The Spice in the Soup: How Adam St. Pierre Thinks You Should Train

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Part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.

A parent once cornered Adam St. Pierre to complain that he was letting the kids play games. St. Pierre had ten-year-olds on skis running sharks and minnows, shrieking and chasing each other across the snow, and the parent was not paying club dues for that. “I want coaching and training,” the parent told him. “This is…” and you can fill in the disappointment.

St. Pierre thinks sharks and minnows on skis is one of the most effective training tools there is. He was lucky, he says, to have a parent board that backed him up in those rare confrontations, because he had no intention of stopping. Kids who are laughing are kids who come back, and kids who come back are the only kids who ever get good.

That belief sits at the center of a coach who, on paper, should be the last person preaching simplicity. St. Pierre has a master’s in exercise science, a background running lactate and VO2 tests on athletes, and a relationship with a Montana State physiology lab that has done extensive work with U.S. Biathlon on both the metabolic and biomechanical sides. He reads the research. He can talk ratios and thresholds for as long as you’ll let him. And his most strongly held convictions keep coming out disarmingly plain. Go easy most of the time. Be consistent. Make it fun enough that people stick around. The science, in his hands, mostly ends up confirming things your grandmother could have told you.

Consistency over the big block

Start with periodization, the idea that a training year should be built in escalating blocks toward a peak. St. Pierre is skeptical of the old-school version of it, and his reasons are specific. A lot of that model, he points out, traces back to weightlifting research, some of it from an era when the subjects were quietly using anabolic steroids, which is not a foundation you want under your training plan. The rest tends to come from single-event sports. “In the marathon world or the Ironman world, you’ve got one event,” he said. “You just need to be good for that one event, like on August 2nd or whatever.” Skiing is not that. A ski racer has to be good across a whole season, weekend after weekend, from November into March.

He points to a meta-analysis, published fairly recently, that looked at the day-to-day training of today’s top Norwegians. The finding was not a secret block of magic. “It really is consistency,” he said. “They’re not doing a big August and a big October. They do big weeks and recovery, and it’s just a very consistent progression.”

The metaphor he keeps coming back to is one he borrows from Marius Bakken, the former Norwegian runner he half-jokingly calls a father of the Norwegian method. Intensity, in this telling, is not the meal. It is the seasoning. “The base of the soup is your endurance training,” St. Pierre said, “and then you add in a little bit of zip here and there. But if you put in too much zip, the soup is not going to be very good.” Roughly 90 percent of the work, whether on foot, on roller skis, on snow, or on a bike, is easy volume. The intensity is the spice, and Americans, he thinks, are forever dumping in too much.

Only what’s livable

There is also a question underneath all of this that the textbooks tend to skip, which is whether any of it is actually livable. St. Pierre still remembers sitting in a USA Triathlon coaching course, listening to a periodization lecture, and asking what he thought was the obvious question. What about a working person who cannot train 24 hours a week but could manage 16? What do you do with them? The answer from the front of the room was that they should take a vacation day and get the training in. “That’s not it,” he said. “That doesn’t work.” His approach is the reverse. Figure out what someone can actually do, how many hours are genuinely available, and then fill those hours with the best workouts possible.

At MSU that math is dictated by a school calendar, and he has stopped fighting it. His athletes train before 10 a.m. so they can make a 10 o’clock class, and again in the afternoon, with nothing scheduled after 4 or 4:30. That produces a seven-day rhythm rather than the ten-day cycles some coaches prefer. Tuesday is intensity, usually threshold or VO2 work. Wednesday is a double of easy distance, with a few technique drills thrown in at the start to get the neurons firing before the athletes head out. Thursday morning is pure speed. Saturday brings intensity again, often paired with the long distance day. You cannot send skiers out for a two-hour roller ski on a Wednesday morning if they have class at ten, so you don’t. “There’s lots of ways to make a great soup,” he said, and it is not worth inducing a pile of needless stress to chase a perfect one.

Two tests without a lab

For readers without a lab down the hall, two of St. Pierre’s tools travel well. The first he calls a VT1 run, VT1 being the top of the easy zone, the hardest you can go while staying genuinely aerobic. Once a week, on flat ground, his athletes run 20 to 30 minutes at that effort and note the relationship between pace and heart rate. Flat terrain because it is the most reproducible. The point is twofold. It tracks fitness: if you run nine-minute miles at 150 beats in early summer and eight-minute miles at 150 by August, you have improved. And it works as an early-warning system. “One of the first signs of overreaching is a change in that heart rate to workload ratio,” he said. If the pace slows at the same heart rate, and it is not 105 degrees out and you are not dehydrated, it is probably time to rest. The signal can run the other way too. An athlete who normally sees 180 during intervals but suddenly cannot push the heart rate above 160 is, in his words, showing a pretty golden sign. Take some rest.

