Skibounding by the lake.

Saturday May 30, P12 Gatineau Park: Today the older crew did their first skibounding interval set on a long and fairly steep hill by Meech Lake. We would start at the trailhead in the P12 parking lot and were able to bound 7min straight uphill. The next day many bums where sore from the bounding.

Guilluame: 3 x7min uphill skibounding

The boys. Dominique doesn’t get bitten by bugs, they’re intimidated by his muscles.

The way back down is much more fun.

Gatineau Park is very green these days.

A fearsome foursome attacking the uphill.

Practice over. Nothing left to do but wander off into the woods.

Fun and Easy

Thursday May 27th, The Arboretum. Every forth training week is a rest week; lots of days off and easy training. We still have practices on rest weeks, but it is nice to have a mental break from intervals and intensity. Rest week practices therefore include lots of fun and low organization games straight of your elementary school gym class. This week, after a bit of strength, we played handball, capture the medicine ball and fireball (a free-for-all version of dodgeball). Pictures are few and far between today as I was too busy enjoying the games.

Nakkersoccer: Two balls, twice the fun.

An over the should view of some core.

More core.

Plyos. Soo many plyos!

Colin is actually not doing plyos; he just got shot in the back.

A few years ago Nakkertok starting having upwards of 20 athletes  racing at every provincial cup race the team participated in. Other coaches would jokingly vow to start 'recruiting out of daycare' next year so they could match our numbers. I remember thinking that our recruiting is already done for the next 5 years at least. Above is a picture of the crew out on Thursday. There where 33 athletes ages 13-16 at practice, which is actually about 15 less than the whole group for this age. Below this group there are another 70 to 80 racing rabbits and midgets who will start in the fall and another 20 athletes older than this group who train at different times. For the coaches this can mean busy days and practices, but we are very lucky to not have to worry about recruiting more athletes.

      Practice over, Emilie happy!

The Bike Paths

Saturday May 22: Park Mousette, Gatineau. Ottawa and Gatineau are fortunate to have over 100km of rollerskiable bikepaths running all over the city. On days when the Gatineau parkway is not closed to traffic, we complete our rollerski workouts on this network of paths. Today's workout started at a beach on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa river.

The yellow line, your friend on long rollerskis.

Riel: 5 x 30sec z5, 1min rest.

The girls hammering.

The boys cooling down, Gatineau hills in the background.

Twisty and fast downhills abound in Quebec.

The Arboretum

Thursday May 20: Ottawa Arboretum. As long as I have been involved in Nakkertok, we have held a weekday workout at the Arboretum in the summer months. The Arboretum is located beside the canal, just across from Carleton university. This beautiful park has dozens of different varieties of trees all of  which can be viewed from the many gravel paths that snake through the fields and woods. The park also has a awesome little ridge, on which countless generations of Nakkertok skiers have bounded up and down, chiseling out their cardio for the upcoming season.  Today marked our first workout of the season at this location. The L2C group of Nakkertokers completed a hat workout, strength and a rousing game of soccer.

The crew warming up, lead up Kieran.

Alana happy to be putting in some time as an assistant coach.

The Hat Workout: The hat contains a variety of different workouts, from long zone 3 to short sprints. Athletes draw 5 different times, never knowing what they are going to get.

What could it be?

The girls completing 30sec sprints...

...followed by some zone3 bounding.

Ben Taylor: "Everybody come see how good I look doing this side bridge"

 Core is more fun when you get to push your friends around.

Down boy.

Core and Sun.

Katerine (on her stomach) has never won a bridge hold competition.

Em likes running fast.

A capital workout

Tuesday May 18th. Today the older gang did their natural intervals and core around the parliament buildings in Ottawa. The workout consisted of tempo running on the flats and hammering some surprising large hills in downtown Ottawa.

    The crew warming up by the canal        

  Michelle leading the girls up some serious stairs on the backside of parliament hill.

 Leslie So and Kirstin in hot pursuit.

  Off in the distance Alana is pushing the pace. This bike path is on the other side of the canal from parliament hill. Just around the corner is an awfully nasty uphill leading to the national art gallery.

20 seconds post workout. Smiles abound.

The boys cooling down.

The war memorial (found on the loonie at times) makes a cameo as the backdrop to our cool down.

Workout ended with some core on the lawn.

Patrick loooves core.

Practice over. Grass is as good as any bed.