December Vakava Racing

Despite only having two Vakava on-snow practices leading up to the New Year (due to lack of natural snow, warm weather that stalled snow-making, and one crazy thunderstorm) several Vakava members raced in Skadi’s Chase, the Hoigaards Relays, and the Winter Warm Up- all at Elm Creek.

At Skadi’s Chase on December 11th, Artie Huber led the way, finishing 7th in a field of 39. Dave Christopherson finished in 19th and was the oldest male competitor by 19 years. Cheryl DuBois was the lone Vakava woman racing, skiing to 7th place among the field of 21 women with most of those topping her less than half her age! 

Dave sporting an old Vakava Racing Suit.

Cheryl, center, wearing the hot pink Vakava hat.

Dave reports about December: “A rather slow start to the new season (after not much of a racing season at all last year), with only one race so far -- Skadi's Chase. The first one always hurts; serves as a good reminder of what racing really is. A small race, soft conditions, and didn't go particularly fast, but a start nevertheless.”

Vakava had a strong showing at the Hoigaard’s Relays on December 18th where teams raced 6 x 1.3 km loops Olympic-style in a skate race. With an inch of fresh snow, conditions were exactly as I like- firm underneath but soft on top. In the most competitive Masters Men division, Andy Schakel paired with non-Vakava skier Dave Benson to take 8th among 19 teams while Artie Huber raced with his son, a senior in high school, to take 11th. 

Andy tags his partner.

Cheryl DuBois and MaryBeth Tuttle teamed up as Vakava Hot Mamas to take 4th in the Masters Women category (but unofficially won best team name) as Maria Schilling partnered with non-Vakava member Kira Stolen to take 6th. Meanwhile, Bonnie and MaryBeth’s daughters, Emma Albrect and Libby Tuttle, took 3rd place. Regarding her race, Maria says “It was so much fun to pair with Kira Stolen, who I paddle with, for a different sport!:) Lots of amazing women's teams, too.”

Maria demonstrating some good weight transfer.

In the Masters Mixed, Brock Lundberg and Bonnie Wieskopf got 2nd while the married duo of Erik Pieh and myself, Elspeth Ronnander, took 3rd (although I question result accuracy and think we actually got 4th). We were hoping to be the first married couple across the line, but the Gregg’s took that honor so we settled for not getting lapped! I went hard the first lap- really hard- and then struggled to maintain that pace for the next two legs.

Me not too far behind Bonnie.

The result times weren’t terribly accurate. The teams of Bonnie and Brock, myself and Erik, and Artie and his son all finished within about a minute of each other, adding to some fun inter-squad competition. 

Erik, Emma Albrecht, Cheryl, and Brock (blocked by a guy in front of him) at the start.

Exchange zone craziness including 3 Vakava teams.

Photo evidence of team #43 finishing first.

Finally, in the Winter Warm Up 10 km skate (4 laps of the machine-made loop) on December 26th, Andy Schakel and Brock Lundberg took 4th and 10th place respectively. Artie Huber finished an uncharacteristic 34th- “I fell twice on downhills and after that I thought about quitting but decided to just tour the race,” he says.

From left to right- Andy, Artie, and Brock competing at the Winter Warm Up

A huge THANK YOU to Elm Creek for hosting all 3 races and to Three Rivers Park District, Hoigaards, and Pioneer Midwest for sponsoring the events. Bonnie adds “I would like to thank all the race volunteers, those not profiting monetarily from their efforts. They are such an inspiration and positive influence on their community.”

Training Analysis Part Four: What Can Garmin Connect Tell Me?

After an almost two year hiatus (turns out publishing a book got in the way), I’m back with more analysis from my training log. This time, I’m going to see what the Garmin Connect website can do, pulling from years of my data going back to 2011. Note, I don’t always use my Garmin, especially for easy biking and running to and from work. Otherwise I use it for most workouts and all races.

I’ve had the Garmin 220 since late 2015 and prior to that the Garmin 210 that Erik got me for Christmas in 2010.

I should also establish that the principle three questions in analyzing my training log data are (1) what training makes me ski/run faster? (2) what training makes me ski/run slower? (3) what training is neutral?

