Someone should ask Ben True to compare the two sports - XC skiing and running. Since he's a top competitor in both, he'd be uniquely qualified to comment.
Someone should ask Ben True to compare the two sports - XC skiing and running. Since he's a top competitor in both, he'd be uniquely qualified to comment.
Eugene the Ex-Drinking Machine wrote:
Even Bjorn Daehlie went down after races:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGuOlF50uTc
Dählie was the one who started it. You never saw guys like Svan, Mieto, Wassberg etc. doing it.
Bjørn Dæhlie
imarunr wrote:
add a rifle wrote:XC biathlon (running/shooting) would be popular. The XC ski version is a great sport to watch.
Years ago, I did the summer biathlon. It was held out at Camp Wythicomb, a National Guard training center here in Clackamas, OR.
You ran a one mile cross country loop three times, with a stop at the rifle range between loop 1 and 2 and between loop 2 and 3. All the rifles were at the range. You did not run with the rifle. The first stop, you shot at five targets in the prone position and for the second stop, five standing.
I got a real appreciation for the winter event after doing mine. Trying to focus on a small target 25 meters away, while sweat is pouring down your face and your heartrate is up near 170bpm was NOT easy.
I love watching this event in the Winter Olympics. Most people don't have a clue how hard it is.
It's my favorite winter Olympics event for sure. Awesome spectacle.
They collapse at the end because of the complete whole-body exhaustion. It's not like running.
Never skied, but done a lot of running/swimming/riding. Easily the highest heartrate I ever saw was swimming ballistic with flippers. Legs and arms both working hard.
By extrapolation I can imagine xc skiing would do similar things to my puny heart.
mentos wrote:
I did xc skiing in high school and it was the hardest sport I've ever done. It was miserable. Your entire body is on fire during the race. I've never been so out of breathe before, even during xc or track races.
Rowers suffer from this also - a burning sensation that utterly owns you.
http://tinyurl.com/lh6s2jfcattle mutilations wrote:
Stick with eharmony wrote:It's all theatrics
+1.
And, they have watched too much women's NCAA xc races. Mass domino's . . .
Stick with eharmony wrote:
It's all theatrics
So now all you insecure runners are railing on XC Skiing? C'mon, you are making us all look like idiots. Runners should be a bit more supportive of the other endurance sports.
Bi-Pedal sport (running) vs. Quadrupedal sport (Nordic ski).
It is much more full body taxing in Nordic skiing because you push off of the ground through four modes rather than two.
As everyone has said, it is a whole different hurt than running. When I transition from XC running to nordic season, it takes me time to get used to the unique pain.
Lastly, it is the Olympics. You work four years to get there. Might as well leave it all out there.
It's easy to tell who has skied before and who hasn't.
Not to mention that course. Skiing uphill HAS to be brutal.
Several reasons:
a) Whole body exhaustion.
b) Buys them a minute or two before some idiot reporter sticks a microphone in their face.
c) Forces the Olympic Sponsor Gatorade girl to stay in the shadows, not a personal sponsor so they don't care, and once they do get up the team leaders and all the idiot reporters are gonna push her aside anyway.
Xc-skiing is an incredibly difficult sport. But the collapses at the finish line are pretty much theatrics. I live in Minnesota and HS skiers are now collapsing at the finish line of races because they saw Northug do it at some World Cup race.
Women who just lie there aren't very interesting.
dfasfdas wrote:
Xc-skiing is an incredibly difficult sport. But the collapses at the finish line are pretty much theatrics. I live in Minnesota and HS skiers are now collapsing at the finish line of races because they saw Northug do it at some World Cup race.
Agreed. I skied through high school and at a decent level after college running.
Of course going all out in a ski race is hard, but so is going all out in a cc or track running race. People trying to make excuses for the diving skiers haven't run hard enough.
Occasionally you see great runners collapse at the end of races, but you ALWAYS see skiers doing it. It's like diving in soccer. It's part of the sport now.
drunk runner. wrote:
imarunr wrote:Years ago, I did the summer biathlon. It was held out at Camp Wythicomb, a National Guard training center here in Clackamas, OR.
You ran a one mile cross country loop three times, with a stop at the rifle range between loop 1 and 2 and between loop 2 and 3. All the rifles were at the range. You did not run with the rifle. The first stop, you shot at five targets in the prone position and for the second stop, five standing.
I got a real appreciation for the winter event after doing mine. Trying to focus on a small target 25 meters away, while sweat is pouring down your face and your heartrate is up near 170bpm was NOT easy.
I love watching this event in the Winter Olympics. Most people don't have a clue how hard it is.
I just did one of these last November.
3.5 miles of rugged xc running with 6 pistol/rifle shooting stops.
More fun than you can imagine.
For you guys that have done a running/shooting race - I assume the firearms were provided by the event organizer/range? And how did the start work - they send runners off at 30 second intervals to space things out?
From
:
"Dr. Dan Heil, an exercise physiologist at Montana State University, suggested to me via email that it’s useful to think of Olympic cross-country skiers as some ungodly hybrid of wolves and cheetahs. “[M]odern cross country skiers need a high aerobic capacity to be able to hunt for a win (like a wolf relying upon aerobic capacity), but they also need a high anaerobic capacity to be able to sprint during the race, as well as for the win (like a cheetah sprinting for a kill),” writes Heil. “The consequence of utilizing both of these energy systems so completely for racing is a transient inability to stand upright on skis.”
Why? As a cross-country skier approaches the end of the race, he relies on these anaerobic bursts, with less and less time for recovery between each sprint. According to Dr. Heil, who has studied cross-country skiers, “repeated high intensity anaerobic efforts will cause a quick build-up of acid by-products in the muscles which causes the muscles to stop contracting effectively. This latter issue can be observed as a loss of coordination during the final sprint, as well as an inability to stand upright on narrow skis within the finishing chute.”
So you’re a cross-country ski racer approaching the finish line. As American Kikkan Randall puts it in the video at the top of this post, you’re “pushing yourself so close to those physical limits and you’re really just convincing yourself to last for incremental times longer.” You’ve been sprinting intermittently for the last couple of minutes, and your body is starved for oxygen. Your arms and legs feel like jelly thanks to acid buildup. “In short,” writes Dr. Heil, “you combine an insatiable need to breathe as hard as possible with leg and arm muscles seizing from acid build up, along with a central nervous system unable to control the act of standing and gliding upright, and the result is skiers dropping to the ground because they cannot stand and they need to recover.” And then it’s on to the next race, where they’ll work really hard and collapse yet again."
Agreed on rowing. Ive never rowed on the water but have been a competitive indoor rower on the Concept machine. Have also run and skiied for many years at different points in my life. The 2000m Concept race is by far the hardest race from a pure pain standpoint. It is extremely common for people to simply fall off the machine with their feet still strapped in and lay there for several minutes. There's something about the sports which use a lot of upper body and quad musculature (skiing and rowing) which brings the overall pain level well beyond running.
Imagine an XC running race where lots of Dathan Ritzenheins were running... that's XC skiing.
Definitely a mental thing just telling your body to go down because it's exhausted.