The more I do cross-country skiing, the more I realize how lucky I was with my first coaches. And with the second ones, by the way, too – but more on them later.
I just can’t ask those with whom I started at the Elizovo sports ski school: why weren’t you like the others, why didn’t you follow the beaten path coaching?
And the most common is this: at the age of fifteen or sixteen, bring, reach the hall to the badge of a master of sports. Then to victories in zonal competitions. And in the final – to the junior team. That’s it, you can rejoice in the work successfully done!
I don’t want to be misunderstood. Increasing MS in cyclic types is not easy. The question is how to achieve it. I’m not talking about doping. It no longer exists in ski racing; EV Vyalbe fought for it decisively and successfully. You have to be a complete idiot to gorge yourself on all sorts of “forbidden things” in order to get into the national team, where women and men with the beautiful name “anti-doping agent” will come to see you for appointments about once a month.
No, it’s something else. The sports mentor of any fifteen-year-old skier who has met the master candidate standard is faced with a choice: how to progress further?
In cross-country skiing, as, I suppose, in other cyclical sports, there are two ways to bring a young athlete to the national team: by focusing on developing skiing technique or by accelerating functional training.
I explain it differently: in the first option, the coach spends a lot of time with you, working on the nuances of the technique, often individually. It is understood that the coach himself is aware of the latest research in this area – no one runs on skis like 10 years ago, and 20 years ago it was a completely different sport, technically. This is the path my coaches chose in Elizovo. And that’s why I win now, and not thanks to some mythical “talent”.
The second option is much simpler, and it can be used not individually, but with the entire training group: to hell with the equipment – you give large volumes of training, mileage!
For the most persistent and enduring, the volumes turn into results relatively quickly. Barely 17-18 years.
There’s only one problem: it’s much harder to expand further: the ceiling. To improve results, it is necessary to add volumes each season until a certain plateau is reached, around 25-26 years of age. And the “forced” juniors have almost nothing to add: they already train non-stop, the body can no longer digest.
Here is a personal example: Artemy Vladimirovich Gelmanov, our junior women’s coach, always asks the recruits: how much time did you train last year before the junior national team? In the old way, in kilometers. So I covered 3,500 km in a year. Yes, this is not enough even by the standards of 2018, when I was selected for the national team. But I got on the podium thanks to my movement technique – thanks again to the Kamchatka coaches. And now the girls calmly call the numbers like this: 8,000, and even 9,000 km. This is not just a lot, it is a monstrously large amount for 17-18 year olds!
Look, personally, I don’t care anymore: at 23, my workload is nowhere near what it was five years ago. And there’s room to grow – I’m still nowhere near Tanya Sorina’s number of training hours.
But my sister is growing up, she is twelve years old, and she is thinking more and more about a serious sports career.
And I understand more and more that my coaches took professional risks, went against the grain. After all, a coach’s success is determined by the victories of his students. To win an Olympic medal, you have to join the main team, and 95% of those who come are from the junior team, exceptions are extremely rare. Which means “give the afterburner”!
This problem is not new at all. And certainly not purely Russian. Maybe someone remembers that in our junior years our main competitors were Polish girls? Where are they now in cross-country skiing? That’s right, not even close to the podium. The same can be said about American, Finnish and German women of my generation.
And all because the system is built the same way all over the world: children’s coaches want to see their players in the junior team – and you, a teenager, see absolutely no reason to refuse. At 18-19 years old this gives a lot, for example:
My point of view is known: you have to do sports to win the Olympics or become a world champion. In the current conditions – the Spartakiad and the Russian Championship.
To play sports professionally just to somehow fulfill the standard with difficulty and fight every time to be included in the national team, to be accepted for a position in the Central Sports Club – this is a bad investment of time and effort. Life passes while you are in training camp, year after year.
But what if you’re 18 – you have ambitions and perseverance, but the experts are saying behind your back: “She’s great, she’s trying, but she was pushed too far in her youth, the ceiling is already there”?
It’s too late to focus on movement technique or to understand how to recover after training in juniors. That’s why I win, for example, on difficult descents: I learned in time.
Someone will read this and do their best to refute me on the ski slope. Well done, I will be happy. But the exceptions only confirm the rule: most modern skiers reach their peak at the same 17, 18, 19 years old – and then smoothly go downhill in results. In order to solve this problem, we need to change our approach. How? I will try to describe it in the next column. Remember: my sister is growing up!
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Source : MatchTV
I am Sandra Jackson, a journalist and content creator with extensive experience in the news industry. I have been working in the news media for over five years. During this time, I have worked as an author and editor at various outlets producing high-quality content that attracts readers from different demographics.