It took me a tad to search through the left sidebar of the Garmin Connect website to find meaningful data, but then I happened on the “Reports” tab. On the “Reports” page, on the left side under “Reports” there’s a bunch of things to click on that are then displayed on a graph on the right. The graph on the right can then be changed to "7 days," "4 weeks," "6 months," or "1 year."

 

This graph shows my average heart rate per activity from January 26, 2020 to February 22, 2020. The high points correspond to the City of Lakes Loppet Classic Marathon, City of Lakes Loppet Skate Marathon, Mora Vasaloppet 42 km Classic, Minnesota Finlandia 25 km Classic, and Birkie 50 km Skate.

From here under “All Activities” I found “Total Activity Time” and “Total Distance” that generated some nice bar graphs representing my different activities for the year. 

 

This bar graph shows my total activity time in 2015, when I ran the Twin Cities Marathon. "Other" is mostly rollerskiing. This year we did a Thanksgiving ski trip to Colorado.

 

Here's my total activity time from this year when I didn't run a marathon.

 

For comparison to total time, this was my total distance in 2015. My August is lower because both year (2015 and 2021) I went on a backpacking trip and did not use my Garmin.

 

And 2021 total distance where I did a lot of rollerskiing in October!

Moving farther down the Reports on the left, if I clicked “Running” it opened up a new drop down menu that told me information about just my running workouts such as “Average Heart Rate” and “Total Distance.”

 

This graph shows my average heart rate for running only activities in September of this year with the one high value being the City of Lakes Half Marathon.

 

At the bottom of the “Reports” menu is “Progress Summary.” Clicking on this opens up a new page where I got most of my data. The first view that pops up tells me the number of all my recorded activities, distance, and time spent doing them. It was definitely a bit mind boggling to learned I’d entered almost 25,000 miles of human powered activities into Garmin Connect! Still, this info wasn’t terribly helpful so I kept searching through the different drop down menu options. I most liked to “Group by Year” under the “Progress Summary” option and then pick my activity. Doing this I generated a bunch of data. Note, the fields displayed can be customized on the right side. It’s also possible to customize dates. 

 

This is the default page that opens for the "Progress Summary." If you've never been here, it will likely blow your mind if you have much data. At the time I took this snip, I'd entered 2200 activities for over 24,000 miles in 3,687 hours climbing over a million feet of elevation gain! Quite the "wow" factor. Not terribly useful data other than something to remember on Bitch Hill.

 

Grouping by year, this shows the above data broken down annually.

 

Here's running by year.

 

Rollerskiing by year. Again, wow, over 6,500 miles of rollerskiing!

 

Classic skiing by year.

 

And skate skiing by year.

The only other useful left menu option I found is the “Activities.” By going to this tab and loading all my activities, I can quickly check average heart rates for races by searching for specific activity and under "Advanced Settings" choosing “Race” then “Filter Activities.” 

Here I've filtered to find just my skate ski races.

The best I could get for looking at my intensity or interval training is at the bottom of each specific activity where there’s a tab on the left for “Time in Zones” (this is next to “Stats” and “Laps”) which can show me my time in the different training zones for that specific workout only. There is no way in Garmin that I, or Erik, could find to analyze the intensity/interval training across different workouts or years. 

Heart rate zones for a recent L4 (5 x 3 minutes) classic ski interval workout I did at ABR that also included a couple hours of easy skiing.

It turns out I’m a bit of a data geek- not surprising given I always liked math. There was something about analyzing this data that was addicting. Even if I didn’t arrive at any great conclusions, the point of this exercise was to explore the Garmin Connect website and see what I could find.

But what I’m really looking for is to compare my time spent doing intervals and heart rates with race results. I should clarify that the most useful information I could get from Garmin Connect would tell me how to ideally train for my best race possible. Unfortunately the system just isn’t set up to compute this data.

Erik tells me I’d have to export my data to Strava, Runalyze, or TrainingPeaks and since that’s beyond the scope of this post, stay tuned!

