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peaking

How Do You Make a Top-10 Biathlete a Medalist? Find 12 Seconds, Somewhere

Biathlon is a notoriously variable sport: besides skiing, there’s the shooting aspect which can ruin a race in a matter of seconds. Sometimes an athlete like Lowell Bailey wins a World Championship for the first time after 15 seasons competing; sometimes the most reliable guy in the sport, Martin Fourcade, finishes 46th. It’s a wild world. Norwegian PhD student Øyvind Skattebo set out to quantify just how variable the sport is, and what amount of improvement...

Wednesday Workout: The ‘Death Blow’ with Chad Salmela

St. Scholastica Head Coach Chad Salmela shares his timeless and Seinfeld-inspired “Death Blow” workout. "What I love about this workout is the raw intensity and guts required while doing it," he writes. "... [It's] primarily for athletes who have raced a bunch but still haven’t seemed to reach into their anaerobic bag of tricks fully."

If you imagine a typical skier’s career in FIS points, it will often follow a vaguely parabolic shape: they get faster for a while and then get slower for a while.  Somewhere in between there they “peaked”.  Our goal in this post is to estimate approximately when this occurs for each athlete and then see [...] Related posts:

  1. Skiing Performance and Age
  2. Best Young Distance Skiers: 2009-2010
  3. Best Young Sprint Skiers: 2009-2010

Adam St.Pierre, M.S. is the head coach of the Boulder Nordic Junior Racing Team and an exercise physiologist with the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine. As we approach the heart of the XC ski racing season, it is important that athletes adjust their training to get into peak form for the year’s big races, whether they be World Championships, SuperTours, or local events. Peaking is what endurance athletes try to do just before their most...