My August Journey through Intense Training Volumes and First Competitions
From challenging training camps across Europe to my first race of the season in Belgium, explore the demanding journey that shaped and carved my August.
My HRV status has dropped to its lowest value in three weeks, my eyes are struggling to stay open and best of all, my legs are struggling to walk up the stairs to my bedroom. It’s the end of August, the highest training volume only behind my monstrous 95+ hours during July. I’ve trained on three different shooting ranges scattered from Belgium all the way down to the Plateau du Vercors. I competed in my first race of the season and signed some of my first-ever signatures at the world's biggest Nordic Festival. So come with me as I break down my training adventures during August.
Belgium Volume 2.0
As per last year with the French ski federation during my first training week for this month, it was back to Belgium but this time with my new training squad the Team Haute Savoie Nordic. We had been invited by Belgium Biathlon to join them during a training camp and then compete in their national championships at the end of the week. This was a fun experience for me because I quite enjoyed coming here last year but it was also great for a lot of my teammates who were discovering this great venue for the first time. lot’s had never trained outside of France before. The warm weather was with us during the first couple of days and this meant our training was not going to be easy.
On the second day of our trip, we had a massive 5 hour ride planned around the Liège-Bastogne-Liège région. On paper when you look at the route there are no hard climbs, the highest point on the ride is a shy 600m of elevation and none of the climbs are longer than 10km at 4-5%. But after that, you have to add the fact that you are always either climbing or descending, the Belgium route planner decided to take us up a few of the legendary climbs that elite racers take on. The only satisfaction I can take home from the ride is the fact I’m only 4 small minutes from Tadej Pogacar on La Redoute (my time being 8’10). It was a great ride with a good group of athletes, I did however finish severely dehydrated because Belgium seemed to lack a lot of drinkable public fountains and the bus which was following us got lost more than we did.
Day three was a first for pretty much the whole group. 100 kilometres on roller skis. I bought some brand new wheels especially for this occasion (thanks to Nordeex for the express delivery). Our route involved a lot of cycling paths or Ravel if you are from OstBelgium so it was really easy to follow and we weren’t getting in the way of any cars either. We started off by skiing past the Spa-Francorchamps racing circuit during which some endurance LMP and Porsche cars were practising, it was amazing to hear them from up above and to see the track from up close was a great experience. We then continued our trip roller skiing to the highest point in Belgium at 670m of elevation. The downhills were all very easy to navigate and didn’t involve any heavy braking. The route started to get very hard after about 70km, my legs were starting to ache and my arms had run out of strength. Tanguy, our bus driver, had also bought some Belgium fries to give us during one of our feed stops, the best motivation after 4 hours on the road. We all made it in the end however with my tour taking me about 5h40. A great experience which I’ll be sure to take on again, but not before next year.
A challenging race weekend
The next couple of days of our camp were much calmer to help us prepare for the races coming up on the weekend. The heat had transformed into a lot of rain and the long training sessions had turned into some high intensity but shorter loads to help us prepare. The format was the same as last year, a 5km prologue followed by a 5km mass start event to determine the eventual winners. A lot of nationalities turned out, the Belgians obviously, but also some top-class Germans, some Swiss, an athlete from Luxembourg and finally us. This meant quite a full start list and added some pressure on our shoulders before the races. The shooting range only has 16 targets instead of the usual 30, so if you wanted to race with the top guns on the sunday you need a good time the day before.
First race day of the year, we weren’t on until half five in the evening so that meant we were able to head out for a warm-up ride in the morning, nice and easy just to wake up the body. Zeroing went well and I then headed off for my new pre-race exercises I’m trying out during the summer. Nothing overly secret but it is not very common either, let’s just say you have to be good at holding your breath. This warm-up should help me keep more energy for the actual race and also be more prepared. Participating in races like the Belgium Champs where the objectives aren’t quite as high profile as in France means it’s a great place to try new things out. 6/10 on the range and a ski time pretty much exactly the same as the people around me means I finished 9th in the sprint event. Not the best result, especially with that many mistakes but I was roundabout where my teammates were so that shows that our training is working well.
