The first quarter of 2025 is behind me now. Reflecting on my training over this period has been interesting. The Christmas season was quite a bit different for me this year. In the past I use the time between Christmas and New Years to really bootstrap the coming year. Settle into a bit of a training camp mindset. Due to some illness issues in my family our plans for that period were updated at the last minute. Things scheduled out such that I had a long block in the alpine following Christmas proper. I had planned to spend my training time in this block on my XC skis. However, mother nature was kind to us this year and dropped piles of fresh snow. So not only is skate skiing in 15cm of fresh snow not very much fun but downhill skiing in the very same is wonderful. Needless to say, I didn’t XC ski to the level I had planned. Still outside in the alpine having physical adventures and loving it.

Following the holiday period I settled in to a pretty good rhythm: I was getting miles on the trainer and session in the gym. The weekends brought XC skis around long downhill ski days. Into February cold season entered the house and I got sick. Things really backed off through this time. It seemed like we were all just passing around colds, we only ever seemed to have one person in the family sick but as a collective we were sick for the whole month.

The second half of March is spring break and we move into the alpine for the duration. Like Christmas time the plan was to do a bit of training camp block and XC ski a bunch. Well, mother nature decided we had been very good this year and dropped piles of fresh powder just about every day for the first week. Every morning I got up to 20+cm of fresh snow. No way I am not downhill skiing with those kind of conditions! Into the second week of the block the temperatures sky rocketed up to about 8C without getting below freezing overnight. This is the other side of skate skiing - super warm snow makes for pretty crummy skate skiing. After a couple of warm days the snow returned again. All that said, I just didn’t cross country ski as I thought I would. I can’t get over just how good the downhill skiing was. For the first time in my ski life it felt like I was living in a Warren Miller movie.

So grading the past quarter I see things like this:

  • From an generic fitness point of view I am in good shape. I skied hard 16 days in a row. That included a number of two-a-days with an XC ski as well.
  • From a specific endurance point of view I am a ways behind where I wanted to be. I simply wasn’t consistent enough over the weeks to provide the steady load to make progress.

So I get probably a C for the first quarter. I am behind where I need to be for the spring racing I thought I might do. I have reworked my racing schedule to account for this.

Onto the next period!