over the edge was getting some one on one coaching, mostly with UWGB coach Bryan Fish. After a number of hours, and building on information I had gotten from Scott Wilson and Kine Torinous earlier, I realized I had a new weapon in getting speed out of my old body. The USSA techniques, of which I had blogged before, seemed like a rocket for me.
Talking about this with Mark, he said that he thought it wouldn't matter that much because without a really good motor, you really can't experience the finer points of technique. Shocking! Philistine! And frankly, since a lot of evidence seems to show that you can only gain about 15-20% aerobic capacity over your genetically determined VO2Max, technique seemed like the only option. And it was working...
As winter hit, work picked up a bit. When daylight savings time kicked out, the dark and cold nudged me inside more than it had. I spent two full weeks in December sick and unable to much of anything. the rest of the winter panned out as a weekend warrior, with 2-4 hours per week most weeks, but almost all on the weekend with little if anything mid week. By February, after a wonderful trip to Norway to ski and Sweden for a conference, I came back and realized I was pretty seriously out of shape. I could still do the new techniques I learned, but in cold dry snow, I got tired really fast. I did the Stump Farm a week before the Birkie and started great but by 9K I faded fast. Not good.
I finished the Birkie and choose to take a positive view. I think we all mark ourselves against a gang of usual suspects of peers. Against them I had a pretty good day in the very soft conditions. I seemed to gain about 20 minutes on those people who were normally about 30 minutes ahead of me. I gained 15-20 minutes on those I usually finished close to. I finished surrounded by third wave skiers. Still, a 4:01 time was kind of lame considering the time I had put in. I cramped up starting 40K on the uphills, and by 45K I cramped in one leg on every stroke. My photo on main street is comical as I was trying to skate without bending my right leg. The final answer came about a month later. I missed the third wave by 9 minutes.
In the end, my technique was affected by my conditioning. Skiing fast requires power and in a marathon, it requires power for a long time. Power requires conditioning. I simply didn't have it in spite of being at what my have been my best condition ever at the end of the fall. My technique held up well until my cramping started. So, if my technique was better, and compared to the previous few years, my conditioning was better, but not as much as I would have liked, I can come to only one conclusion.
For me, it will be conditioning that determines my fate as a skier in races (note how he carefully avoids calling himself a racer here). While I can take some satisfaction that I skied close to guys who would leave me for dead on a bike in 20 minutes, only conditioning will move me out of the fourth wave. And with genetics, age and lifestyle what they are, even that could be a tough one.
But this little voice keeps nagging me: Mark Ernst was right. I hate when that happens.