Through it you can follow my journey that i call »My Way To The Top«. Browsing the page you will find out more about me, my sport and the way of achieving my goals.
I hope you enjoy the site!
JZR
Tuesday 02 March 2010
End of first spring camp
Just made it to the end of the spring camp no.1. It was a great camp with lots of hard work and lots of fun too. I believe we have done an amazing amount of hard work and it makes me happy to know i could stand all this heavy load. The largest amount of our work here were hard and long washlead sessions that i have done mostly with Fabio Wyss from Swizzerland and Charles Lohnitz from Germany. Big thanks to both of them for keeping me at honest speeds! We've also done some really intense sessions like speed, resistance sessions in the boat or 2km TT and that's where all the team was coming together and we really went for it. It is amazing how many we have suddenly become, with the 2 Swiss, the Austrian and the German guy we were sometimes in 11 hammering it out. Such a great feeling! Now it is down to a few easy days for a few deep breaths and to heal the sore ass. And only then back into it again with full steam!
Posted by Jernej on Tuesday 02 March 2010 - 12:07:43 |
Sunday 14 February 2010
Spring camp
Just made it to the end of the winter as it looks. This winter was hard and at momemts i really wished to be not where i was but in some warm nicely warm place instead. Neverthereless i totally agree with what Mark Oldeshaw wrote here about enjoing the moment and the place you live in the present moment. Anyway it is carneval time so winter will be officially aksed to leave the stage and let the spring start. But most importantlly today we drive to our training camp in Skradin. This should be a great adventure and i am looking to it a lot (ok, the weather should be great too there). Skradin is a small town on the central part of Dalamtia (wich is the part of the coast of the Adriatic sea stretching between the island of Rab and the Gulf of Kotor) and sits very close to the Prokljansko jezero where river Krka ends (tke Croatian Krka river ofcourse not to be confused with the 3 Krka rivers in Slovenia or the 1 in Austria). Also the famous Paklenica national park (especially among rock climbers) is not that far and there are antient cityes of Šibenik and Zadar pretty close too. You can train both on the sea and on the lake wich gives you a wide variety of water surfaces and directions to go. Both the lake, Krka river and its famous waterfalls are part of the Krka national park. It will be a big group of athletes again: 8 slovenian, 3 austrian and 2 Swiss seniors, almost 15 juniors and 6 coaches. Unthinkable numbers just a year or two ago. We will be staying there for 2 weeks with the main focus on endurance and techicque training. So there is going to be A LOT of hard-yards to paddle! Looking forward to the tough challenge.
Posted by Jernej on Sunday 14 February 2010 - 09:12:09 |
Monday 08 February 2010
Starring in the eyes of winter
After the easy week it was time to go back in the boat. Winter conditions being the cruel reality or not, i had to get used to paddling again before heading south for the first paddling camp of 2010 season. These 2 weeks is all i have to stand to reach the end of the winter tunnel and paddling in -9 during the first week was really the pinnacle of wintter suffering. Just 5 days left and what i am taking care of the most is not to get sick! Once we get to Skradin it will be carneval time already and we will officially calll it spring camp! Check my foto gallery tribute to the training through this winter here.
The notorious bench-pull exercise:
Posted by Jernej on Monday 08 February 2010 - 16:35:00 |
Monday 01 February 2010
Backing off
This week i really had to take it easy. The workload of the previous week(s) really sat hard on me and it was necessary to fully respect the planned easy week. I did some easyer gmy and run sessions and i already did the first 3 (shorter) water trainings of this year!!! The best fun of the whole week was sledding down a hill after having walked on our own all the way up. It was slightly scary and really fun! And the best part of it was, that we did it with the Sports unit in the army, so the fun was actually…work!
Posted by Jernej on Monday 01 February 2010 - 16:27:31 |
Monday 25 January 2010
XC-ski camp no.2 - Planica
The past week was an incredible experience. For a kayaker January is sinonimous with hard work, lots of hard work. It is still far from the racing season and you should be logging lots of volume and possibly do as much as possible of cross training, to fully use all the unspecific means of development before you jump back in the boat and start looking towards the racing fitness. So this second week of cross country skiing camp was the obvious choice for one of the hardest weeks of this winter. Kilometers and kilometers of skiing combined with tons and tons of gym work. As always every second day we did a killer session (3 in 6 days) that will stay in our memoryes for the whole season. I am sure me and JK will remember the Thursday's uphill intervall session when time comes to really hurt in the boat in summer racing. We do the same session every winter and it feels like we just learn over the years to push harder through it. The rest of skiing was about going the distance. And sometimes it got so cold and i had still so much road back to the hotel that i just wanted to stop, crowl under a tree and have a nap. Gym was good too, power after the morning skiing and core strenght before dinner as the last session of the day! Sometimes i wonder how the body feels when you simultaneously attack it with super heavy loads in gym and very intense aerobic stress, a bit confused i guess! Noone stops to ask anyway. But somehow i felt even through the week i was improving in both areas. A bit of a surprise as at the end i stoped at 33 hours of training in 6 days. And that's not games anymore. Thanks to JK and Gašper Miklavc (aka Grehrad Schmid) for good company. I think the coming week will be VERY EASY for us all!
The olympic training center where we were staying:
Posted by Jernej on Monday 25 January 2010 - 13:44:13 |
Tuesday 19 January 2010
Planica
From Monday to Saturday i will be staying in Planica for some more xc-skiing. I will be training here with Jernej Korenjak and Gerhard Schmidt (from Austria downriver team). We are living at the Planica olympic center, just under the biggest ski jumping hill in the world (watch the world record being broken in Planica). The snow is here, the courses are all set nicely, the hotel crew treats us marvelouslly as always and the Tamar valley is there too....stoic, silent and astonishing, frozen in ice and time!
