SHE RACES FROM THE HEART
By Bill Holland
Generation XC - Feature
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Editor's Note:
This article is an original contribution to xcskiworld.com by the author. It originally appeared in the September 4, 1997 issue of The Valley Reporter (Waitsfield, VT--USA). All rights reserved.
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It takes deep sources of inspiration to be an Olympic hopeful, especially in a sport as obscure and grueling as the cross-country ski biathlon. Nineteen-year-old Warren native Jenny Watkins frequently looks to her grandfather, Lenord (that's the Swedish spelling, not a misprint) Robinson, owner of Blueberry Lake Cross- Country Ski Center.
A prime example is the 1996 U.S. Junior National Biathlon Championships when, three laps into the fourth and final race, Watkins realized she was in trouble. Knowing she had to win the race by at least twelve seconds to make the team that would travel to the World Championships, she had gone out fast--maybe in retrospect too fast. Now she was paying for it. Watkins remembers being tired, maxing out, in danger of drowning in a sea of lactic acid, the toxic by-product of the muscles' burning oxygen.
Then, as she puts it, "I began thinking about my grandad. I began thinking about how he'd never quit. So I picked it up on the fourth lap. I knew I had a ten-second lead, but I somehow had to stretch that to twelve. I kept telling myself, `If anyone's going to catch me, they're going to have to catch the granddaughter of Lenord Robinson.'" Thanks to that inspiration, Watkins succeeded in stretching her margin of victory to twelve seconds, thereby securing herself both a spot on the Junior World Championship squad and now, a year and a half later, the opportunity to take part in a three-week training camp with the U.S. National Biathlon Team at the National Guard's Ethan Allen Training Center in Jericho, Vermont. (With the Russian and Canadian senior biathlon teams also in attendance, joint time trials there have taken on a special intensity.)
Then, too, it was on the narrow, winding trails of Lenord's Blueberry Lake Cross-Country Ski Center (before a lawsuit with the lake's current owner forced its removal from the environs of the lake itself) that Watkins gained the sure-footedness on downhills that's one of the hallmarks of her technique. Another feature is powerful poling action, an innate upper body strength further honed by several years of flatwater canoe racing. In the words of U.S. Junior National Biathlon Team coach, Cory Salmela, "I tell her to focus on just getting up the hills and then really pour it on over the flats and gradual downhills where's she's got a real advantage."
Since there was no Bill Koch Youth Ski League program in the Valley at the time as there is now, Watkins traveled down to Rutland for several clinics, several of them supervised by former Olympian and Olympic Team coach Mike Gallagher. She then cut her competitive teeth by taking part in as many Bill Koch races as possible during her grade-school years. Whenever his duties permitted, Susan Robinson recalls, Grandad Lenord came along to cheer. The summer after her sophomore year at Harwood Union H.S., Watkins attended an elite, by-invitation-only summer camp sponsored by the U.S. Biathlon Association in Jericho. She became a convert to the biathlon in large part because the discipline doesn't involve the traditional diagonal stride. Instead, racers only ski-skate, a technique that emphasizes powerful pole thrusts and that therefore allows Watkins to use her upper body strength to better advantage.
Expertise in shooting has not come easily, and Watkins readily acknowledges that it's still her weak point. And this in turn has forced her to confront her inner weak points as well. "My biggest problem," she claims, "has always been in the areas of consistency, concentration, patience, and diligence. Doing things that require attention to tiny details just doesn't come easily for me. In fact, it's only this year that I've finally started keeping a training log." And with 500 hours of training in the last year, that's a lot of workouts to keep track of.
Coach Salmela, whose wife is a national caliber biathlete, concurs: "Diligence is finally becoming Jenny's middle name. She's always been a free spirit, which is great, but now she's becoming more methodical as well." Asked to identify Watkins's greatest mental asset, he replies, "She's always looking for the right way to do things. She's receptive to new ideas and doesn't get complacent. Then she's very good at incorporating these pointers into her technique." And in shooting especially there's an emormous amount of technique to master.
