Kikkan Randall is back! Logging hours with her APU teammates in Anchorage and with the U.S. Ski Team at camps, the three-time Sprint Cup winner is looking forward to packing her Aeropress and heading back to the World Cup after a season off last year while pregnant with her son, Breck.
Having joined the SMST2 Elite Team this year as well as enrolling at Dartmouth College, Kern has made some changes and is looking forward to another big year. "I think there isn’t one specific area where I have seen improvement over the past few months, but actually in every area," she wrote.
Go, go, go. That's the type of energy Liz Stephen brings to skiing. From a high-tempo skate technique to steeper is better, Stephen has been a force on the Distance World Cup since her push into the top 30 in 2012. Last year was a setback for the Park City resident and she feels like this offseason she's done the work to make a rebound.
Over the dryland season, U.S. Ski Team sprinter Simi Hamilton has been working on improving his double poling and as always -- keeping the soul fed with adventure training. “I have been playing around with a much shorter range of motion on the climbs to keep my tempo much higher,” he explains.
After her first SuperTour podium and junior national titles last season, Sugar Bowl Academy's Hannah Halvorsen snagged a U.S. Ski Team nomination. Now she's making the most of her first training season without school.
U.S. Ski Team and Alaska Pacific University skier Sadie Bjornsen has seen a few changes this summer including an increase in monthly training hours and the number of those sessions with her teammate Kikkan Randall. "It was definitely a new level of training for me, but I felt like I was able to absorb it, so that was cool," Bjornsen said.
It's back to school and the World Cup for U.S. Ski Team A-teamer Ida Sargent. Based out of Craftsbury, the Vermont native has been mindful to keep her training quality high. As she readies for the first World Cup in late November, she'll also keep her mind sharp while taking online classes in public health.
U.S. Ski Team member Noah Hoffman tackles our "17 Questions" series, revealing a summer of concerts and cornhole while he tries to conserve energy and improve recovery from an increased training load.
A closer look at the U.S. Ski Team's new selection criteria for 2017 World Championships, designed to reward the top performers in a given season and discourage points chasing. “Athletes who skied fast in the spring of the previous season no longer have a potential advantage over those athletes skiing fast in the current season," U.S. Ski Team Head Coach Chris Grover wrote. "...The athlete that is winning races is most likely going to make the Team.”
Everything's better with a group -- at least in terms of threshold interval workouts. In this "Throwback Workout" from three years ago, U.S. women's coach Matt Whitcomb explains why this was one of the best workouts he had seen back then. “It doesn’t need to be incredibly hard — today was roughly threshold and above during bursts of speed — but it was about the terrain that helped push the pace for us,” he said.
After two weeks in Norway, U.S. Ski Team sprinter Andy Newell returned with some new ideas for double poling and a better sense of why skiing is so huge there. "Maybe the coolest part about training in Norway during the summer is not just the awesome roads and cooler weather but also to get a taste of that skiing culture," he explained.
During the U.S. Ski Team's Alaska camp this month, FasterSkier caught the team during a rollerski in Anchorage and chatted with U.S. women's coach Matt Whitcomb. He addressed everything from the upcoming World Championships to Kikkan Randall's return, the assimilation of new team members, and what gives the U.S team its competitive edge.
Martin Fourcade, the most successful biathlete of the last several years, resorted to Twitter to ask his international federation about the ten positive tests by Russian athletes allegedly hidden by the Russian Ministry of Sport. He didn't get a response. Meanwhile, the IOC moved forward with re-testing anti-doping samples from all Russian athletes at the 2014 Olympics, and also called for any major events scheduled to be held in Russia to be moved.
Anchorage-based reporter Gavin Kentch observes and outlines the ins-and-outs of a U.S. Ski Team classic speeds rollerski. U.S. women's coach Matt Whitcomb explains how each session is deliberately engineered and how a single workout can vary among individuals. (Includes photos and video clips)
Happy Father's Day to all the pat-on-the-back, "go get 'em kid!" dads out there. We asked U.S. and Canadian national-team skiers to share the best advice or lessons they learned from their dad. As Ian Torchia's dad told him: "You know what happens to hot dogs, Ian? They get eaten!"
We recently caught up with U.S. Ski Team member Noah Hoffman -- which is not such a easy thing to do lately as he's training big hours -- to discuss his new training paradigm and how it came to be. If you're training big hours too, this podcast serves as good recovery.
High-quality hours and lots of them: that's a focus for U.S. Ski Team member Noah Hoffman this offseason. Currently in Park City, Utah, Hoffman began a two-week block earlier this week during which he'll accrue 53 training hours. FasterSkier got a snapshot of what Day 1 looks like.
At the helm of the U.S. Cross Country Ski Team since 2010, head coach Chris Grover sits down with FasterSkier to talk what success might look like in the future and the challenges he faces as a coach. The snow may be gone, but Grover and the team are in full preparation mode for the 2016/2017 World Cup season.
On Wednesday, June 1, U.S. Ski Team veteran Kikkan Randall plans to resume training, six weeks after giving birth to her first child. While she's admittedly antsy, she also knows it's wise to ease back into things with a goal of peaking for 2017 World Championships. “I’m really curious to see how it feels,” she said of racing. “My body is refreshed from a little break, my mind is refreshed and that could open totally new doors.”
At the first on-snow camp of the season at Mt. Bachelor in Bend, Ore., the U.S. Ski Team aims to jumpstart its training year with high-volume training loads and a series of technique sessions. On Wednesday, they targeted uphill striding and herringboning, using instant videos to provide trailside feedback.