By Teemu Virtanen
One of the worst enemies, perhaps even the worst, for Pro Team athletes is not their rivals, nor weather conditions but getting sick, or injured. So many winter seasons have been ruined by being sick in the middle of a hectic racing streak, and quite often many athletes have not been patient enough to take their time and recover properly before stepping back to the battlefield.
Injuries, of course, usually come with more serious consequences, and an athlete may have to step aside for a longer period of time, which happened to Anton Karlsson, Lager 157 Ski Team, and Niko Koskela, Team Mäenpää, this season. But getting hit by a flu or cold is more common, and if properly taken care of, it may not kill the whole season. The key factor is to allow oneself time and patience to recover and slowly return to action when there are no signs of physical distress caused by the sickness.
In Season X, both Astrid Øyre Slind, Team Koteng, and Lina Korsgren, Team Ramudden, were extremely strong in the early months of the winter. Astrid was in a league of her own at La Venosta, and Lina conjured up a superior performance at Kaiser Maximilian Lauf. Then, fate intervened, and both athletes started to feel a bit under the weather. For Astrid, it turned out to be a long road to nowhere, but Lina managed to overcome the setback and return to her winning shape by taking home a victory at Vasaloppet.
So, Lina must have done something right, but what did she do? She admits that it wasn’t a bed of roses, but she took her time to recover.
“After Kaiser, I was still at high altitude, so I was a bit worried,” Lina says when recalling the unwanted incident. “But I stayed calm, and when my heartbeat started to get normal, I began training, but with an extremely slow pace. I worked out for 5 days before Marcialonga, but had no hard sessions, just slow skiing and maybe 1-2 hours a day. The plan was not to force the shape to come back and not to risk anything. I took Marcialonga as the first hard workout. And then I hoped to get back to top shape for Vasaloppet.”
She continues saying that it was mentally hard, but over the years she has learned to stay put and take her time to recover. According to her, the most important thing is to just face the fact and be patient. And sometimes getting sick can be a "blessing in disguise", meaning that a little rest can help a skier to get the best possible performance after recovery.
“The actual rest comes from your training afterwards. That’s when you’re getting better. Athletes can often get sick when they are in their worst or best shape. At your best, you are vulnerable because everything you do is at stake. You feel unbeatable, but the feeling can be deceiving. When you’re on the top of the world and able to perform at your maximum level, it can be too much for your body to handle without proper rest and recovery.”
If professional athletes, whose workload is immense, are vulnerable to certain outside attacks that can cause illness at their peak, that begs the question of whether they get sick more often than the normal population.
“I don’t really think that top athletes get sick more than other people,” Lina ponders the issue. “Throughout the winter, perhaps 4-5 months, they are statistically sick less than an average person. But the real fact of the matter is that they are really vulnerable because it often takes a week or so to get back to training, and then more weeks to find the shape that one had before sickness. And if you get a more serious case of sickness, your recovery can be much longer. In the off-season, you don’t normally care so much about your performance shape. You just work out, and the shape will come eventually. Britta is a great example of an athlete who never gets sick. As far as we know, she hasn’t missed a race in years. Why? She just has that gift!”
Britta Johansson Norgren, Lager 157 Ski Team, is definitely an athlete who never misses a beat, and that is probably the main reason for her unbeatable streak of five Champion titles. However, she is an exception, but there are things we all can do to avoid illness in the racing season and to recover if such bad luck falls upon us. Lina gives us some useful tips.
“Here are my tips for staying healthy; 1) you always have a choice of not meeting people or eating at a restaurant, 2) wash your hands regularly, 3) be normal or at least don’t think about it too much. Then, when you get sick, you need to take it easy, don’t stress out and do not go out for workouts until you’re completely recovered and feel healthy. Finally, you need to sleep, and make sure that you beat the bug.”
We can certainly follow those guidelines when trying to stay fit and ready for our races next season. And when that “nasty bug” hits us, we just need to put everything on hold and take our time before even dreaming about racing or doing intensive workouts.
