Training gets a lot more complicated for a full time skier versus a busy collegiate athlete. The new (or old?) fad in endurance sports is testing. And the current training tool is lactate testing. Here's the simple explanation.

Lactate is produced when your body is stressed from exertion. The higher the lactate levels, measured in millimols per Liter (Mols have something to do with Avogadro's number, actually I think everything has something to do with Avogadro's number. No matter.), the higher the stress on the muscles. Lactate is just another way to determine what effort to train at. Instead of training at levels 1/2/3/4/5 or by heartrate, you can train by mmols of lactate in the blood. Lactate levels are correlated to heartrates so that the athlete doesn't actually need to test their blood lactate after every interval, they just check their pulse.

At this point lactate testing appears to be just a fancy and more scientific way to determine training zones/levels; but there's more. The most important function of lactate testing is checking for recovery. If an athlete's lactate levels don't return to normal by the beginning of their next workout (we would say the athlete couldn't clear their lactate), then something is wrong and the athlete failed to recover. In that case another hard workout could make the athlete sick.

We tested today by skating up a one mile gradual hill and then having Bryan test our lactate levels. After our warm up, he took our resting level, which should be about 1 (mine was 1.1). Then we skied the mile sloooowly and he took it again, along with our average heartrate over the mile course. We repeated, raising our heartrate each time until we got as fast as our 10km race pace. Then we can graph the lactate levels against heartrate and now we know what heartrate corresponds to a 4 mmol or a 6 mmol interval.

Useful? Probably. Interesting? Definitely. Fun? Yes, except that my fingertips get treated like pincushions.