By Gavin Kentch
Welcome back to “Get to know a skier’s Strava,” an occasional feature showcasing an athlete’s Strava account. Previously in this series: Federico Pellegrino, Michaela Keller-Miller, and Pål Golberg Eats Breakfast.
The mass of athletic men lead lives of quiet consistency, as I’m pretty sure Thoreau once said. There is no way to develop the aerobic capacity to succeed in this deeply demanding sport without a cumulative thousands of hours’ worth of easy distance under your belt; there is no way to reliably log, say, 800 hours of easy distance a year without being consistently conservative in your approach. Twenty weeks @ 40 hours apiece and forty weeks @ 20 hours both work out to the same total number of hours, but one of them is a great deal more likely to be sustainable in the long run.
John Steel Hagenbuch is not most men, and he cares little for your physiological conservatism. Let’s take a look at his training for the week of September 2–8, 2024, humorously denominated on Strava as “Shrimp Week” for reasons that I am neither young nor hip enough to understand (yes I get that the leitmotif here is a movie that came out in 1994). Buckle up; what you are about to read may shock you.
Monday morning: 50km rollerski
At 9:21 a.m. on Monday morning, Shrimp Week USA 🦐 2024 officially gets underway. John Steel Hagenbuch does a 50km rollerski, in 2:25. Impressive for many mortals, but likely not a huge physiological undertaking for Steel Hagenbuch, who V2s with a fluidity belying its grace and strength, and who logs 50km rollerskis far more frequently than your typical athlete.
Average HR here is 144, so overall this may be a moderate effort for someone with a MHR well over 190, though that figure hides some consistent periods of elevated HR over several climbs. The back roads of New Hampshire look somewhere between perfect and idyllic here; I am jealous.
Monday afternoon: 49km rollerski
We’re already at 4:20 (lol) on Monday afternoon, and this is our first sign that this is not going to be a normal week. Steel Hagenbuch heads north this time, on a tridentine route into eastern Vermont, knocking out another 49 kilometers in just over three hours on his feet.
One of his videos embedded in this post captures a peaceful moment on an empty road. Dusk approaches. The world quiets; crickets are chirping. And still Steel Hagenbuch rolls on.
It is now Monday evening. The man has already logged a cool 99km, and 5:15 moving time, for the day. This is roughly equivalent to my highest *weekly* rollerski total from the past summer (I run a lot, okay).
Tuesday morning: 65km rollerski
Monday evening’s workout concluded after 7 p.m., if you read elapsed time against starting time and do the math. Less than 14 hours later, Steel Hagenbuch is at it again. He goes north and east this time, out to Lyme, New Hampshire, and back. Detours slightly mid-roll to log a dozen repeats up a short climb. Picks up a KOM on a 118-meter hors catégorie climb earlier in the ski, ascending an eight-percent grade with his HR at a chill 153.
Average HR for this morning’s workout, in toto, is 123. Speaking of chill.
Tuesday afternoon: 45km rollerski
Tuesday afternoon, Steel Hagenbuch is back onto the rollerskis once more. Into Vermont this time, and “just” 45km this time, but also that’s still well over 100 kilometers of cumulative rollerskiing for the day.
The average HR for this session is 117, MHR a sedate 134. I’m going to have some pronounced “don’t try this at home, kids” cautions at the end of this article, but in all seriousness, if there is a broader takeaway from this profile that anyone can use, it’s that you really do have to ramp down the effort when you increase the volume. This week is just a memorably extreme exemplar of that moral.
Wednesday morning: 107km rollerski
Wednesday morning: for a change of pace, some rollerskiing.
Steel Hagenbuch knocks out the century mark in one fell swoop this time, leaving the Dartmouth campus at 9:27 a.m., swinging by in the early afternoon for, I would hope, a whole lot of food, then heading out again for another 40+ kilometers after lunch.
The entire rollerski — 107 kilometers, 6+ hours — takes place over two large loops, with basically no overlap. I’m not sure there are 107 kilometers in the entire state of Alaska combined where I would feel comfortable rollerskiing on the roads like this… we do “rural” here, sure, but not so much “chill rural farm roads.” Or farms, for that matter. New England, man.
It is now Wednesday afternoon, less than halfway through the week. Steel Hagenbuch has already logged 316 kilometers’ worth of rollerskiing across 17.5 hours’ worth of training time. This would not be out of place as the cumulative rollerski training load for a top World Cup skier — which Steel Hagenbuch demonstrably is — for the entire week.
(There’s a lot of different ways to get to 25–30 hours in a week, and individual athletes will adjust ratios for individual needs and capabilities, but 15+ hours of rollerskiing, 7–10 hours of foot or foot with poles, a couple hours for strength, and the rest on the bike or other training modalities would not surprise me in a high-end skier’s training log.)
Steel Hagenbuch, for his part, has hit this mark by Wednesday afternoon.
Wednesday afternoon: 29-mile road bike ride
Slightly less than one hour later, Steel Hagenbuch is back out the door on a Wednesday night group ride, his first non-rollerski training of the week. I’m glad he’s giving his upper body a rest, I guess?
But not so much his legs. Dude claims the KOM on a popular climb plus several other segment top-10s in the process; he is not going slowly out there. Though he does this all with a MHR of 175 and an average HR of 142, a difficult achievement for most people. But Steel Hagenbuch, if you had any doubt whatsoever remaining by this point, is not most people. (Is he even human? Discuss.)
Thursday morning: 60km rollerski
Thursday early afternoon: Track workout
Thursday evening: 40km rollerski
“This is the most sicko double day of all time,” one admiring/appalled commenter had written on Strava of Wednesday’s exertions.
