It’s been a while since I wrote my last blog on this site, 8 months to be exact, and I’m realizing that so many interesting and exciting things are happening in my ski career, important lessons are being learned and someday I’m going to want to look back and remember all these little details. So I’m making the effort to get this blog going again.
A lot has happened in the last 8 months. Back in December I was just getting started on a new ski season, full of optimism and motivation to go after a fourth sprint globe and most importantly, try to take home some medals at the World Championships in Falun. Unfortunately, my plans didn’t pan out. I struggled through the entire season under a hard-to-identify burden of fatigue, never found my top gears and only managed one World Cup podium in Lahti at the end of the season. After an incredible run of successful years, it was my first real downturn in my results. I ended up taking a big break in the spring (6 weeks no training) to try and recover from the fatigue and spent a lot of time with my coaches trying to figure out what went wrong.
Our analysis determined that I had been under a lot of extra stress during the training season and that extra load in addition to the training load I was trying to sustain led to the over-training-like fatigue and lack of gears. The extra stress was probably due to a combination of carrying some delayed emotion from the disappointment of the Sochi Olympics, the extra load of doing work for sponsors, leading the FIS Athlete Commission and working to get Fast and Female USA officially incorporated and off the ground as a non-profit. All great things that I absolutely love to do, but probably too much time spent not recovering from a heavy load of training.
One of the fun things I get to do as an athlete, inspire kids to be healthy and active!
Not wanting to spend any more of my career out of the fight for the medals, I started off this new season trying to be smarter about protecting my recovery time, focusing the training around quality sessions and not as much quantity, and minimizing travel and other distractions. It felt like trying to put together a major jigsaw puzzle in the spring, to keep the balance between the needs of my training, some unavoidable obligations and also maintaining myself as a person. But in the end we came up with a plan that I believed would help me get back on track.
Now I’m on the road to working my way back to top form. I’ll talk a little about how this summer has gone so far in the next post.
Thanks for tuning in!
Cheers,
Kikkan 🙂
