After a month of body rest in May and then a stack of fitness work back home three weeks in the Alps was a great way to kick off the up and coming season. Three weeks of combining some good quality ski time with lots of fitness, the perfect summer training!
I’ve been to Zermatt quite a few times before this camp however I’ve never really appreciated the potential it has for a good all-round summer training camp. The facilities down in the town are great for fitness and the hill always brings the best conditions for drills and gates, which is essential when you're trying to get the most out of early season training.
Zermatt also offered us the great opportunity to train alongside some of the world’s best and see how they do it compared to you! So close in fact that me and Ozzy-Paradis had a keepy-uppy contest on our day off. We also had a great opportunity to train with some of the best guys in Britain again with Jai Geyer and Dougie Crawford working and training alongside us. This was a great opportunity to see how good they are and to pick up a few tips off them. Knowing that they’re from the same place as you, that they’ve worked their way to the top through the various pathways and are now succeeding also helps. Being able to relate to what they’ve achieved also keeps the motivation high and it’s great when you hear and see those people doing so well not last when I’m working so hard to emulate them.
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| Team BSA hiking in Les Houches |
However before the skiing started we spent a week in Les Houches on a dryland camp, working hard on our fitness. Three intense training sessions per day for six days was very good for me and the other lads on the camp because it got us in tip top shape for skiing and showed Ruslan how well we had progressed in our fitness over the summer.
Every day we went out on the bikes, averaging 100km per day. Given the mountains around us this was pretty demanding at times but it was great to just get out and turn some gears with the lads and have some fun trialling various slip streams and team chains.
The main aim of the camp was to improve balance, stamina and core strength; these components of fitness are abilities that need constant work to get to and keep to a high standard. They are the fundamentals of any sport. It was good to get some new exercises from Ruslan and you know your commitment is there when you're working on the slack line at 7 o’clock every morning.
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| The ultimate ice bucket challenge. |
We also took part in various new activities such as cannoning down rivers, hiking around Mont Blanc and other fun activities.
This included time for a good game of football with a few locals off the street who called themselves the Chamonix FC first team. Fraser Buchan put in a top drawer goal keeping performance, keeping the ball out of the jumpers and water bottles on numerous occasions however, much like the super Saddlers back home, we lacked goals up front. David MacWilliam gave it plenty of effort but despite lots of encouragement (including suggesting he was the alpine Kenny Miller) our lack of firepower did for us in the end.
So, after a good week in les Houches we moved onto Zermatt and picked up a few more of the team from Geneva along the way.
Zermatt was great, however – as with Summer camps generally - the weather was a bit of an issue on some days. 4 days of storms meant we had a fair bit of time to have good fun fitness sessions and make good use of the facilities in the town, even if it was a bit rainy. The camp was very full on yet we had a lot of time to learn some new exercises from Jai and Dougie that we are now incorporating into our weekly fitness programme. The new exercises are very ski specific and bring great variety into the programme, hopefully making us more versatile athletes.
The first week we did a lot of slow drills to get back used to the skis again and rebuild the foundations of the technique which is essential to have a good season. It is important to re-learn the right techniques again and bring everything back to a basic level to get the fundamentals right before incorporating speed into the skiing again. Ruslan has a very good way of improving the basic skills and we spent a fair bit of time going back to basics before progressing on to some more advanced tweaks which I feel really helped my skiing.
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| A T-Bar selfie with Milo |
As the camp progressed we started smashing some gates down, looking at focusing on skiing the right line and generating space at the top of the turn to make the right type of arcs to get the most out of the skis. This meant we spent lot of time in the gates simply working on line and transition which is really good for me because it this one of my main weaknesses right now. It was also very useful to do a fair bit of pro slalom because it relies on a good line to get anything from it.
Overall I feel that I really benefitted from the work that we did in the gates in the week. We did plenty of video analysis and I spent of lot of time with Ruslan analysing what was going on. The fact we were both so picky about the finer details is a good sign that I’m taking my skiing up a notch.
Overall I think it was one of the best summer camps I’ve been on. My fitness was in good shape and I feel that my skiing progressed a lot over the camp. It was also great to catch up with some of the lads and share some laughs without the immediate pressures of race preparation over us. Now I’m home and back to the real world of work (we've got a winter to pay for), visiting the gym and watching Walsall win week-in-week-out (or maybe not).
Finally, best wishes to Dougie who has recently announced that he’s taking a step back from ski racing for the near future. Hopefully he’ll re-find his racing mojo and bounce back even stronger. Working with him in Zermatt was an absolute pleasure.
Thanks to Malcolm for putting together such a great camp, to Ali for putting up with me and Fraser all the way there and Ruslan and his coaching team for a brilliant three weeks. Looking forward to October already!