This is me while travelling to Planica on early Monday morning. I am standing on the new bridge above Log pod Mangartom, just before the Predel mountain pass:
Posted by Jernej on Tuesday 19 January 2010 - 10:58:27 |
Wednesday 13 January 2010
A paddle with Michele Z
Yesterday i finally managed to visit my friend Michele Zerial from the italian town of Trieste. He only lives 20 minutes away from my town and it was really sad we naver managed to train together on our bay before (also training in the same bay are strong canoeists like: Stjepan Janić, Luca Piemonte, Mauro Pra Floriani, Luca Malusa, Marco Lipizer (marathon), Anna Alberti and Špela Ponomarenko along with past and present day olympic medallists Andrea Facchin (bronze in 2008), Bruno Dreossi (silver in 1992) and Daniele Scarpa (gold and silver in 1996). Not bad for a north Adriatic bay;-) Together we did a good paddle from the Piazza del'Unita (the biggest square with a view on the sea in Europe) in the center of Trieste to the Miramare castle and back. Brisk air on a sunny day made the view along the Barcolana pretty astonishing (Barcolana is the site of the famous Barcolana regatta, traditionally held in october). I used his Nelo Vanquish 3 XXL (the boat he used to finishe 5th on 2009 World Champs), wich is a size bigger than my boat. Liked the additional space in the hip area and the smooth running and decided i will too use this model for the 2010 campaign. The same day i already talked to Nelo and within hours they already agreed to produce the boat according to my specs and deliver it to me by mid February. Amazing as allways! Can't say Thanks enough to them! On the foto it is Michele and me standing by his car. It is the famous FIAT 500, not the new one, but the oldtimer one (it must be a bit pimped judging by the roar it makes). It is a petit car only 3 meters long and Michele realy is a big guy so seeing him driving it or squeezing himself out of it is a must see spectacle (almost beats seeing Imre Pulai driving a mini morris in Budapest once)!
Posted by Jernej on Wednesday 13 January 2010 - 20:39:26 |
Sunday 10 January 2010
Back from the snow
Back on our lake from the xc-ski camp! It was a hard six days with 30 hours of training and i am happy how i managed to stand the torture and only started feeling the tank empty on the last day. It was so nice to be back on the snow after i skipped this camp last winter. And i enjoyed every single session on the snow, even the long steady ones i sometimes had to do alone and finish them in the dark. The hardest session was an interval training where we did 24 times (in 3 sets of 8) a course around 1:10 minutes long, it was only allowed to use hands and it was a bit uphill. We pushed it to absolute oblivion and i think only those who ever tried this game will understand how hard this can become if you play it all out. I had two more very intense ski sessions in these six days while the rest of skiing was long slow distance. During the week we also climbed Mt.Viševnik (2050m). Tired from the morning skiing and gym sessions and in half a meter of snow it was not exactly an afternoon walk, but definitelly worth the trouble. Stane Klemenc (steped on the highest peak of all the continents except Asia and first Slovenian to reach alone the South Pole) was our guide so we all felt pretty safe. I am staying home now for a week and will use my rollskies instead. In a week time i will be back on snow for some more hard pounding on the white crystals.
Posted by Jernej on Sunday 10 January 2010 - 16:09:10 |
Tuesday 05 January 2010
XC -skiing training camp 1
I am now already on my next training camp. We came to Pokljuka for a week of dryland training. Between christmas and beggining of February i will focus a lot on this kind of unspecific training. The main focus will be strenght in the gym and endurance in running, swimming, xc-skiing and rollskating. This week is 1 of 2 weeks i will spend cross-county skiing. We are staying at the new and posh Sports center Pokljuka and spending endless hours on the skies along with big loads of gym training. This is a very difficult combination, as the skiing allows you big volumes of hard work and gym trainings are notoriously difficult per se. But being part of such a big team (here there are almost all slalom, downriver and flatwater guys) makes everything also good fun. It is going to be a hell of a week!!!
And this is me waxing my skies after dinner:
Posted by Jernej on Tuesday 05 January 2010 - 20:51:20 |
Friday 25 December 2009
Back from Sabaudia
Just back from a very hard training camp in the Italian town of Sabaudia. Sabaudia lays between Rome and Naples, wich is already quite on the south of Italy and makes its climate pretty nice for winter training (also a big Polish canoe team and the Slovak K4 were there ). It was built in 1934 by Mussolini in the Modernist arhitectural style that is strongly reffering to neoclassicism and looks very different from most Italian towns. Besides the town's architecture the main atractions in the surroundings are the national park 'Il Circeo' with its flora and fauna, the 4 lakes (Sabaudia, Caprolace, Fogliano and dei Monaci) and the 22 km long sandy dunes on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea. We were paddling on the lake Sabaudia and keeping our boats at the training center for canoeing and rowing of the Italian Police. At the same spot in Sabaudia there are 4 training centers for canoeing and rowing – the ones belonging to the Police (Polizia dello Stato), Finanzial police (Guardia di Finanza), Marines (Marina Militare) and Forrest guard (Guardia Forrestale). Quite cool to know noone will dare to steal your boat over the night. It was also very interesting to see how top paddlers in Italy can use these facilities over the whole year and basically can paddle all year round with not more than a few cold days per year. With our German coach our training was extremely extensive. While with our large, new, young and eager team our training never stopped to be competitive or slow. I am still adapting to the new team dynamics, but at the same time i am inmensely enjoying the luxury of being put out of the comfort zone on every session – by athelets of my own team. Exciting stuff!
