Category: XCFeeds

As promised, race snapshot graphs today’s sprint races.  First the reduced versions (top 30, plus North Americans) and the full versions are below the fold (the names on those might be a bit small; there were a lot of racers!).

Updated: Bit of a mishap with some of the athlete’s names created some errors.  Fixed now, hopefully.

Obviously the red dots for sprint races are a bit more uniform in placement, since I’m using rank rather than FIS points!  I left them in as a visual aid for comparison with each athlete’s other races.  Click on the full versions below the fold to expand them…

Related posts:

1. <Distributed Sprint Points
2. <Most Improved: Men’s Sprint
3. <Post-WJC/U23 Development: Norway

The West Yellowstone sprint races happened today and it was COLD.  I don’t think my feet have ever been so cold for so long.  I’m really looking forward to it warming up a little bit for tomorrow’s race.  Unfortunately, I don’t have much to report.  I can tell you that I went hard, and I […]

The West Yellowstone sprint races happened today and it was COLD.  I don’t think my feet have ever been so cold for so long.  I’m really looking forward to it warming up a little bit for tomorrow’s race.  Unfortunately, I don’t have much to report.  I can tell you that I went hard, and I […]

The West Yellowstone sprint races happened today and it was COLD.  I don’t think my feet have ever been so cold for so long.  I’m really looking forward to it warming up a little bit for tomorrow’s race.  Unfortunately, I don’t have much to report.  I can tell you that I went hard, and I […]

The West Yellowstone sprint races happened today and it was COLD.  I don’t think my feet have ever been so cold for so long.  I’m really looking forward to it warming up a little bit for tomorrow’s race.  Unfortunately, I don’t have much to report.  I can tell you that I went hard, and I […]

The West Yellowstone sprint races happened today and it was COLD.  I don’t think my feet have ever been so cold for so long.  I’m really looking forward to it warming up a little bit for tomorrow’s race.  Unfortunately, I don’t have much to report.  I can tell you that I went hard, and I […]

The past couple weeks “on the road” have included racing, pig noses, deck jumping, and landing in nordic ski heaven. On the racing front, I want to start off by bragging about my talented teammates. On each of the race days I had something to be excited about, regardless of my own results, because it was inspiring to see the friends I’ve trained with all year kill it!Here’s Kate Fitz, coach

The past couple weeks “on the road” have included racing, pig noses, deck jumping, and landing in nordic ski heaven. On the racing front, I want to start off by bragging about my talented teammates. On each of the race days I had something to be excited about, regardless of my own results, because it was inspiring to see the friends I’ve trained with all year kill it!Here’s Kate Fitz, coach

The past couple weeks “on the road” have included racing, pig noses, deck jumping, and landing in nordic ski heaven. On the racing front, I want to start off by bragging about my talented teammates. On each of the race days I had something to be excited about, regardless of my own results, because it was inspiring to see the friends I’ve trained with all year kill it!Here’s Kate Fitz, coach

The past couple weeks “on the road” have included racing, pig noses, deck jumping, and landing in nordic ski heaven. On the racing front, I want to start off by bragging about my talented teammates. On each of the race days I had something to be excited about, regardless of my own results, because it was inspiring to see the friends I’ve trained with all year kill it!Here’s Kate Fitz, coach

The past couple weeks “on the road” have included racing, pig noses, deck jumping, and landing in nordic ski heaven. On the racing front, I want to start off by bragging about my talented teammates. On each of the race days I had something to be excited about, regardless of my own results, because it was inspiring to see the friends I’ve trained with all year kill it!Here’s Kate Fitz, coach

The family traveled out  to West Yellowstone to celebrate Thanksgiving and cheer me on in the first races of the season.  Our Turkey Day races consisted of a  Classic sprint and a Skate sprint.  Looking forward to a great winter of racing!

Classic Sprint Photo by Ian Harvey of Toko

Skate Sprint Photo by Ian Harvey of Toko

Aside from being a yummy holiday treat, Thanksgiving turkey is a term used (in North America, at least) to refer to ski racers who come out of the gate kicking everyone’s pants off in November or December and then fizzle out for the rest of the season.  A friend urged me to write a post on this subject recently, so here it goes…

If you’re unfamiliar with high level ski racing, you might need a little background.  The way that elite training works is usually built around the fact that the big, important races that you really want to be skiing fast for are later in the season in February or March.  That means that skiers try to structure their training through the first part of the racing season such that they get steadily faster.  The concern is that if you go into the ski season in November already “peaked”, it can be very difficult to maintain that level of fitness for the next 2-3 months and you end up “burning out”.  There’s lots of complicated physiology and training principles at work here, that I’ll likely get wrong if I try to explain.  So let’s just accept that this is a real concern and leave it at that.

