Interview: Piotr Bednarski
As previously mentioned in the final mountain bike report, a interview with Piotr Bednarski was in the works. I have had the pleasure of getting to know Piotr over the years from ski racing and more recently mountain biking. Piotr is currently serving as director of athlete development with US Biathlon Association and the founder of Go!Training. Piotr is one of those coaches that doesn't come across as too serious but just eager to show and share his knowledge of the sport of skiing, biathlon, and mountain biking. I continually run in to athletes that have worked with Piotr that have nothing but the highest to speak of him. Piotr is also involved with the well run City of Lakes Nordic Ski Foundation, working hard with others to provide opportunities for Twin Cities residents (and visitors of course) in mountain biking and skiing, and providing a top notch venue for the JO Nationals this coming Spring. I dropped a email to Piotr, asking him a few questions about training, skiing and mountain biking.
- What are you busy with these days; what capacity do you serve with MN Biathlon?
PB: I’m the Director of Athlete Development for the US Biathlon Association. I have a range of duties that include helping regional coaches organize training/recruiting camps for juniors. I also write and manage the selection procedures for all USBA international teams (World Cup, Olympic, Jr World, etc). Within Minnesota, I mostly help run major events like the IBU Trials (December) and the US Nationals (March) which will both be hosted at Mt Itasca.
- How many athletes do you work with your GoTraining program?
PB: Go Training programs really grew this past year. This summer and fall we had 55 junior and 8 seniors athletes. We have an amazing coaching staff – this bunch can ski very fast, as well as coach really well: Sara Morse, Kate Ellis, Johanna Winters, Caitlin Compton, Brandan Ostroot, Jacob Beste and Evan Pengally. Over the winter we had approximately 50 masters skiers of all levels in 5 different programs.
- How did you first get involved with racing and training?
PB: My dad was a runner back in the 70’s. As a 1st and 2nd grader, I’d ride my bike with my dad while he would run. Growing up, we didn’t watch football or baseball on TV. It was all about track and field, xc skiing, bike racing.
I grew up primarily running and xc skiing, with lots of biking touring and hiking in the summers. I became more serious about skiing in college, but I was really frustrated by my lack of knowledge about training. This has been my biggest motivator for wanting to coach as I made the transition from athlete to coach.
- What is your basic philosophy on training, regardless of the sport?
1) You need to have fun with it, 2) you need to make it an integral part of your life, 3) develop a group of friends that train together - then training time can double up as your social time, 4) become an expert on your sport , 5) learn how to train, before you worry too much about racing.
- For upcoming junior athletes, do you advise them to focus on one sport or spread out and participate in multiple activities?
PB: Tough question. At some point you must focus if you want to excel. You just need to figure out how to continue to have fun and focus. For high school skiers, the biggest concern is keeping up training volume. Basically all other high school sports make it difficult to keep training volume up in the spring and fall, so by senior year, I generally encourage the most serious skiers not to participate in a fall high school sport.
- Is there a particular athlete(s) you have worked with that sticks out. Not necessary results but responded well to your training methods and worked hard to excel?
PB: Well, it generally not hard to find athletes that work hard. Really, at all levels, I see many athletes that are busting their butts. Its just the lucky few that have the time to train and physical gifts that allow them to have great results. This past season it was very gratifying for me to see Caitlin Compton do so well at the Olympics after coming off a very difficult summer of training where she basically took 2 months off to due health issues. We have a great rapport - I feel I am able to help her figure out her training needs by just being a sounding board for her.
I would say that the person I could see the fastest improvement in results from anyone I have ever coached has been Jack Hinkens. As most talented athletes, Jack would probably have improved quickly with or without coaching, but they just may have a few more bumps in the road without some guidance. Jack went from being a hockey player through 9th grade, to racing his first MTB races in 10th grade. About 2 weeks before he was to graduate from high school he was headed to Europe for his first MTB Swiss Cups. A few weeks later followed his first World Cups, and then the World Championships. For an endurance athlete to come from a hockey background to move to the World Cup MTB level in 3 years is pretty amazing.
Jack’s physiology definitely agreed with what is my basic training formula - LOTS of volume, a good dose of L3 long intervals, and keeping the number or races under control. Though he failed on the last element of the training formula, he made great strides very quickly. It will be fun to watch him over the next few years.