City of Lakes Half Marathon

Back in June, Erik declared he needed a race to provide some motivation. After debating some adventure and trail running races, we settled on the City of Lakes Half Marathon, which I argued could provide more specific goals than the unknowns that come with trail. 

Despite running the Loppet Trail Half Marathon a few times, a 26 km race around Lake Bemidji, and two marathons, this would be my first road half marathon. My pace for the 26 km race had been 7:56, so naturally I wanted to go for 7:50 for the half; however, that 26 km race may have been my best distance race ever and it was four years ago. After doing a couple threshold runs, 7:50 pace seemed too ambitious. Maybe a couple years of injuries and not doing much fast running has made me slow. I had some hopes that a week at altitude and Level 4 uphill running intervals would give me a boost but not so much luck. 

Finally the week before the half I did a new workout that I made up: 3 minutes and 30 seconds at 8:00 mile pace followed by 30 seconds of recovery jogging for an hour (15 reps total). The first 10 of these felt amazing, then #11 I increased my pace accidentally and the second half was uphill and by the end I was in Level 4. When I started #12 I was a bit dizzy but finished, possibly because then I was running downhill. #13 was another uphill and by half way through I was 2:1 breathing and my body was doing the thing where I feel like I needed to have explosive diarrhea (i.e. I was hitting my max). I stopped and walked, then rallied for numbers 14 and 15, hitting both at just under 8:00 pace. 

My heart rate for the 3:30 on 30 seconds off until I hit the wall (excuse the artifact at the beginning that always happens with my arm strap).

Looking back at my splits, I hit the wall after a few too many sub 8:00 paces in a row, so that told me I better aim higher than that for the marathon and decided to even go a bit conservative with 8:20 pace and then hopefully pick it up near the end. 

Race morning dawned moderate temp for September, cloudy, and maybe a touch humid (i.e. 60 degrees). The course, almost two laps around Lake Harriet and Bde Maka Ska, initially seemed a bit boring to me, but then I realized it doesn’t really matter much where I race and sometimes loops are nice. Erik’s training hadn’t gone particularly well after he got “dysentery” on our backpacking trip last month, and he was hoping to not get wified which meant he mostly planned to run with me. 

The race definitely has a large field. It felt a bit unnerving given the recent surge in COVID-19 cases. I kept a mask on in the port-a-potty line and for awhile in the starting gate. Erik and I started relatively near the front but not too close. When the gun went off it was a bit of a traffic jam. Just chill, Elspeth. We’re probably going faster than I think. And every second I run slower now are seconds faster I will run later. 

Less than a half mile into the course it climbs a hill on the south side of Lake Harriet. This was good to string out the runners. As we made our way along the east side of Lake Harried the course was fairly packed.There was plenty of room for people to pass, but there were a good number of people around me. I tried to keep things in control and not go with anyone passing me. My splits were mostly on target. It was still easy. 

City of Lakes Half Marathon course per my Garmin. Note the start (green arrow) at Baird's Plaisance is not where it finishes (red square) at the Lake Harriet Bandshell- so it's not quite two loops.

I ran a bit fast up the hill between Lake Harriet and Bde Maka Ska but then reeled things in. There was another hill on the east side of Bde Maka Ska that I didn’t know about. We ran in a lane on Lake Street on the north side of Bde Maka Ska. A woman passed me wearing a tie-die t-shirt with wolves on it. I wondered if it was cotton. It wasn’t exactly form fitting but despite her shirt, this woman was cruising! It reminded me of a guy who had passed me early on wearing a singlet with a tree pattern- probably the prettiest singlet I’ve ever seen. It’s interesting how people wear different clothing and it doesn’t always match their speed. 

We got cross wind on the southwest side of Bde Maka Ska that became a headwind as we turned east. I ducked behind a couple guys to draft off them. It’s not something I usually do running but it worked. As we turned to go back towards Lake Harriet there was a two-way section and Erik and I were both a bit stunned by the fastest runners who were already heading back to Bde Maka Ska. Soon we were through the lap/finish and going back around Lake Harriet. 

