My friday thoughts and some training advice

The winter (with snow and ice) doesn’t seem to come to our latitudes this year (either). This week It has though been minus degrees but as a skier I am waiting for snow, desperately. The following weeks are the most important in my training year. In february I have planned to take part in two or three marathon skiing competitions in Finland, and in beginning of March in the worldś most famous Marathon ski competition, Vasaloppet, in Sweden. If I want to succeed in the competitions, I must get a lot of time on snow now.

Then to my training advice:

Clever cardio training

I know there are many out there who are training for a competition or any event in sports. It may be running (half marathon, marathon, trail running), cycling, ironman, skiing or whatsoever. Most of you have jobs, families and much to do. It may be hard to find time for training. My training advice for you are not to train much, but to train cleverly and effectively. 2 hours of effective training may be as good as 5 hours of less effective training. For many of you this may sound obvious, but I also know that many exercisers are trying to copy the elite competitors and does lots and lots of training without getting so good results. I have recently read a book “smart konditionsträning” written by Erik Wickström. It is in swedish but the common sense of that book is to “train smart”, “think out of the box” and “not copy the elite”. I would recommend this book to all of you that want to get better without spending all your leisure time on training. (unfortunately the book is only in swedish)

My training so far this week hasn't been great. It has been a week with a lot of things to do both at work and at home and not much time for training. I have done a few short quality training sessions so far this week. Hopefully I will get two longer training sessions in the weekend.

40 min of Skierg (intervals: 4+4+4x500m) medium
45 min of Skierg (intervals: 2x5000m) hard
Running intervals (8x750m) medium/hard

As follow the heart rate curve from my second training session. Half of the session in "maximal" zone. Good.

And of course...Premier league is back this weekend, NICE! hopefully Chelsea will take all the three points. Interesting to see if the new "kid", Ross Barkley will make the bench, though I think itś too early. He will surely be in contention for the second leg of the FA cup against Norwich next week. KTBFFH!

See you!