- You compete in both mountain bike and Nordic events, do you have any preference one over the other?
PB: I started skiing fairly serious in 9th grade (1981) and have been ski racing with very few breaks ever since. I started competing in MTB in a focused way in 2005, so I’m pretty new at it. When I ski race now, my goal is not to get any slower than the previous year, while when I MTB race, I know that every time I go out I’m probably getting faster. I’m still on the fun part of the learning curve for MTB and so in many ways that makes it really fun for me.
As the leaves change color, and it starts getting colder, I am definitely getting fired up for the ski season. This year I think the event I’m looking forward to the most is taking my family to Maplelag over President’s Day weekend!
- Asking the question what has been your most memorable event, I have a feeling the Breck Epic?
Bill Dossett and Craig Rudd, Breck Epic, August 27, 2010 ()
PB: The Breck Epic is a 6 day MTB Stage Race in Breckenridge, CO, with about 240 miles and a gazillion feet of vertical (actually somewhere in the vicinity of 42,000 feet). It was definitely the most challenging and the most fun athletic event I have ever done. It was brutal, but I got to share it with three of my best friends: John Munger, Craig Rudd, and Bill Dosset. I would recommend it highly to any crazy endurance athlete. It was a brutal physical test, but the technical parts of MTB biking just made it super fun.
It had a nice side benefit too - coming off of 2 weeks at high altitude in Colorado, we were super prepared for the last few MTB races back home in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
- Any particular ski race that sticks out (challenging conditions, etc.)?
PB: My most vivid (and exhausting) memories of ski racing are from my freshman year at Cornell. I raced the Dartmouth Carnival in the pouring rain. 20km at Oak Hill - a brutal course on a nice day, but when its raining, and you can barely see the snow through the pine needles and leaves, you know you are in for a long day. By February of 1985 all the other college teams had switched over to skating technique, but my team was still doing classic only - our coach was waiting for the next season. No form of kick wax would work, and I’m quite sure I skied the entire race on my special tricep wax. I was definitely DFL that day.
I like to remember that race when I get to a classic race and my kick isn’t great, then I know things could be much worse.
- Being involved with biathlon and hunting season in full swing, do you do any hunting yourself?
PB: Funny, that’s a very common question. No, I’ve never hunted anything - but I’m happy to help you out with any venison you can’t fit in your freezer! I generally find that hunting and previous firearms experience does not necessarily enhance one’s biathlon marksmanship skills. People (read...men) that hunt a lot, generally think they know everything about shooting, so when you try to teach the fine points of biathlon marksmanship they don’t listen very carefully. It can take a lot longer to actually learn the skills they really need.
- You and the folks with the City of Lakes Nordic Ski Foundation have been busy making improvements at the Theodore Wirth Area. You mentioned to me earlier about future plans for development of more expert mountain bike trails with hope to host a Minnesota series race. Can you explain a bit more?
PB: COLNSF has been very busy improving the ski trails at Wirth for the 2011 Junior Olympics. But in our big picture plan we see MTB as a key to increasing the number of TC metro kids that get into endurance sport and more specifically, into cross country skiing. Its our “gateway” sport. I am convinced that MTB biking is inherently the most fun endurance sport for beginners, so if you want to get kids more active, its a logical (and really fun) place to start. Once they are MTB biking, you can trick them into other ridiculous forms of endurance training like ski walking, bounding, running and even xc skiing!
I am convinced that MTB biking is a great complement to rollerskiing/running in the spring and summer for athletes that are pretty serious about their ski training. I’m always looking for ways to get juniors to increase their training volume without getting injured (mentally or physically). MTB biking is a really good way to do that.
The current MTB trails at Wirth are really nice, but they are just not adequate for our needs. We want to create a skills teaching area, more beginner trail, more expert trail, and we need WAY more vertical. Theodore Wirth has lots of terrain but the best terrain is not accessible right now. We are working long term with the Park administration to find ways to create new mountain bike trails and other silent sport facilities.
We don’t have a detailed plan for new routes on paper just yet, but I am confident that in the next two years things will look very different. We are looking to start a MTB league for athlete ages 7-12 for next spring/summer. Hard to say if we will be able to hold a MN series type event in the next year or two, but we are cautiously optimistic.