To begin with, you can't simply pick up a nine-pound $3,000 German rifle and start blasting away at the row of five black circles 50 yards away. Before the race or workout gets under way, the weapon has to be "zeroed"--the sights, that is, have to be adjusted a certain number of "clicks" for the wind speed on that particular day. The coach will often cover the metal target with a paper one, then watch the subsequent grouping of bullet holes through a telescope before recommending just how many "clicks" are needed.
Then, because even a tiny shift in wind velocity can throw those settings off, the athlete has to watch the little red flags on the range and "shade"--make the allowances necessary to keep the rifle trained dead-center. But it's not enough to be a good marksman. You have to be accurate when your whole body is "at pulse"--shaking from just having skied two kilometers at top speed. It's this alternation between flat-out exertion and total concentration that the Team is working at day after day at the race venue in Jericho.
"You have to know yourself and decide if you really love what you're doing. You have to work through times when want to quit."
A typical intensive team dryland workout consists of roller-skiing six two-kilometer laps at 85% effort punctuated by six sessions of shooting, three in the prone position and three in the standing. The team physiologist takes "lactates," quick blood tests, between at least three of those laps to make sure the athletes aren't pushing themselves beyond the pre-determined threshold of exertion. In a recent workout of this nature, Watkins hit four out of five targets, 80% accuracy being the current team goal. In actual races, penalty laps are assigned for missing the target in the shorter events, while in the longer events, one minute per missed target is added to the athlete's total time.
Once Watkins set her mental sights on making the Junior National Biathlon Team, she began searching for a ski program more intensive than local ones could offer. She investigated the Stratton Mountain School, decided it was too regimented and intense, and opted instead for the National Sports Academy in Lake Placid. "There were forty kids in the whole school," she recalls, "ten in my graduating class, but they did all different sports, which made it more interesting. There were lugers, downhillers, figure-skaters--not just cross-country types."
It was during the winter of her senior year that Watkins won the climactic fourth race at the 1996 Junior Nationals, thereby gaining a berth on the U.S. contingent at the Junior World Championships, where she placed 38th in a field of 85 or so. The two-month trip through Italy, Germany, and Austria leading up to the Worlds in Finland, however, drained Watkins of much of her enthusiasm for the sport. Living out of a suitcase day in, day out in cheap hotels in an often frustrating chase after decent snow, the friction of trying to get along with the same eight other people proved highly stressful. To top it all off, she became ill for several weeks, barely recovering in time for the Junior Worlds, where her solid results very much took her by surprise.
It may have been the fallout from that trip that cast a pall over Watkins's enthusiasm for the sport the following season. After missing the 1997 Junior World Team by two seconds, she spent the winter and spring at the Northern Michigan University Sports Training Center in Marquette. When she wasn't studying for a test on anthropology or training, however half- heartedly, she was doing a good deal of soul-searching. Little by little, the joy she'd always found in cross-country skiing seeped back into her heart.
A lot of that joy, Watkins says, "is the whole endorphin thing. I also like challenging my body, being out in nature, being outdoors. Plus, a lot of the other skiers are my best buds. Then there are all these people who are there to help you along, who are putting a lot of time into you so you can learn that much more." By the end of her sojourn in Michigan, she was ready to rejoin the U.S. National Team Biathlon program because, as she puts it, "I knew I was doing it [biathlon] because it was what I wanted to be doing."
Now into the second week of a the three-week training camp in Jericho, Watkins knows that she's heading into a make-or-break year. It will be her last year as a junior, and the 1998 Junior World Championships are being held on February 22-March 2 in her own back yard--right, in fact, on Jericho's asphalt-covered trails and shooting range. Then, depending on how things turn, out, she will know whether to back off for a year or two before an all-out push to make the 2002 U.S. Olympic Team or whether to just plain back out.
Asked if she has any advice for a high school athlete contemplating commitment to success at the world-class level, Watkins says, "You have to know yourself and decide if you really love what you're doing. You have to work through times when want to quit. You have to hold on to who you are. You have to keep questioning, constantly evaluating and reevaluating your values. You have to learn to appreciate people you may not get along with at first. But if you stick with it, however things turn out, you're in for one hell of a ride."