I’m not here to dispute the idea that this happens.  If you go looking for instances of skiers going really fast early in the season and then flaming out later on, you can certainly find them.  (And I’ll do just that later on in this post.)  The “statistics” question here would be whether there’s an overall trend.  Do skiers who go really fast early tend, on average, to end up skiing really slow later on?

Color me skeptical.  There are a variety of issues here:

• Reversion to the mean – Skiers who go unusually fast are likely to slow down, not because of some “Thanksgiving turkey” effect, but simply because your subsequent performances are more likely to be closer to your average level of performance.
• How do we define fast? – When we talk about skiers who are “going fast” in November are we referring to skiers beating their competitors or outperforming their own past performances?
• Normal variation and small sample size – As I’ve remarked on before, skiers are not robots.  Their performances vary quite a bit from race to race, and this is in fact normal.  Comparing early and late season races for a single racer will involve comparisons of, at most, groups of 5-7 races.  More often we’ll see someone doing 2-4 races in November/December and then 6-8 in January-March.  Given the normal variation in racer’s performances, it might not be unusual at all for them to pop a great race in November, which might not mean anything at all.

All this will make any general trend very difficult to discern, but let’s see what we can see in the data.  Since comparing performances within athlete (going fast relative to your previous self) is quite a bit more complicated, I’m going to stick with absolute comparisons.  The other headache in this investigation is deciding what group of skiers to look at.  Do we only want to consider skiers with a podium in Nov-Dec?  A top 5?  Top 20?  All of these things are possible, but to prevent this post from spiraling out of control, I’m going to just use FIS points.^<1

Focusing on distance results, I divided the season into two halves: Nov-Dec vs. Jan-Mar.  Then for each athlete and each season I calculated some relavent summary statistics on their results for each half of each season.  First, let’s look at the median FIS point result in Nov-Dec vs. Jan-Mar:

First note that from a bird’s eye view, these two quantities are actually quite strongly correlated.  This isn’t surprising, really.  People who ski fast are likely to ski fast in the future!  And note further that this cuts directly against there being an overall tendency for skiers who ski fast early on in a season to flame out in later months.

The blue line is a fitted trend line to the data.  The red line represents a theoretical relationship where everyone skis precisely the same in both halves of the season.  Dots above the red line represent skiers who skied faster in Nov-Dec and vice versa.

Note that the blue trend lines for both men and women drift above the red line slightly.  This would seem to be evidence that skiers who go super-fast in Nov-Dec (< 20 FIS points) have a tough time maintaining that level in Jan-Mar.  But remember that we’d expect that to happen simply as a result of reversion to the mean, which isn’t necessarily related to any particular time of year.

Suppose we have a skier who’s average performance is around ~30 FIS points.  Given the natural variation of ski racers and the small number of races early in the season, it’s entirely possible for them to have an occasional 5-10 FIS points race, regardless of the time of year.  Even in November!

Again, none of this means that the “Thanksgiving Turkey” phenomenon doesn’t happen.  But I can’t seem to find much persuasive evidence that it happens generally, across all skiers.

Ok, the wet-towel portion of the post is now concluded.  Let’s have some fun looking at specific examples of skiers who’ve excelled in Nov-Dec and then struggled in Jan-Mar.

• Tor Arne Hetland!
  • In 2005-06 Hetland best WC result in Nov-Dec was 1st (median – 9th), but the best he managed after that was 27th (median – 29th)
  • He actually was the most frequent offender (using the very simple metrics I chose) with his median finish slipping an average of 16 spots.
• Vassili Rotchev in 2004-05 had a median result of 6th in Nov-Dec (best – 2nd) which slipped to a median of 30.5 in Jan-Mar (best – 22nd).
• Espen Bjervig had nearly identical numbers as Rotchev in the 1999-00 season.
• Nikolai Bolchakov in 2002-03 did four WC races in Nov-Dec managing a median of 15.5 and topping out at 5th.  In Jan-Mar he did one race, finishing 47th.
• Lina Andersson in 2001-02 had a median result of 10.5 in Nov-Dec including a 3rd; in Jan-Mar her best result was 16th with a median of 31.

