with the improved basic endurance that they develop over years of increasing training volume, the quality of these hard training sessions does improve. This is a fundamental concept of the preparation of XC skiers. High volume, low-intensity work builds the basis for extending the athlete’s performance capacity with the hard sessions. The two are complementary. At the elite levels, both are necessary for success.
Absolutely coorect. I have a triathlete that I coach who lives in Sweden. He goes out and skate skis for 8-10 hours at a time. A 4-6 hour bike ride for him in the summer doesn’t seem to hard to him after a huge winter base.
Actaully he wrote an article in my last newsletter (January):
The research and writing of Stephen Seiler is dead-on. It should be mandetory reading for anyone who is serious about improving their performance in any endurance sport event. To my mind the best training informatioin that I have seen in print and online over the past ten years has been the stuff that Seiler has posted on his web site and the stuff the Owen Anderson has posted at Peak Performance. It’s all there. Seiler has studied the top xc-skiers and rowers while Anderson has looked at runners - the Kenyans in particular. Both are advocates of a moderate amount of threshold type training. The simple reason - by and large we race at threshold intensities, give or take, so if you follow the theory of specialization, that’s what you should be doing more of in training.