Garrott Kuzzy races for the CXC Elite Team and won the 2008 overall SuperTour Sprint Title in 2007/2008. This article first appeared in Ski Post – www.skipost.com
A carefully maintained training log can be one of the best tools for becoming a better racer. I started my first training log when I began ski racing back in middle school. My log started in a notebook as a simple record of the date and how long I trained. Over the years, my log has evolved into a detailed record of my training activities, hours of training, hours of sleep, heart rates, recovery methods, and many more aspects that affect how I feel and how fast I can ski.
Through high school, I opened my training log infrequently and often went months without any update. After my freshman year in college, I sat down with my coach, Terry Aldrich, to review the season. He asked to see my log from the past year, but I had not kept up with it. Terry set one goal for me for the next year: “keep your training log up to date everyday, all year.†I wanted to write goals like, “win NCAA’s†and “compete at the U23 World Championships,†but somehow “keeping my log up-to-date†sounded more daunting than either of those performance goals! With that one goal in mind, I updated my log every day for the next year. When we sat down for the same meeting the following spring, I had a completed log and had coincidentally had my best ski season to date. Recording in that log did not directly make me ski any faster that year, but it gave me a template for years to come. Keeping a training log has become habit and I often look back on past logs when I am in doubt about how to handle a given situation. It’s exciting to see how the log turns from blank pages into a record of my life over the course of the season.
With the ski season right around the corner, I give you the same challenge that Terry gave me: record in your log everyday, all year. You will be surprised with the results!
