Bill Jennings: Banff offers bountiful cornucopia of skiing prep for SSRA

Mark Burandt celebrated Thanksgiving in Spokane with his family more than a week before the rest of us. Burandt, who has been coaching ski racers at Mount Spokane for 25 years, will be feasting today in Banff, Alberta with his other family, the Spokane Ski Racing Association (SSRA).

Every year during Thanksgiving week, Burandt, head coach of the alpine team, and Chuck Holcomb, Executive Director of SSRA, travel north with an entourage of young athletes, parents and siblings to spend seven days training for the first time of the season on real mountain snow.

While Burandt, 51, is in Banff, his sons Stefan, 24, and Alex, 21 – who are also SSRA coaches – will be working as volunteers on the downhill and super G courses at Lake Louise, the site of an annual World Cup event. His daughter, Elyse Burandt, 16, will be training with the Schweitzer Alpine Racing Team in Panorama, a few miles to the southeast.

“All the top downhillers and super G racers from around the world will be there at Lake Louise and my boys will be there, too,” Burandt said. “I’ll be coaching the under-16 group and we’ll be doing an early-season progression of training.”

Banff is an ideal location for SSRA’s young athletes to spend seven days on snow in preparation for their first event in mid-December. The resort town is surrounded by ski areas where winter usually comes earlier than it does in our neighborhood.

Holcomb and Burandt will be putting their team through workouts at Sunshine Village and Norquay before wrapping up the week with a trip to the World Cup downhill at Lake Louise.

SSRA started “dry-land training” as a group Oct. 1 a couple of times a week at U-District Performance Training in Spokane. The athletes have also spent time on ice skates, getting a feel for the balance and muscle actions required for skiing. This week is their first chance to turn on snow since practicing on glaciers at Mt. Hood last summer.

“It’s a really cool training environment,” Holcomb said. “We get up on the hill about 8 o’clock and typically get in more than 30 runs a day. It’s real high-volume, and it’s great to learn watching your teammates training as you ride back up the hill. We spend a lot of time applying the skills we’ve been working on in the offseason to real tactical situations.”

Holcomb said the opportunity to train on terrain different to what the skiers are used to at Mount Spokane is important.

“Every course is different,” he said. “We need to be adapting to terrain, adapting to conditions and tactically applying our skills to turn shapes that aren’t dictated by us, but by the course setter. Our Banff training camp is critical for developing those skills.”

More than gate crashing will be on the program. Burandt said he will be directing drills to develop leg strength, balance and coordination. One of his favorites is having the athletes make slow, deliberate turns wearing only one ski.

“It makes it easy for a coach to see all the little glitches in technique that have to be corrected,” he said. “For the average skier that’s very difficult to do. But after working on it every week for a few weeks, it’s amazing to see how they really start doing it well.”

For the average skier, spending seven full days on snow running gates and performing drills may sound exhausting. But young legs are resilient and it won’t be all work and no play for SSRA. Burandt can also indulge in another Thanksgiving dinner.

“We work really hard, but we have a lot of fun too,” Holcomb said. “A lot of families come up and turn it into a holiday vacation. We have a big thanksgiving team dinner and everybody brings a favorite dish. It’s a pretty neat deal.”