This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. A new study landed in my feed last week, and I will admit the algorithm has my number. It steered me toward a question I have chewed on more than once here at FasterSkier: when it comes to low-intensity training, are you better off concentrating volume into one big week,...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. A Different Equation Masters’ athletes are often told to “train smarter, not harder,” or the current version: “Go easy on the endurance sessions so you can go hard on the intense sessions.” Those phrases get repeated so often they’ve lost context and meaning. But there is a real physiological reason...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. I was reviewing recent U.S. Ski & Snowboard Cross Country Sport Committee meeting minutes and came across an interesting note in the April 7, 2026, meeting. The following item stood out: “Rick shared the announcement of adding Para Cross Country and that there is a strong drive from the...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. A review of a recently published paper from Norway, “Long-term development culture for sustainable Olympic success: Lessons learned from Norwegian cross-country skiing” by Jacob Walther and Øyvind Sandbakk, is worth the time. Long-term development culture for sustainable Olympic success: Lessons learned from Norwegian cross-country skiing – ScienceDirect We’ve all heard...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Where do High School and USCSA programs fit into our development. In a recent article, I laid out the disconnect between what we say about long-term development in Nordic skiing and what we do and the rewards. “Long-Term Development in Nordic Skiing: What We Say vs. What We Actually Do”....
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Where do Plyometrics Fit Within a Training Program Hint: You Don’t Start with Plyometrics Over the past few years there’s been a noticeable shift in how athletes and coaches talk about training. More emphasis on power. More interest in being “explosive.” That’s a good direction. Cross-country skiing is a power-endurance...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. As this ski season wraps up, many of us coaches are doing similar work. Using spreadsheets or a popular training platform, we map out training for the year. We plan the yearly hours, monthly hours, and weekly hours, along with defining the training intensity distribution. We also plan how long...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. As the season winds down, it’s worth stepping back and asking a simple question: Does the way we develop young skiers in the United States reflect the philosophy we say we believe in? I know everyone is probably done with hearing about how the Norwegians do it, so let’s look...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. This essay by Jim Galanes was written on the evening of the Olympic Men’s Classic Sprint in Val di Fiemme, when Ben Ogden won silver to become the first American man in 50 years to medal in an Olympic cross-country skiing event. It was drafted from the race course...
John Caldwell, born November 28, 1928, passed away February 27 at 97 years old. John’s contribution to cross-country skiing in the United States is unquestioned. He was a 1952 Olympian in Nordic Combined. He wrote several books on cross-country skiing that became our training guidance, our bibles, in the early and mid-1970s. He was a long-time teacher and coach at The Putney School, an early U.S. Ski Team coach, and a member of the coaching...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. In my coaching and consulting work, I get a lot of questions about using heart rate variability (HRV) to guide training. This is a follow-up to a previous article, where I want to move from theory to practice and show how HRV has been one of the most valuable...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, passed in 1978 and amended several times (most notably in 1998 and 2020), is the statute that created the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) and granted National Governing Bodies (NGBs) exclusive, monopolistic, authority over Olympic sports in the United States....
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you would like to see more articles like this one, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. A few weeks ago, I sat down with Kris Freeman expecting a fairly general conversation about his skiing career. What I got instead was a clear-eyed, detailed account of two decades inside U.S. men’s distance skiing, performances, missed opportunities, technical evolution, and the political forces that...
After my posted articles on FasterSkier on “Junior Nationals” and “What’s the Hurry”, there was some anticipated discussion on my statements around over training, burn out, and the attrition rate in the sport. When I write, it is based on my experience, my research, and my opinion. I encourage and welcome the debate. Over training and burnout in junior athletes is real I think it is important to define the ways I view over training...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you would like to see more articles like this one, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Over the last six days, I drove 1,000 miles down to Tucson and 1,000 miles back to visit Bob Treadwell, a teammate on the U.S. Ski Team in the mid-’70s, along with our friend Tim Caldwell, who most readers will know from his long run...
What follows is a simplified training philosophy that works, if you apply it consistently. I’m focusing on the core elements of endurance sports: aerobic endurance and capacity (VO₂max), strength, speed, and appropriate training volume. These are the levers that matter. Coaches love to talk about nuance and the next latest and greatest shinny object: not going too hard during distance days, going hard enough during high-intensity sessions, finding the right dose of speed and strength,...
This is a follow up to the reporting of an abuse case that occurred in March of 2025 within a major Colorado club. An initial report was posted on Faster Skier earlier this summer. This subsequent article is an attempt to keep all such issues front and center so that athletes and coaches will feel safe, so that families will feel faithfully represented, and so that governing bodies will stand behind their responsibility to protect...
We read it again and again in studies, articles, and coaching posts: “Training volume is the best predictor of performance.” It’s one of the most consistent findings in exercise science, appearing across endurance sports for decades, and in national training systems. But the statement is often repeated without understanding what it really means, or more importantly what it doesn’t. One reason this line gets repeated so often is that “train more” is an easy message...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you would like to see more articles like this one, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. I’ve been curious for a long time about participation trends in cross-country skiing and what direction the data might point. Ideally, I’d like to see longitudinal data over 10-20 years, but that kind of dataset doesn’t appear to be publicly available. Still, there are several...
Over the years, I have often been asked to review training programs for junior athletes. Most of the time, these requests come when an athlete is underperforming, showing signs of overtraining, or failing to make anticipated steps in competition. Unfortunately, these situations occur far more often than we might think. In fact, I have reviewed at least a dozen similar cases in recent years, where athletes share the same training and performance profile: high motivation,...