As we climbed the hill on the south side of Lake Harriet I tried to keep things in check but couldn’t help noting the women in front of me that seemed to be slowing. Let’s race. It’s time to catch the women, I thought at mile 8. By now I was starting to breathe a little harder. I still felt good, but there were also still 5 miles left. I passed a couple of women and then we were back on the two-way section. The top runners were lapping a lot of runners. The woman I had been running with for the past couple miles pulled ahead of me along with another guy. I took a gel at the top of the hill on the east side of Bde Maka Ska, arguably as Erik would later say, a bit late in the race. 

Then we were down the hill, back on to the closed lane of Lake Street, going up the rise over the canal, then flat, zoning in on mile 11. My plan here had been to speed up if I felt good but I knew I was already running under pace and only had at max two sub-8 minute miles in me. All I could do was maintain. 

I came through mile 11. Let’s go hunting. Not many women in my sights though- not many men either. Everyone was really spread out. I didn’t feel like pushing much faster. I was working hard and the next mile flew by. One mile left. By now I was closing in on two women. It seemed it was taking forever to pass them. Erik moved in front of me. I stuck on him. Slowly we passed the women. The wind wasn’t as strong this lap around Bde Maka Ska. 

The last half mile droned on forever. I resisted the urge to look at my watch to see the tenths of a mile pass by. We turned onto the two-way between the lakes. I moved alongside Erik. Slower runners were coming in the opposite direction. I pushed hard up the hill. Erik and I were tied. There was a brief plateau, then more climbing. Elspeth, remember how you feel now, I’m giving this all I can. Then we were over the hump, made a sharp right turn, then gradual downhill to the finish. I pushed what I could and Erik and I crossed the finish line together. 

After finishing we walked towards the food tent. I got the chills and the feeling that I had to poop. It was brief but meant I’d finished hard. 

My time was 1:47:12 for 8:12 mile pace which was about the best I thought I could do based on my training. Obviously not the 7:50 pace I was initially hoping for, but still decent for me. I know I have a higher gear, but it didn’t come out to play and that’s OK. My average heart rate was 152 with a max of 167. And I finished 70th of 357 women! 

My nice heart rate graph, slowly increasing, for the half marathon.

For now I’ll go back to the ski training but next year I’ll set my sights on some more running and hopefully no injuries. 

Aside from the half marathon, my training this year has been woefully inadequate. Most weeks I’ve been averaging just under 12 hours, the amount I consider my baseline. After a backpacking trip in Yosemite at the end of September, I’m determined to average at least 12 hours/week of training for October and November, if not even more. My long Sunday rollerskis all need to be at least 2.5 hours. Time to start hill bounding!

Strength Reboot

Not unlike many of my posts, this one has been over a year in the making. I’ve held off publishing it until I found a solid strength routine and gone through an entire cycle.

Andy Newell, in his interview with Ian Harvey, says the biggest mistake skiers make is doing the same strength routine. He says don’t do the same routine for more than 5-6 weeks. He recommends periodization and mixing up the exercises. He also talks about velocity strength. He says that if you aren’t getting faster you need to do something different in the gym.

While I’m good at doing strength three days a week, I’m not good at variety or progression. This is partly because I can do 10 pull-ups which is super kick-ass for a 36 year old woman and I can do the 8 minute ab routine easily and even my 12 minute side-ab routine is getting easier. I keep trying to substitute in different ab exercises and routines, but after a few weeks or months, they all get too easy.

But despite this, I feel weak.

You might be wondering how I can do 10 pull-ups and feel weak but it’s because I haven’t really progressed in the past 8 years or so. I mean, I’ve progressed a bit- I used to do 5 reps and now I’m up to 8, but that's hardly any improvement.

So my strength training needed a reboot.

I began developing a plan last year and tried some things out and this year have made a more complete plan with 3 main goals:


1. Increase variety (do different exercises)

2. Lift with weight more 

3. Progression (i.e. start w/ body weight and then progress to adding weight)

My plan is still to do strength three times a week, each for about 30 minutes rotating through 4 week blocks of progression.

So let’s talk about these different goals.

