As a coach, I occasionally settle into a rhythm of workouts that my athletes (and myself) are familiar and comfortable with. Consistency & focusing on workouts that have proven productive in the past are decent rationale when selecting a workout plan. However, there are downsides, such as:

• Athletes not developing plasticity & general athleticism
• Athletes becoming bored, or not finding excitement in pushing for the next level
• Particular to youth and high school sports, athletes have different motives. Some may be more focused on social & team aspects or just want a fun experience, more than becoming the best skier on the team.

How can a coach overcome these issues, and serve all their athletes? Make workouts that are just fun! I'll describe a fun (and cardiovascularly challenging) activity I recently developed for high school cross country skiing.

Ski Orienteering Workout

The general idea is simple: Create destinations on a map, and have your skiers find them. Visiting a destination scores points, which skiers try to maximize.

In practice, my destinations were paper stamps hung from trees along the trail with fishing line; I attached some bright cloth to the line to make it easily visible. Maps were simply printed off on paper.

Map

Irondale, the high school I coach at, maintains its own 5K ski trail. Below is the map of destinations I put together; the icon of a destination matches the paper stamp design at that destination. I removed nearly all landmarks from the map, leaving only the shape of the trail for navigation.

The bottom of the map also included a table of points per destination, and a place to stamp the map when visiting a destination. I made destinations further out worth more points, with some variance to make decision-making for skiers more difficult.

Rules

Here are the rules I implemented, and why:

• You have 1 hour to collect punches in the table
  • I wanted skiers to do an approximately threshold-level ski workout.
• All punches are on the trail and visible; don’t bushwhack
  • Safety: with a creek the barely freezes over cutting through the trails, I wanted no possibility of skiers being on it. On different trails, it may be fun to try off-trail destinations.
• You may only bring 1 punch back to the clock at a time; coaches will sign it.
  • Because our trail is relatively short, allowing skiers to do all destinations in one pass would be too quick. By forcing return trips after every destination, skiers get more distance and have to think more carefully about strategy and route planning.
• If you bring more than 1 stamp back unsigned, coaches will invalidate all but 1
• Only ski the correct direction. You may use all cuts–be clever!
  • Because our trails are not wide, it was dangerous to allow two-way traffic. However, if your trail allows it this may be a good way to spice up route finding.

Results

We lined the kids up at our race clock, and they sprinted off the line. They were excited, working together, and skiing hard. Some skiers were carrying their maps with their mouths, a practice we'll forbid in the future! It was neat to see skiers thinking critically about which destinations were worth trying for and performing the route finding (something they don't typically need to think about in practices). Our top skiers made it through all destinations, for an estimated 15 kilometers, so we had them start over with a second map. Our beginning and more recreational skiers were equally engaged as our racing-oriented skiers, which is rare.

To keep it competitive for our new, less speedy skiers, we granted them a few free punches in advance of the start. The top scorers for boys and girls won Toblerones.