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JD Downing's Training Tips

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  "Movement is medicine, movement increases mobility, and a rolling stone does not get mossy. That's how the saying goes, and it is. Exercise is as important as eating and sleeping."  ~Hilkka Riihivuori, former Finnish Olympic skier, current masters skier (and podium stander), 72 years old (so you know she knows what she's talking about!) Some years ago I spent a week at JD Downing's training camp in Bend. It was super fun and I learned a lot, as you can imagine. I dug out some of the notes I took that week in case you, like me, need a little boost in these dog days of summer. Winter is coming! "The tried-and-true method is lots of easy distance in the summer, with a small amount of intensity and tiny bits of easy explosive/plyometrics, then increasingly more intensity and more plyometrics in the fall. Transition period starts when you get on snow, and you can back off a little on the intensity and do lots of easy distance again, for about three weeks. Then w...

The Doctor Skis

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The Sovereign2SilverStar race is on my want list, so when I looked at the results this year and saw that new KSC member Emily Stitt finished the skate race on Saturday as the first American female and sixth female overall, behind a handful of Canadian national team women (after spending the prior week backcountry skiing and camping, a whole new approach to tapering for a race), and then the classic race on Sunday as the eleventh female, right behind Laura McCabe, I determined to ask her for a race report for the blog.  photo: Vanessa Garrison But several people said, yeah, no, that’s not a good idea; she is totally buried in her day job as an intern and now a resident in anesthesia at the UW, and would not exactly welcome that request. Then I saw that she was the first female finisher in the Nordic ski leg at last month’s Ski to Sea, seventh overall, and I knew I had to find a way to hear her story. Emily's photo of her fun team So we met last week for an after-work gelato and an i...