The second tool he lifted from cycling: a five-minute maximal effort, a long recovery of maybe half an hour with some refueling, then a 20-minute maximal effort. The ratio between the two tells you whether an athlete leans anaerobic and sprint-oriented or aerobic and distance-oriented, no lab required. He built a version of it into his athletes’ training plans. He is quick to add the caveat that governs all of this, in the field or in the lab. Heat, dehydration, and altitude bend every number, and even a lab lactate value shifts with hydration. “No one metric is the god metric,” he said. “You’ve always got to have that context.”

Building complete skiers

The individualization matters more now because the college game is about to change. Sprinting is coming to the NCAA Championships, a change St. Pierre cares about personally, because he wrote the proposal years ago and watched it slowly work its way toward reality. In anticipation, he is nudging the team’s intensity mix, keeping most of the hard work at threshold but adding more VO2 and anaerobic speed than a pure distance program would. One test the MSU lab ran compares an athlete’s VO2 at threshold to their VO2 max. A skier sitting well above the roughly 90 percent that is typical probably skews distance and might gain from more VO2 work to lift the ceiling. A skier down in the low numbers might benefit from more threshold. Even so, his priority is all-around development. The sprinters still do threshold. The distance skiers still do speed. He wants complete skiers, partly because a race does not always let an athlete choose its terms. If a distance race comes down to a mass sprint, a distance skier who cannot find another gear finishes 20th.

The place where St. Pierre thinks American skiing has a real and underrated advantage is strength. He knows the reputation, that Norwegians do not lift, and allows it may be true of many of them. He also knows that the Norwegians who have come through his own program found the strength work novel. As part of a university, MSU has a strength coach, Benito, a former mountain bike racer at UVM and one of the rare ones who understands endurance sport, and the two of them build a program meant to complement the skiing rather than pull against it. St. Pierre credits it for keeping his team generally healthy, and he pushes back on the notion that skiers only need core and pull-ups. “If you can produce power with your legs,” he said, “that’s necessary.”

He connects strength to a broader idea about movement economy, and here he reaches, carefully, for the Nike Oregon Project. Setting aside the doping and the scandal that eventually swallowed that program, he finds one lesson from it genuinely useful. Its coach had noticed American distance runners getting outkicked, so the group attacked the last 400 meters with sprint work, max strength, and plyometrics. The athletes did improve their finishing kick. They also got faster over the first 9,600 meters of a 10k. Better economy, it turned out, does not just help you sprint. It lets you hold a faster pace all day.

The long game

If that all sounds relentlessly optimized, it is worth returning to the sharks and minnows, because the fun is not a break from the method. It is the method. His college team plays ultimate on skis, using a ball instead of a frisbee to remove the throwing barrier, usually after a track workout, and they lobby to play more. For the youngest kids, he has long argued that the travel race is not really about the race. A ten-year-old drives across the state to ski a 1k, and the actual point is the hotel pool, the snowbanks, the hide-and-seek, the exhaustion on day two that horrifies the parents. “This is why kids get into ski racing,” he said. “It’s not the ski race. It’s hanging out with your friends in the hotel room.” Those bonds are what turn a ten-year-old into a fifteen-year-old who wants to go do a long mountain run with the same crew, and a fifteen-year-old who stays in the sport into an adult who never leaves it.

Which is finally how St. Pierre defines success, and it is not a medal count. He worries a little about the sport’s fixation on the Nations Cup, because doing well in it requires a lot of athletes racing a full season well, and he is not sure the American pipeline has that base yet. He points to Jessie Diggins as the rare skier who reached the level where she could show up week in and week out and land in the top five every time. Whether that season-long consistency cost her an Olympic medal or two is, he admits, a whole separate and unanswerable question. Finding metrics for development beyond international results is genuinely hard, which is part of why he has soft-started a PhD. The idea is to pull two decades of national points lists and track individual athletes year over year. Are American skiers actually getting better as they age, or do they wash out? The kid who was brilliant at 18 and gone by 22 is memorable, he notes, but memorable is not the same as typical. “Is that the rule or the exception? I think that’s the exception,” he said. “I’d like to have some data to back up my opinion.” The numbers are public. He just needs the time.

His personal definition is quieter. He wants his athletes to develop far enough that the door to international racing is open if they want to walk through it, and he wants the ones who don’t to keep loving skiing anyway, as coaches, as parents raising their own little skiers, or simply as people who stay active and outdoors for the rest of their lives. He tries to live it as a father, chasing his own two kids up mountains in the summer and out onto snow in the winter. “There’s so much outside of skiing,” he said, “that makes skiing great.”

 

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