XC skiing books for
Christmas - 1 (McKibben)
Date first posted on eCommunity - 23
September 2007
LONG DISTANCE, A YEAR OF LIVING STRENUOUSLY.
By Bill McKibben
Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000.
ISBN (hardback) 0-684-85597-6
(ISBN for the paperback edition is 0-452-28270-5)
The wise and courageous course, probably, is just to ignore the
annual December consumerfest. And if you can get away with that,
then read no further. But if you are going to exchange gifts, then
you might as well make them good ones. So in that spirit here is the
first of our reviews of books that would make good presents for
cross-country skiers.
The first book focuses, in a very accessible way, on racing. (In
later postings we'll look at a couple of vintage classics that will
appeal to the skier who prefers off-track touring in remote places.)
At the age of 37 Bill McKibben, a prominent US writer and
environmental campaigner, was feeling that his life had become too
sedentary and bookish. Although he was a fairly keen recreational
cross-country skier, he felt he had never pushed his physical
limits, never really tested his body. Out of his unease with that
situation came the decision "to spend a year in real training,
putting in nearly as many hours as an Olympic endurance athlete
spends prepping his body." After that year he would spend a winter
ski racing.
The book is the story of that time. It starts with his meeting on 1
January 1998 with Rob Sleamaker, author of the influential
book "Serious Training for Endurance Athletes", who agreed to coach
him. It concludes with his participation in the Norwegian
Birkebeiner race fifteen months later.
In telling the story McKibben covers a lot of ground, mentally as
well as physically, and the book serves as a good introduction to
cross-country ski racing and to cross-country skiing in general.
He writes about setting goals. Asked by Sleamaker to write down his
own goals, he finally came up with this: "I want to gain an
intuitive sense of my body and how it works. And at least once I
want to give a supreme and complete effort in a race."
He writes about endurance training. Sleamaker prescribed a tough
programme of about 600 hours training over the 12 months. To begin
with, most was low-intensity, long-duration work, designed to lay
down a good aerobic base. McKibben would grow accustomed to long
slow distance runs, up to three hours duration by the summer. But
from the outset he also worked on strength and speed. In describing
his workouts he writes about training schedules and periodisation,
about exercise physiology and nutrition, and about fitness testing
(VO2 max and lactate threshold).
By the September he was training 18 hours a week. But no matter how
hard he trains, his outlook remains much more that of an
intellectual than an athlete. He has an abiding interest in how much
(or how little) the physical training is changing his character, his
spirit. He sees similarities between endurance training and
meditation. He is curious about the reasons, personal and social,
why endurance athletes devote huge hours to training. And, being
just as curious as to why ORDINARY people work out on exercise
machinery in gyms, he digresses to consider the growth of the
fitness industry.
He writes about the recent history of cross-country skiing in the
USA. There was huge growth in the 1970s, a decade that saw Bill Koch
win a silver medal at the 1976 Olympic Winter Games in Innsbruck.
And the 1980s too were good for US racing: Koch won the World Cup
one year and USA had four or five finishing in the top twenty at all
the races. But then it all fell away. Race performances worsened and
the overall number of American XC skiers declined.
And, of course, he writes about his own races. Almost from the
outset, Sleamaker encouraged McKibben to compete, and in the first
months of training he took part in a race in New England, an event
in the Canadian Keskinada festival, and in the World Masters
Championships at Lake Placid. Six months into the year he flew to
Australia and raced in the Paddy Pallin Classic, a 25km event near
Mount Kosciusko.
And he did, finally, have his winter of racing. But it was truncated
by the terminal illness of his father. And the suffering and passing
of his father comes rather to dominate the end of the story. Some
readers will think this enriches the book. Others will feel that it
derails it, and that a more focussed volume would in the end have
served as a better monument to his father's memory. Nevertheless,
the book is a good one, and it deserves a place on the shelf of
anyone who has an interest in cross-country skiing.
FOOTNOTE: If you want to have a taster, you can find an article by
Bill McKibben, a sort of lengthy preview of the book, in the online
version of Outside Magazine (Feb 1999). It is at:
http://outside.away.com/magazine/0299/9902xcski.html
.
|