If you found Wednesday notable, and you probably should, then get ready for Thursday. The morning session brought another 60km of rollerskiing… early afternoon saw a track workout… and then the evening saw 40km more rollerskiing to hit an even 100km for the day. That is, combined, 100km and 5:38 of rollerskiing, plus another 48 minutes on foot. My goodness.
Back to that track session for a second:
The morning’s rollerski workout commenced at 9:19 a.m. and had an elapsed time of 3:34 (against a moving time of 3:22; dude spent a whopping 12 minutes total stopped to eat, drink, or photograph in a 3.5-hour ski), so Steel Hagenbuch was on his feet on rollerskis until 12:53 p.m.
A full 30 minutes later, at 1:23 p.m., a warmup run for a track session ensues. Assuming that it took, say, just five minutes total to remove and stow rollerski gear and put on running gear, that leaves 25 minutes’ worth of transition time. I hope that the intermezzo from ca. 12:56–1:21 p.m. was luxuriant. And filled with a lot of food, given the 60-kilometer rollerski just concluded.
… but maybe not too much food, because now it was time for, I think, 8 x 400 on the track.
And that’s still not all! A little less than three hours later, it was time for the final 40km of rollerskiing on the day. This bagatelle of a workout — at 40 kilometers it was the shortest rollerski of the week lol — commenced at 5:13 p.m., and saw our hero out on the roads until 7:48 p.m. Sunset in Hanover on September 5 was at 7:09 p.m., with civil twilight concluding at 7:37 p.m. Suffice to say that Steel Hagenbuch is not going gentle into that good night out there.
Friday morning: 110-mile road bike ride
110 miles, 7,200 feet, just under 6 hours on the bike. In the abstract, this is substantial, but not an atypical weekend long ride for a dedicated roadie. In practice… suffice to say that your typical weekend warrior road cyclist has not logged 416 kilometers of rollerskiing in the past four days as warmup.
Friday afternoon: (nothing)
And on the afternoon of the fifth day, John Steel Hagenbuch rested.
Saturday: 145km rollerski
“This activity is John Steel’s longest roller ski on Strava!” reads a cheerful badge accompanying this entry. Joyce’s longest sentence, Faulkner’s longest paragraph, and John Isner’s longest tennis match are all jealous.
This, for me, is where the entire enterprise shifts from the deeply impressive but still theoretically intelligible to the simply obscene. Over eight hours on rollerskis. Nearly 10 hours on his feet total elapsed time. In the rain. 561 kilometers of rollerskiing for the week.
This is beyond real. This is hyperreal. Move over, Disneyland; Baudrillard has new fodder for analysis here. I bet he was a huge nordic ski fan.
Sunday: 5.5-hour, 34-mile run
An easy five-and-a-half hours on his feet to finish things off. No big deal. Plus the week’s first and only photograph of an actual shrimp; I respect the extended buildup to this final sight gag.
For the week, that totals, per Strava, 45 hours of training time on the nose. 852km total distance, with 11,769 meters of elevation gain (that’s 529 miles and 38,600 feet in American). This is two weeks’ worth of training for some pro skiers. A month’s worth of training for an ambitious citizen racer. Six to even eight weeks’ worth of training for some midpack skiers. All in seven days.
These totals are, well, obscene, but are not too far outside the standard range for high-volume endurance sport athletes. I was going to write something like, “pro triathletes log 40-hour weeks pretty consistently,” but one Kristian Blummenfelt (2020 Olympic gold medalist) doesn’t have anything over 35 hours listed on his Strava from the last year, so, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Turning to speedskating, Nils van der Poel, who by any standard was an outlier, built an aerobic base off of 33 hours of largely stationary cycling within a week a five-day training week… but he also writes, “If I wanted to go for a trip with my friends Thursday–Sunday I would squeeze in 30 hours of training Monday–Wednesday and then have four days of no training.” van der Poel retired two years ago with world records and Olympic gold medals in both the 5,000m and 10,000m to his name, so the somewhat outré training distribution of 33 hours in five days — or even 30 hours in three days — seems to have worked for him.
Closer to home, and back to this sport, Noah Hoffman stacked up 35-hour weeks pretty consistently during what I would describe as his infamous year of infamous hours, in which he increased his hours to a round 1,000, from something like 750 the season prior, in an attempt to become the fittest athlete in the men’s World Cup field.
And while the precise training of the APU Elite Team is a state secret around these parts, it is safe to assume that multiple men in Anchorage logged at least 30 hours a week on several occasions this past summer. Indeed, here’s APU athlete Garrett Butts referring to “another 4 digit season of training in the log” for the 2022/2023 training year, and here he is earlier this month discussing “get[ting] dug out of a hole while training 27+ hours/week.” If you’re at a 1000+ hours for the season overall, and you have any degree of periodization for a several-month race season, simple math suggests that you’re going to be around 30 hours/week for much of the summer.
… finally, Kílian Jornet seems to have logged 268 hours in one recent 19-day binge of linking up all 82 Alpine peaks over 4,000 meters under only human power — that’s roughly 14 hours a day, or 98 hours a week, for nearly three weeks straight. But his Strava for this, while perhaps the single most impressive Strava entry of all time, only mentions bike and feet, so Steel Hagenbuch still gets the nod here on rollerski time.
In conclusion, unless you are John Steel Hagenbuch or someone else of his ilk, you should not train this much volume. (And if you are that good a skier, there’s no way you’ll be taking training advice from me, anyway.) But no matter how long you’re going for, you should probably go easier than you think you need to, and eat more food than you think you need to, to help make it sustainable. I hear that shrimp are pretty nutrient-dense, and a good source of protein.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, this season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
Glazefest
haha fair