Clearly, I don’t know the personal histories of each of these skiers, so who knows what sort of injury or illness issues might be at play here.  Still, this just goes to show that yes, you can certainly find some extreme examples of skiers going very fast early on and then flaming out for the rest of the season.

Since Hetland seemed to pop up more than others, I thought I’d take a closer look at his results:

This graph contains all Hetland’s WC, OWG and WSC distance and sprint results by their date within a season.  So we have results from many different years plotted together here.  To keep things simple I’m sticking to finishing place rather than FIS points.  The lines are quantiles regression lines representing Hetland’s results at the 90th percentile (bottom line), median (middle line) and 10th percentile (top line).  This allows us to separate trends between someone’s “average” results and their “best” results.

In this case, it does appear that Hetland’s best distance results were somewhat better in the first half of a season.  In fact, he seemed to generally do worse as the season went on.  Of course, that’s just “one average”.  You can see that he still did have an excellent race or two late in the season.  This trend does not seem present in his sprint results.

So there you have it, your Thanksgiving Turkey!  Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. <Daehlie vs. Smirnov
2. <Most Improved: Women’s Distance
3. <USST Preview: Liz Stephen & Morgan Arritola

First World Cup race is in the books and I can definitely say that I got the full experience!

Leaving the stadium-#7 on the left side.  Photo thanks to Pete Vordenberg

The original plan was for Kikkan to scramble and then tag off to me but on Saturday afternoon, the coaches decided to flip the order sending me out first.  I think my jaw dropped quickly after hearing this news and immediately the nerves set in.  Relays in general usually make me more nervous but now scrambling a World Cup relay in Scandinavia…  Luckily Sunday morning I woke up feeling a little more relaxed and was pleasantly surprised to hear that the temperatures had slightly warmed up from the frigid arctic temperature which had hovered around -20C all week.  Wax testing  was very easy and we had great fast skis but a lot of kick which would come in handy on the hilly course.  I kind of zoned everything out while I was warming up but then in the last few minutes while I was running around the stadium and getting ready to lineup I started to take it all in.  There were spectators everywhere, packing the stadium. One side of the stadium had bleachers that were packed with bundled up Swedes.  A huge screen was ready to broadcast the race footage and there were speakers everywhere on the course playing music and race commentary in several different languages.  It was kind of like a huge party  and just really exciting.  Alongside the course people had built fires.  This part was actually not so sweet because parts of the trail were very smokey and smelled a lot like burning hotdogs.  The US team had drawn the start spot in the middle of the second row so I was lined up right behind Norway. Looking around and lining up I could feel the nerves clenching again but before I knew it the gun had fired and we were off, serenaded by the loudest cheering crowd I’ve ever heard for a Nordic ski race.  I got a quick start and was immediately right in.  Everything was so loud and exciting that I don’t think I noticed how fast the group was skiing.  At the time the pace didn’t seem overly fast or aggressive but I think I was just really amped up with adrenaline.  Because then a little before the 4km marker, the wheels came off and things went downhill quickly.  I lost a lot of time between that point and when I finally reached Kikkan in the tag zone.  But going first meant I got to watch the rest of the race play out which was awesome including great skiing from Kikkan, Morgan and Liz.

Morgan, Liz, Kikkan, and I before the race

I was pretty bummed with my race at first but looking back I decided I probably wouldn’t do it any differently if I could go back and do it again.  Hopefully with some more experience and training I can hold that pace for a little longer.  It was also very fun to watch the men’s race afterward.  The volume of the stadium when hometown hero Marcus Hellner outsprinted the Russian team to give Sweden the win was indescrible and definitely gave me goosebumps.

The view from my window in Kuusamo just after lunch

On Monday morning we loaded onto a big bus and drove the seven hours to Ruka, Finland.  The course here has some monstrous steep uphills and screaming downhills that is sure to make for very tough races.  There is only one 5km course open here so everyone is out skiing laps together.  Racing gets going again tomorrow with a classic sprint and then a 5km classic and a 10km skate later this weekend.  In the meantime we’ve passed our time with a little blacklight bowling.

Can you find me?

Thanks to Kikkan for most of these pictures!