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Coach, competitor, correspondent, commentator—Jim Galanes has spent a lifetime on cross country skis, always serving as a keen observer of our sport. A three-time Olympian in both Cross-Country and Nordic Combined, Jim has tested the theories, initiated the instruction, assessed the results. Now, FasterSkier is thrilled to announce that Jim joins our staff of writers and contributors, adding his unique and time-tested insights to the editorial offerings of this publication.
FasterSkier recently sat down with Jim to discuss his insights—and his hopes—for the sport of cross-country skiing.
Jim Galanes—“Over the last couple years, I’ve begun to feel a responsibility to involve myself in some of these issues around Junior development,” said Galanes. “For too long, we’ve not been willing to have productive discussions on those issues. It’s time . . .”
FS—What are the issues you think that are important to consider in junior development right now?
Jim Galanes—The biggest issue I see is this: skier development needs to take place slowly. This goes back to my first days in coaching when I certainly made mistakes. We found talented kids at 13, 14, 15 years old, and we tried to rush them along. So now we have a long track record of burning out or losing a lot of these talented, eager kids.
Between my 30 years in Alaska and time in New England, I see a common theme. I tried to count them; I think I got up to around 100 athletes that I identified who were we’re kind of tagged as “the next great thing” at 13, 14, 15 years old. Maybe only one or two of them really survived in the sport.
FS—How do you think the other athletes might’ve been better served, programmatically? What mistakes do you think might’ve been made?
Jim Galanes—Well, I can only base it on what I’ve done and what I’ve seen. I think when you get somebody with talent, they’re often 13 or 14 years old. They’re typically really motivated, and they end up training with the older age groups. I think they just get pushed along, and their bodies (or their minds) aren’t ready for that type of training. They end up washing out; their best years are really U16. Maybe they make it a year or two into the U18 age group, but eventually their peers catch up with them. Ultimately, most of them quit skiing and move on.
FS—How much of that do you think is a natural progression and how much of it do you think is systematic? Sometimes, you’re dealing with a young skier and they’re just physically more mature than their peers. And as you say, their peers eventually catch up. How much of that skier fading from the sport is just the disappointment of being caught, and how much of it do you think it is a systematic failure?
Jim Galanes—I think a lot of it is a systematic failure. From what I’ve witnessed, we have an innate desire to accelerate their training and their development. I’ve seen it here in Colorado over the last decade that I’ve been here. Just in our county, alone, I can identify plenty of young skiers who dominated the U16 age groups, but they really couldn’t even go on and ski in college.
I’d made those mistakes when I was just getting into coaching. I coached a few other kids in Alaska, and even with the best intentions, we were doing things at 13, 14 years old that we just shouldn’t have been doing: too much distance, too much high intensity training, not enough focus on just having fun and skiing technically well. I think that that initial phase of their development was just too much.
Specialization isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. It’s just how you how you approach it and some kids at 13-14 might be ready to. I still see it written up that athletes need so many hours (of specific nordic training) to be successful. And you gotta start those hours when you’re 13 14 years old. That’s a damaging philosophy: I downplay the hours approach the training a lot because I think it’s it’s a trap. What we’re looking for is to improve fitness and build from where the athlete is not trying to throw them into 500 hours at 14 or 15 years old just because that’s what it says on some chart. And I always tell people “An hour’s not an hour.” Measuring training by hours is only legitimate if the athlete has total control over their own intensity. And coaching 13 14 year-olds, we find that they don’t have training zones. They don’t have intensity control. Coaches advise Level 1, Level 2, and young athletes simply blow right through. I’ve done a lot of work over that particular issue in the last 10 or 15 years, and through a lot of athletes I’ve worked with. I start digging in into their training and I see things like 75 % 80% of their workouts they hit “threshold” (not a term I like using very often, but one that describes the problem). And they maintain those higher intensities all the time, just cranking it out. I don’t think we’re teaching kids how to train! My Focus on the sport these days is I’ve got athletes from 14 years old up to 80 years old, and I think a lot of times with training we miss the mark and don’t play the long game.
FS—And skiing at world class levels has definitely become a long game, with the careers of professional skiers extending well into their 30’s. Do you think that young athletes habitually over-intensifying their training runs counter to the controlled environment that top athletes are following today?
