So counting something like x-c skiing is a no -brainer, of course you should.
Snow shoing- sure count it
a hard hike- sure
What about alpine skiing- mogul skiing which really works quads, glutes and hamstrings- and I feel helps with bike strength…
Do other people count alpine skiing in their log? When I say count it I mean the actual time spent doing the activity. As a lifetime alpine skier and bump skier I have never counted it… but I’m thinking I might want to add it in… just the actual ski time obviously- no lift time.
I have people ask me this question all the time, and there are two ways to look at it in my opinion. You don’t turn in your log book at a race and cash it in for a race performance based on how many hours you put in. So in that light you should count it, write it down, etc. because you are trying to indicate in your training log what sort of state you are in as a whole. If you skied the bumps yesterday and your track workout didn’t go as planned today, you want that to be reflected in your training log. Or if you ski all winter and build huge leg strength and set all sorts of PR’s this year, don’t you want to look back and see that the skiing had something to do with it?
On the other hand, if the question is more if you have a 15 hour training week planned and you want to know whether or not you can replace bike or run workouts with mogul skiing, then I might have a different answer. The person who counts the 15 hours towards only swimming, cycling, and running might just come out ahead of the person who counted their 4 hour ski day in their total training hours and skipped their long ride.
Stretching and strength work fall into this questionable classification all the time as well. I realize that people don’t have endless amounts of time to train, far from it. But if you start counting strength and conditioning workouts instead of the three specific sports and your competition is doing both, who do you think wins on race day?
Your training log is just that, a log of training. You can regard it as an exercise log and record all physical activity that you do, or you can call it a training log, select a goal, and record your training towards that goal. It’s really a semantic argument.
I think that if you have a goal, such as IM, you should not replace something like a 4 hour ride with 4 hours of alpine skiing if you are in the lead-up to the goal. If it is still the off season for you (as it is for me), and you have a choice between a 4 hour ride and a 4 hour ski, then choose whatever floats your boat.