ALL PHOTOS BY ROGER CARRY (top & left – BCST summer training group athletes; right – Ella Renzoni; bottom – Morgan Pridy)
Fitness Season ~ written and submitted by BC Ski Team Coach Morgan Pridy
Hi all, welcome to a new year with the BCST, and I suppose at this point also a new year with the BCST Summer Training Group. We have welcomed several new faces to go along with some familiar ones. If you have no idea who I mean, I would check out our social media platforms so you can put some faces to names and meet the crew! If you have no desire or are otherwise incapable of navigating the social media world then let me tell you, they are a bunch of good eggs and we will leave it at that (http://bcalpine.com/news/article/2019-BCST-Summer-Training-Group/).
Now onto the “Where are we now?” “What are we doing?” “How is it going?” portion of the update. It’s fitness season! AKA summer… eventually AKA anytime we aren’t skiing. Now fitness season isn’t altogether that dissimilar from ski season; okay yes, it’s not on snow and you don’t actually have skis on and it takes place largely in the summer, but once that’s all out of the way, same same. Bring the focus, bring the intensity, bring the passion and the drive, then work your ass off to achieve what you’ve set out to achieve. Sounding a little bit closer? Add in the fact that it’s so much more about you versus you if you aim to make changes, and I could be talking about either one interchangeably. Make great habits and you will take them into the rest of the year, neglect them and it comes back to haunt you somewhere down the road. I guess I could just blanket the whole 365 with “athleting”. We are currently athleting and will continue to be athleting into November, then once we start racing we will also be athleting until next spring.
Where does all this take place? To forego tedious specifics it looks something like Home – a month in Whistler as a team – Home – mini camp in Whistler as a team – Home – Skiing (yay!).
Prior to our newbies arriving, it’s always a bit of a mystery as to what shape they will arrive in and what amount of work they are putting in at home on the heels of a long and demanding season. There isn’t exactly a right or wrong answer since recovering mentally is so closely tied to your physical state. The idea of some people decompressing with a book and others with a jog hasn’t been lost on me, so the hope is that everyone arrives at camp ready to work, and not necessarily that they arrive already in peak form (thankfully no one has arrived as a human wasteland up to this point).
Alright, so here we are, in Whistler and together as a team for the start of a month of centralized training, and I do love me some centralized training. “Team” on many levels needs to mean family. You don’t get to choose your family. This team is on the verge of a long season and they are about to spend countless hours not only just around each other, but living together, eating together, and sharing a year’s worth of ups and downs together. Having them centralized for a month in an environment where they are being pushed gives them every opportunity to understand one another. See how a person functions when they are tired, learn how a person responds to stress or happiness, fail and succeed together, then learn how to pick someone up; the list could run on and on. The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives (definitely didn’t steal that quote from a TV show no one watches…).
So here we are, all centralized and stuff in Whistler, now what do we do for training? Well, the team does a lot. The program is a real mutt when you start to break it down. A day could include several of a hundred things; maybe the modality varies but the main components to the week will always include strength specific to the lower body, core in all it’s forms, energy systems, and recovery. Yeah I know, that’s neither a surprise nor is it ground breaking, but it works.
We have answered the where and what, so how about how is the crew doing? They are pushing hard (mind you, no one has died of exhaustion yet soooo….), but really it’s been a full month and each and every one of them has stepped up to the task. The level of willingness to work has my respect and is not a common thing for a whole group to show. By mid month, the team had a good idea of each other’s strengths and began to use each other to push their own limits. Iron sharpens iron (credit: any interview from NFL training camps).
Next we have our mini fitness camp, a small but sturdy week to get the team back together for a little more sweat equity prior to getting back to what the crew has been working towards: getting on skis again in Chile.
I’ll leave you with a little trivia from the month, maybe you can guess whose name goes with what:
- If your roof rack with a bike didn’t fit in the underground the first time, it definitely wasn’t going to fit the second time…
- “Sorry”
- “Is this even F***ing yoga!?”
- Feet, head, feet, no handed cartwheel off his bike
- Teams best napper, by a mile.
- Gerrit. Dylan. Tait/everyone… Marcus. Ella.
