One of the top U.S. skiers not on the national team, Alaska native James Southam has been moving up the results for many years. Last season at Soldier Hollow (UT) he finally captured his first national championship.
Right now James is training in West Yellowstone, MT along with a majority of the rest of the elite racers in the country. We talked earlier in the week about his training, goals, path through college and more:
How did this summer’s training go?
– It went really well. I was healthy all summer and I was able to pretty much do everything I wanted to, and made some pretty big changes to the training program. It seems to be working. I’ve been feeling in better shape now than I was last year.
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<BR><font size=1 face=verdana>Rollerskiing this Fall</font></center><BR></p>
<p><B>What were the big changes? </B></p>
<p>– Just a lot more intensity. I started working with Torbjorn [Karlsen], so it’s a lot of intervals; in general a lot more hard training than I’ve done before. I’ve been feeling the benefit, Fairbanks went well.</p>
<p><B>Yeah how did you feel in Fairbanks? </B></p>
<p>– It felt good. Physically it felt good, it was just squirrely, and the classic part was just kind of hacking around trying to get to the skate part. But I felt pretty good about it–a good start to the season.</p>
<p><B>Are you feeling pretty equal in classic and skating right now? </B></p>
<p>– I think so. It’s tough to tell. Technically skating feels better, just because I haven’t been classic skiing as much. But this week I’ve been doing just a lot of classic skiing and kind of getting the feeling back.</p>
<p><B>What do you work on at the beginning of the season? </B></p>
<p>– Just getting the feel–it’s hard to really put it into words better than that, but just getting the feel for riding the ski, that’s the biggest thing. I don’t really change the training program much. </p>
<p>It’s also nice that my first on-snow time is at sea level, so you don’t have to come up and deal with altitude as well as being on snow. And Fairbanks is an easy place to get on snow because it’s fast and it’s sea level. You can go on pretty mellow [terrain] if you want or some harder stuff if you want that too.</p>
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