Jim Galanes—I look back at my own training and the days that I should’ve been going low intensity. I would go in the mountains up in Alaska and run for four or five hours at significantly too high intensity, and doing it chronically! What we experienced was a brief period—two to three weeks in early December—when we’d go to the early races and excellent and then we’d be crap for four or five or six weeks. I think Bill Koch was probably the only one who was smarter than the rest of us when it came to that. Just the way we trained led to very inconsistent or unpredictable performance. I think now we know that long range performance requires better control in the implementation of workouts, and better nutrition, and better recovery, and better understanding. I think the training process hasn’t changed that much, but the understanding of how to do it has improved a lot.
FS—How do you think your perspective as a lifetime participant and contributor and observer of the sport? There’s a perspective gained by someone—like yourself—who has watched the sport from your angle. How would you describe that? Where is the value in listening to those who molded the sport in an earlier era?
Jim Galanes—You know, I’m sure a lot of people would wish I just go away and stop talking, but I think what I experienced both as an athlete and in my early years of coaching is really framed how I think now. Whether it’s in social media poster or personal communication, I always tell people that more isn’t always better. I’m kind of anti-volume: what’s important in creating training volume is how we build up to that volume and how we manage it over the long game.
And that that that’s the biggest hurdle I’ve seen with coaching juniors. I can go back to when I was at Stratton Mountain School in the 90’s, or when I started the Goal 2002 APU program in Anchorage. Those were the things we were really trying to do for these young athletes so that they could go out and train at that level, and have it be productive training.
For me, the best training is learning good technique and really refining it. I tell people it took me 10 years to really learn how to ski efficiently and effectively. We need to teach young skiers good ski technique across the intensity domain; it’s really important that they learn they can ski with the proper movements and sound technique at that low intensity. You know, I honestly don’t know how other coaches are approaching it. Regardless, I feel like this is one of the shortcomings in American skiing in spite of mandating educational requirements for ski coaches. I don’t think we have a good handle on sharing information in this country
FS—Well, writing for FasterSkier may become a way to do that. And, fortunately, yours is a name that people should know and respect. They should appreciate that yours is a perspective that’s valid. You’re not someone who’s an unknown quantity and there’s a good reason for the community to listen to and consider what you have to say. So I think this is a great opportunity to do that.
Jim Galanes—I mean, hopefully we can create a dialogue; that’s a good thing. I think that’s what we need in sports. In the 80’s, when Torbjorn Karlsson first came to the US to coach the US ski team, he started showing me all this information that (Norwegian coaches) were sharing back then. That was kind of the bread and butter information that US skiers had, and good results eventually followed. Then Nikolai Anikin came to the country with the Soviet methods, and John Underwood came back from master’s degree work in Finland with the Finnish approach. But we still don’t have a good mechanism in this country to share information! In Summit County, Colorado, we started having kind of weekly coaches’ coffee once every two weeks just to talk about stuff. What are we learning? What are we seeing? What are we thinking we could do differently or should be done differently? I think that’s where the true learning comes from.
FS—Does it sometimes seem like the American system is holding back information, or enforcing a kind of coaching indoctrination around watered-down or over-simplified philosophies?
Jim Galanes—Well, I know more about how the Norwegians the Swedes the Finns design their programs than I know about the US Ski Team. I’ve got friends and coaching friends in all those Scandinavian countries, and we openly discuss what they’re doing, what works, what didn’t work, and what comes next. I’m familiar with how those countries are training and what their philosophies are because I engage in discussions with those countries. I haven’t found the US system to be nearly as open. Maybe that’s because I haven’t shelled out the money to go through the American coaches’ education system. I don’t know, I feel like that that kind of information ought to be free and available. We should be talking about it all the time, not just at occasional coaching seminars where we watch PowerPoint presentations and roller ski around a parking lot.
I’ve written a lot about our sport—and tried to have discussions in person and in social media—and a lot of the time I haven’t presented it in the best way. It can be received as, “There goes Jim again, telling people what they ought to be doing.” When my real motivation is “Let’s talk about these issues, shoot holes in my arguments, demonstrate to me where I’m wrong or where my reasoning is flawed.” That sort of interaction helps us all learn because we have these dialogues about opposing points of view. And I think that’s the best coaches’ education. I’ve learned more by sitting with my old friends, having conversations, having them challenge my understanding of physiology and forcing me to learn.
FS—Obviously, multiple and diverse voices could add to those discussions if logical venues can be found to voice them. So it’ll be great to have your input and your voice added to FasterSkier. I’m sure that our readers are gonna love it.
Jim Galanes—Well, we’ll find out! At least we’ll know that we’re all talking about a sport we love.