In terms of variety, I don’t have much fancy equipment at home. Currently I have a pull-up bar, a Total Gym, two 10-pound dumbbells, and some resistance bands. For years I’ve been doing push-ups and pull-ups but as I’ve created a plan, I’ve found that there are a ton of variety options just with push-ups and pull-ups alone. For both, arm position makes a big difference. There’s also different speed and hold options. For example, my push-up planks I hold in high position for 5 seconds, then do 5 push-ups, then repeat until exhaustion. I also do both push-up and pull-up holds whereby I go partway up/down, hold for 5 seconds, go all the way and hold for 5 seconds, and then hold for 5 seconds part way up/down again.

Our Total Gym, some posters for inspiration, and a messy basement:)

Until last year I never did my exercises with extra weight. I brought in weighted pull-ups and then started doing squats with weight. This year I’ve added in weighted stair steps. For the legs it’s not a ton of weight. This will likely increase when we finally buy some heavier dumbbells, but until then, it’s at least a start.

Finally, I developed a 4 week progression working backwards from ski season with a rapid fire in January of one week each. The idea is to do a weight progression followed by a velocity/speed block. This is also to help with developing my power.

My pull-up bar and more posters.

Prior to doing my strength sessions, I like to do a warm-up. Sometimes this is running or biking home from work but my favorite is a 30 minute classic rollerski.

My plan is still a work in progress. I’ve been using Youtube ab workouts to give me some new ideas and I’ve found some hard ones I can’t quite complete! I try not to worry too much if I miss a day of strength (like if I’m building a retaining wall or on an active vacation).

Retaining wall to bust out. This stuff was heavy!

Active vacation in the North Wind River Range in Wyoming.

So here’s my plan. Use what suits you or simply read for interest. 

Overall plan.

More detailed plan. I don't have reps or sets on most of these noted. For push-ups I usually do 2 or 3 sets of 20-30 push-ups, trying to get low enough to get my nose (is that gross?) on the ground. Pull-ups without weight is usually 8-10 on my first set and 6 or 7 on my second set. With weight it's 5-4-4 or so for both sets. I do 20 step-ups (2-3 sets each leg) and 20 squats (1 set each leg position).  

My four different pull-up grips.

Leg exercises including my four squat positions.

A detail of my different ab routines minus the YouTube ones.

My three YouTube ab routines:

6 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M3W5VCsuCY

10 minute lower abs (this one is a killer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54x6yjnzLms&t=303s

10 minute 6-pack abs (good luck!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOiP3kfFlrE 

I usually do all my abs at once but will alternate an upper body with lower body set so as to not have any “resting” time between sets. If I find I need more rest between sets, I will throw in some physical therapy-type exercises or striding or skating mimic.

Often I do 3 sets of exercises, except I usually do 2 sets for each pull-up grip and 1 set for each squat position.

I realize this plan is heavy on pull-ups for upper body and most people can't do pull-ups with weight. This is the equipment I have and what I've been working with. And while my pull-ups may seem impressive, in my experience, there's only a very minor correlation with ski performance.

Caitlin says "Do Your Pull-ups!"

It took me until I worked through an entire cycle of this plan before I could publish this blog. That way I was able to find the exercises that work for me, and even the ones I found most fun. Jump lunges were initially in the plan but they seemed to hurt my foot and didn’t feel good so I threw them out. Meanwhile I found jumping w/ tucking my legs up to be really fun so I incorporated those. I wasn't able to be very explosive on the pull-ups during the Velocity phase so next time around I will substitute one pull-ups session for inverse push-ups (pull self up to a very low bar with body almost horizontal) and pole jumps (use bounding poles to get self high into the air).

I find the 4 week (or month-long) block to be about the best duration for me to get some progression but not get too bored. If I stretch it out to 6 weeks it feels too long. In the future I may try more rapid cycling with 2 week blocks (although it’s easier to think in terms of months) or perhaps do a full cycle each 4 weeks followed by 2 week blocks.

This new strength plan may or may not make me a faster skier, and I’m OK with that. The point is to do something different, something that’s fun, and something that makes me happy!