After a two year hiatus from analyzing my training log, I’m baaaaaack. I’ve procrastinated writing this blog because I’m not very skilled at using Google Sheets. My brother (who has a Masters in Statistics) crunched some data back in 2016 and if I remember correctly, it took him a long time and he said he wasn’t going to help me again. Hence, I had to do it myself, a really long way, the only way I know how.
I introduced my Google Sheets training log in the first series on this theme. As I noted then, I do use the data for the purpose of looking at my weekly training hours. This helps motivate me to hit my average of 12 hours a week but if I’m up to 15 hours for 2-3 weeks, it’s a reminder that I should back off some. Usually this happens naturally due to weather.
In analyzing my data, I thought adding my yearly totals would be most helpful. When I first created the spreadsheet in 2008, this was always my intention but because this data involves 365 rows, it’s much more complicated to compile than the weekly data.
Here are my training totals in hours:
There’s a few things to note here.
Annual data is from May 1st-April 30th.
I don’t count canoeing as endurance or total hours unless I’m racing. When I’m casually canoeing my heart rate is around 80. If I’m racing, my heart rate jacks up to 120 or so, enough to count as endurance.
When I go hiking or backpacking, I usually count the time spent going uphill only.
Intervals include L3, L4, L5, and races. I haven’t delineated these out. Perhaps it would be helpful, perhaps not. I count the time I’m trying to do these intervals, regardless of my heart rate. And from my previous post, the heart rate conundrum, I’m not always hitting my target heart rate.
I’ve lumped classic and skate rollerskiing together. Prior to 2014, I exclusively skate rollerskied.
So, what is this telling me?
Let’s start from left and move right, thus we’ll begin with total training hours. It looks like on average I train around 600 hours per year. My 2012-2013 season was very light. This was because Erik and I moved back from New York, took 3+ months off from work, canoed from New York to the top of Maine (hence the high volume of canoe hours). We also spent 3 weeks hiking the John Muir Trail, none of which I counted in my endurance hours. I also clocked my lowest running and rollerki hours. I finished 30th in the classic Birkie this season but had the handicap of skiing from Wave 4, which likely put me around 10 places farther back.
My biggest training year was 2015-2016. Incidentally this coincided with running Twin Cities Marathon. This also coincided with my best finish place in the Classic Birkie at 11th. It looks like my hours were fairly well distributed across the different training domains, but on the higher end of all.
Last year I was down almost 100 training hours compared to the previous year. Initially this surprised me, partly because I was working less, so theoretically my training should have increased. I did start volunteer high school cross-country ski coaching, albeit at most one day per week, but this may explain why my hours didn’t increase. I was relatively close in interval and strength time but significantly down on endurance time. I had more on-snow ski time compared to the previous year, about equal rollerski time, but my running was way down, likely because after a hard running interval session in early November, my posterior tibial tendonitis finally got the better of me. Hence for six months, for most of November through April, when I’m often running up to 3 hours per week, these were all zeros and likely contribute to most of the decreased hours. Interestingly enough, as I commented last year, I had lots of energy for the Mora Vasaloppet, the Finlandia, and especially the second half of the Birkie.
If I use my classic Birkie finishes, by far the largest field in which I compete and mitigating my handicap from 2013 of skiing from Wave 4, I finished in the upper teens in 2014, 2015, and 2018. Yes, my training hours were rather consistent but also seems like all that canoeing and hiking in 2013 didn’t really affect my Birkie performance.
Moving farther right, I’m going to skip over endurance which largely parallels my total training volume and next discuss interval time. I joined Vakava for the 2014-2015 season. I’m impressed to see I did more interval time on my own the year prior to joining Vakava and now have settled into around 45 hours of intervals and races, peaking in the 2021-2022 season when I didn’t feel very sharp for the Bikie. As noted above, my Birkie results are fairly consistent and I can’t draw any obvious conclusions from my interval training.
Looking at strength is a bit erratic. I hit big hours 2010-2012 when I was a grad student and last had a gym membership. Despite all those hours, I’m pretty sure they were ineffective, lifting largely free weights working isolated muscle groups. The last couple years I’ve tried to incorporate a lot more leg strength into my routine and am hitting bigger hours again, but not even half of my max hours. I’m doing mostly multi-muscle group lifts and trying to do these with weight (pull-ups and squats) and this feels way more effective than ever before and crazily enough, I’m feeling stronger than I ever have before. How do I know this, well this summer I achieved a 20 year goal of benching my body weight, this after I hadn’t benched in 3.5 years!!!
Next I’ll move to rollerski time. I’m shocked I rollerskied a whopping 167 hours back in the 2009-2010 season, all on my OG Marwes. I’m still rocking them (got ‘em in 2004, replaced the wheels a couple times) but have mostly only been putting in 100 or so hours on rollerskis. While I think rollerskiing is good for technique and intervals, I often find that with flat terrain my heart rate is much lower than running unless I’m going uphill, hence probably not great to use as exclusive training.
I’ve broken down my ski time into classic and skate. 2011-2012 was a terrible snow winter in upstate New York and I only skied 45 hours that year! Otherwise in recent years I’ve been doing more classic than skate (except when I did the skate Birkie in 2019 and 2020). It’s interesting comparing 2018-2019 to 2019-2020. While I skied more the first year, I rollerskied more the second. My best ever classic Birkie place in 2016 was not the year of my highest ski volume, but it was near the top.
Regarding running, I ran the Twin Cities Marathon in 2015 and then got on a running kick for the next couple years. I’ve already been over last year’s low numbers. As mentioned above, my best Birkie Classic place happened the same season as Twin Cities Marathon and I had some of my highest running volume; the same did not hold true for 2018, following probably my best ever running race in 2017 and still high volume.
Most of my bike time is commuting. I almost never have my heart rate monitor on. I try not to be too lazy of a biker, but biking isn’t really my jam and I’m sitting so probably isn’t the best cardio but also feels like I’ve done some work, so I count it. I’ve heard of coaches who only let skiers count a third of their bike time and others none at all but I think this is wrong.
Finally, my canoe hours have waxed and waned, hitting an up-tick when the pandemic started. I don’t think there’s much to learn from this to correlate with ski training, although I could be wrong.
After compiling all this data and making a bunch of graphs, I don’t find this information terribly useful, perhaps because my training has been fairly consistent over the last 10 years, similar in most part to my Birkie results. It’s also not very specific. I’m not looking at specific workouts, how long they were done before target races, my heart rates, etc. As winter approaches, fellow skiers often inquire into my training to which I respond: “oh, about like usual.” According to my analysis, that’s right. I tend to prioritize training, or at least that 12 hours a week average, no matter what else is going on in my life, and usually that’s not much:)
In my next post I’m going to focus on three running races and use more specific data and heart race analysis to drill down on optimal long running race workouts and tapering. In my last post of the series, I’ll do this again to compare my skate Birkie races from 2019 and 2020.
