Supplemental Training On Saturday

Today was the first of hopefully a series of weekly supplemental training at our club. Coach AH gave us a program prior to practice so it was a simple matter of running through the program. Since I knew the program by heart and blessed with a reasonably loud voice and a stopwatch, it was only logical that I kept things moving along.

We had a good group of skaters showing up including DA, MW, SaH, JaS, and EL. The wind was strong today and I remember clearly at one point our pack got blown sideways as we entered a corner. Our 5k warm up was skated at approximately 23s laps. Obviously I couldn't keep up but I continued skating nonetheless and completed in 10:46. It felt slow and labourious though only afterward did I realize it was still faster than what I could do last season in optimal condition. I was exhausted after the warm up.

We ran a series of rolling 500m sprints. I opted to stand aside and just keep time. That was a very hard drill and with so few people in the pack, everyone had to take their turn to lead out the sprints. EL talked me into joining the last four sprints and I took my turn leading out two of them. I thought it was really funny when DA high-fived me after my turn...goes to show how tired everyone was! I'm glad that I did part of the drill in the end. It was difficult but at the same time, it gave me an idea of how hard to skate for a 500m sprint. It is afterall one of the distances for provincials and nationals. We wrapped up practice with a 5k cooldown. Although our practice was short, it was very hard. Hopefully we will have more people showing up at the next practice!