By Paul Hooge

I don’t mind short road trips; perhaps 500 miles each way is a sane distance. I don’t often fly because you cannot haul a bunch of old or antique skis on planes easily (packaged they may resemble some sort of missile). This September my trip began in crested Butte, Colorado (9250 ft elevation at the house) to Ohio (900 ft) and on to New Hampshire (around 1200 ft) and back in twenty days. I had meetings in Kansas City, Columbus, Ohio and finally at the New England Ski Museum in Franconia, NH where we discussed a conference for Ski Historians in 2009 in Crested Butte.

I planned to keep up my workouts, packed my road bike, forgot the dumb bells and was too busy to locate gyms along the way. So I arrived back in CB feeling a bit bloated and stale, knowing that it would take a week to get my training program back on schedule. While in NH I purchased a copy of Skiing: The International Sport, published 1937.This text rates among the top ten books ever published about our sport.

The first chapter I read was Training for Ski Racing” by Peter Lunn. I started here because while scanning the chapter I saw the word “stale” and at this moment I was feeling very stale.

Lunn lists three critical elements in training for skiing (from his perspective exactly seventy years ago): exercise, food and sleep. Then he states that “… the mind is trained to avoid staleness and to develop sufficient power to conquer the nervous reactions of one’s body to high speed skiing.” Regarding training he has three primary recommendations:
1. Plenty of up hill climbing,which, he says will condition muscles that skiing cannot target specifically.
2. Plenty of distance running, interspersed with high speed sprints
(Lunn believes that this will help prepare the skier to deal with “risk taking” during high speed runs.
3. He recommends that skiers quit smoking prior to the ski season because “the resultant effect on the nerves is bad for form”, race form specifically.

Regarding alcohol, Lunn states that “Wine and beer taken in moderations after a day of skiing are good for training, but cocktails should be eliminated. Red wine is better for training than white.”

Lunn covers a lot of territory including sleep and diet. Sleep, according to Lunn, should adhere to Ben Franklin’s advice “early to bed and early to rise” and sleep should be on a regular schedule. Concerning diet, he advises, “Personally I eat normal meals though I try to avoid eating bread with my lunch or dinner… I think it is advisable to eat in between meals; recent research among factory workers has shown increased work productivity among those who have taken additional meals in the middle of the morning and afternoon. When skiing I generally carry chocolate in my pocket!” Finally he states that the skier with a fit body and mind has an edge over all others.

All of this advice from seventy years ago and much of it seems timely; however I’ll defer to Andrew to compare and contrast elements of training then and now.