How an Olympian is made
Scientists make some surprising discoveries about training
Becoming the most decorated Winter Olympics athlete in history requires snow, fortitude, technique, squats, more squats, a team of dedicated physiologists, a stable body weight, running shoes, high-intensity intervals, about 940 annual hours of exercise — much of it conducted at a surprisingly light intensity — and a willingness to substantially shake up training when it is no longer working well.
Those are the findings of a new study published in Frontiers of Physiology that analyzed 17 years’ worth of records about the workout routines of the Norwegian crosscountry-ski racer Marit Bjorgen, who will turn 38 this month. She won five medals at the Pyeongchang Games, making her the most winning athlete there, for a career total of 15 medals, eight of them gold.
Bjorgen also appears to have led a thoroughly examined life, keeping scrupulous, detailed diary entries about each of her workouts from the time she was 20. Recently, she shared all these entries with scientists at Nord University in Bodo, Norway, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who already had been working with her on regular fitness testing and monitoring.
In the past, these scientists had analyzed similar records from some of the top male cross-country athletes in Norway. But much less was known about the routines and responses of accomplished female endurance athletes.
So for the new study, which was published before the start of the Olympics, the scientists dove into the entries from Bjorgen. They also gathered data about her competitive results over 17 years.
They were looking for patterns and lessons that might be of use for other cross-country ski racers and also, potentially, anyone interested in high-level endurance competition. What they found confirmed much of the currently accepted wisdom about how best to structure seasons-long workout routines for endurance athletes.
But in some respects, Bjorgen’s training also confounded expectations about how young athletes progress and what humans are capable of.
The study’s data began in 2000, when Bjorgen was a newcomer to senior-level racing. She already had accumulated medals and championships at the junior level, mostly in sprint-distance events. Now, she wished to start winning longer races, too.
But her training at the time tended to skew short, at least by cross-country skiing standards. According to her training diary, she was exercising about 520 hours a year, much of it spent in strenuous sessions usually shorter than an hour. Her competitive performance, meanwhile, began to plateau.
So in her mid-20s and with the encouragement of and advice from the university scientists, she upended her routine.
She added volume, lots of it. Her workouts gradually became much longer, eventually lasting two or three hours, said Guro Strom Solli, a doctoral student at Nord University, who once trained and raced with Bjorgen and led the study.
By the time Bjorgen reached her early 30s and embarked on her five most successful years as a racer, 2010-15, she was training around 940 hours per year, about 80 per cent more than a few years earlier.
Most of these added workouts were performed at what, in cross-country racing terms, counts as “light” intensity, Solli said, with Bjorgen’s heart rate hovering at about 80 per cent of her maximum. By contrast, her heart rate had tended to exceed 90 per cent of her maximum during her shorter workouts when she was younger.
She continued several brief, strenuous interval sessions each week. But a far greater percentage of her workouts now were prolonged and, by her standards, gentle.
She also began focused, frequent weight training, concentrating on her core and upper body. Her biceps eventually became so honed that blogs today celebrate them.
The lessons for average athletes from her training are perhaps subtle, Solli said, since Bjorgen most likely has physical, genetic and psychological gifts that have thoughtlessly bypassed the rest of us.
But one take-away is that athletes should consider shaking up their training to some extent if they begin to feel stagnant, said Oyvind Sandbakk, a professor and manager of the Centre for Elite Sports Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, who oversaw the study.
Bjorgen improved when “she changed her regime a bit,” he said, shifting the bulk of her workouts from short, hard sessions to longer ones.
But, of course, a case study directly concerns only the individual studied and is not an experiment, so it cannot tell us whether Bjorgen might have thrived equally using different training techniques. Bjorgen, as an athlete, is remarkable and probably, Solli said, “unique.”