Trond Nystad, the US Ski Team Head XC ski coach and his co-coaches are busy men these days – coaching, helping and administrating six National A-Team members, five Development team members and six additional ambitious “want to be World Cup skiers”.
We caught up with Trond on September 19th following a two-hour morning skating rollerski workout up Mirror Lake Highway outside Park City:
“Easy skiing in easy gradual uphill terrain was on the agenda. The start point in the town of Kamas was roughly at 6000 feet and the pick-up point two-hour or 30-40 kilometer later at 8000 feet. It was a beautiful sunny, cold morning where everyone understood perfectly well why they have chosen to be cross country skiers”.
 was spent in New Zealand – three weeks of good training where most of it was done as skiing.<br />
Fairbanks, Alaska follows Park City (October 22nd to November 10th).</p>
<p>Carl Swenson and Kris Freeman will then travel over to Europe all pre-Christmas World Cup races starting with Beitostolen, Norway. The rest of the team will go from Alaska to West Yellowstone (November 19th to 30th), Montana and participate in domestic NorAm races. The price money at the NorAm races are good so it should be exciting.</p>
<p><B>Philosophy</B><br />
“The training in New Zealand was solid with training hours from 65 to 80+ hours when looking at a 4-week cycle. Everyone trained by themselves for the two weeks following the return to the US. The goal was to recover and get ready for a step-up in the number of interval sessions and the intensity in them during this six week long Park City Camp.</p>
<p>We are shooting for 2-3 weekly hard session – this can be two in one week, three the next and so on. We will also do one period where we do six quality sessions in a period of 14 days.</p>
<p>We are now including some ski-walking intervals after mostly doing running, rollerskiing and bounding intervals earlier this summer and fall.<br />
We’ll do two time-trials – one running and one rollerskiing<br />
We are doing mostly longer intervals but now and then a session with many short intervals and short recovery.</p>
<p>This upcoming period also includes several 1-2 minute long very hard interval session – high lactates and long(er) recovery. We want to be prepared for the mass-start races. We are also preparing for another 4-6 week period of max strength before returning to more traditional strength training”</p>
<p><B>Carl Swenson Returns</B><br />
Trond was excited that Carl Swenson had returned to Park City to start working out with the team again. Carl has spent the summer doing mountain bike racing including the World Championship. A 79th place (at Worlds) was probably below what he had hoped for after last year’s 5th place in the World’s Nordic 50K World Championship. For now the focus is on the Cross-Country World Cup opener a little more than two month away, where he and Kris Freeman will represent the USSA.</p>
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