The arrival of winter reminds us that there are natural rhythms that affect our development. When we spend most of our time inside in artificial light and temperature controlled environments it’s easy to lose touch with this. Tuning in to the seasons reminds us that although life seems to move in circles, it is not monotonous and there are good reasons for the cycles of life.
Winter has always been a particularly powerful time of year for me. Winter has traditionally been my time of rebuilding and laying strength foundations for the year. However, it’s also by far the most playful time of my year. Over the years, I’ve gradually started doing more demanding and difficult winter activities. However, no matter how hard I am working it always seems to feel like I’m just playing in the snow. After winter I emerge refreshed. I think it has to do with a lot more than just the return of warmth and daylight that comes with the arrival of spring.
As we participate in nature as outdoor athletes, the different seasons tend to have a significant impact on how we challenge ourselves, how we train, and even on how we think. This variation helps our development as athletes and as people. We stagnate or burn out when are always going at the same intensity and pursuing the same goals. This is fairly well known in the strength and conditioning world, and one of the key general training principles that’s commonly accepted today is variation. In addition, it seems healthy and natural to devote a portion of our year to rebuilding and recharging. This is a pretty common phenomenon among many lifeforms.
When we consider the cycles of progression and development, we can learn a few things from the experience of elite athletes. Generally it doesn’t make too much sense to try to strongly emulate the training of elite athletes. Their lives are often quite unusual (frequently lacking the demands and stresses of another career), they are sometimes genetic outliers, and they are so much more developed as athletes that they can train differently. However, there are some differences in the way they train that can offer us some guidance. This is obviously helpful because they were able to get to a very high level of development and they are often continue to make year after year improvements (which becomes very difficult when we are advanced).
First, elite athletes are far more focused on varying training intensity and building foundations by progressing through certain stages. They tend to periodize their training, systematically dividing their training year into different periods where they vary the volume and intensity of training. Of course, this is explained by the fact that they are preparing for specific competitive seasons. Most of us aren’t trying to hit peak performance at one key time of the year and want to perform well throughout the year. Hence, a highly structured annual schedule that builds towards one peak like the periodized programs athletes use doesn’t really make sense for most of us. However, there seem to be a few general takeaways to what elite athletes do. First, there seems to be some benefit to not having to be at full intensity at all times of the year. It seems fruitful and healthy to carve out some times of the year to slow down and work on our foundations and fundamentals. Due to the seasonality of athletic competition, competitive athletes may have just stumbled into this.
For outdoor athletes, it benefits us to take advantage of seasonality in our training. When seasons change it is a time to embrace the opportunity to do new things, perhaps rebuild and recharge, on perhaps shift our focus to building a key strength that we will need for a future challenge. For many outdoor athletes, winter is a great time for base training (i.e., building our foundations to support a year of more specific training and adventure). For many of us, winter is simply a great time for playing in the snow. When we open ourselves to the seasons, nature gives us a natural prevention for burnout and a natural reminder to rebuild our foundations and play.
December 2019: Winter base training begins. In the past, snowshoeing all day with a heavy pack would have seemed like a real slog compared to a day at a ski resort. But scouting terrain for backcountry ski routes near the Idaho/Montana border and laying a foundation of work capacity to prepare for bowhunting in fall 2020 made this day particularly inspiring and fun. Plus, my little buddy Kodi is a really inspiring athlete.
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