After some great Belgian cuisine later that evening (burger and fries) it was straight into focusing on the Sunday’s mass start. As last year I was starting quite a fair way back because of my poor shooting the day before. Nothing to worry about though because after two good prone shots, I was in good contention for a medal. But sadly one miss to many on the last standing had me leave the shooting range 10 seconds down on the podium with only a very short 850m loop to catch up. I pushed as much as I could and managed to catch up to the German athlete on the final climb, but sadly on the final stretch my legs completely gave up and he beat me to the line. P4 after a convincing race for me. I was happy with the result and came out of the weekend with a great list of things to focus on before the French championships in mid-September. You can find some more detailed results and pictures by checking out the Belgium biathlon social media pages.
As always massive thanks to the Belgian federation for the invitation and the races, the organisation was perfect. Big thanks as well to Thomas who drove the bus all the way there and back during the night so we could avoid it.
Split between La Savoie and Le Vercors
After our long week up north, I spent a quick day at home before heading down south to La Féclaz, a place at which I’ve spent numerous hours training and always enjoy. The village is very small but it has quite a long roller ski track to train on. It’s also reasonably high up so it generally stays quite cool during the day. I didn’t have anything special planned for this week of training apart from a lot of shooting. I had a threshold session to do running up a steady hill during a 3h run to accomplish, and la Féclaz isn’t really the best place for this. I did however find a route that I’d been trying to do for quite some time now. From the shooting range, you can see a massive ridge on top of quite a steep cliff, but when I looked at the strava heatmaps I could see a potential path to take. The route was 23km but I’d planned my threshold to be done during the 2km - 700m elevation climb near the beginning. Yep you read that right, it was very steep. Steeper than I expected actually and I ended up having to put my hands down a couple of times to help me climb up. At the top, I still had a good two-thirds of the run left to accomplish. It was very long, check out the full run out by clicking here.
I was then on to Villard de Lans to join my good friend Mathieu Garcia for my final week of August training. The last push before a well-deserved rest week. It had been a long time coming because Mathieu had invited me ages ago to come and join him for a week but we never managed to find the time. We started things straight off with a long three hour session on the road. The Plateau du Vercors is a great place for this, the roads are in good condition and never too steep on the downhills for safe roller ski training. As per the week before I had a long trail running session mixed with some threshold. The mountains up above Villard and Corrençons are incredibly rocky and get technical very quickly but I managed to find a long traverse just below a ridge which would do the job perfectly. I’d planned to head up La Grande Moucherolle as well but this would have added an extra 600m of very technical climbing and my legs were very tired. I also chose the lazy option on the way back down from my loop, taking the lift. This may be frowned upon, but when you still have a lot of training during the week if you can save your legs a little bit you definitely go for it. I obviously stopped the watch when going down ;).
The next day I had the opportunity to train with a good friend of mine who used to race biathlon but has since switched and is now competing on the World Cup circuit in cross-country skiing. We’d planned a 4*10mins threshold around the roller ski track with no shooting. The pace was very high, I spent most of the session just trying to keep up with him, definitely wasn’t in the correct training zones. But the session was incredibly beneficial for me, my friend has an incredibly good skiing technique and getting to ski behind him for a little was great. I got a lot of tips that I’ll be able to apply myself before we start skiing on snow again in November. The rest of the week before the weekend was spent recovering from that session, it impacted me a lot more than I would have imagined and a lot of recovery was needed.
Recovery was exactly what was on the program though so that was perfect. I spent the weekend at the Martin Fourcade Nordic Festival watching the races but also racing myself on Sunday in a team for Rossignol. I’m going to write a full newsletter entry about my time in Annecy and summer biathlon to deep dive into what the future of biathlon could look like if we focused more on developing the summer racing aspect of this sport.
For me though it’s a well deserved week back at home to rest up, switch off for a little bit and refocus on the big objectives coming this autumn. If you are around Prémanon on the 20-22 of September be sure to come and watch me race. Thanks a lot for reading and I’ll catch you all soon.