Forged excellent international results from time to time last season Krista Pärmäkoski32, started the World Championships in Planica with an impressive 6th place in combined skiing.
When Pärmäkoski, who has been monitoring his heart rate every night for a decade, monitored his recovery with the help of technology at the team’s hotel in Tarvisio, Italy, the readings were shocking.
The recovery didn’t start at all after the competitions, and while competing advances the performance of a healthy athlete, Pärmäkoski fell into a slump.
Bad results followed one after the other in Slovenia.
Heavy atmosphere
Right at home, on the Monday after the Games, the corona test showed positive, and things were explained. The atmosphere was heavy, as Pärmäkoski had had to stop the Tour de Ski, which had already gone well at the turn of the year, after becoming ill. At his own World Cup preparation camp in Italy, he was still in such a shock that he even talked to his close friends about the only medal color he still lacks in prestigious competitions: gold.
– It was quite clear that the health situation strongly correlated with the results in Planica. The setback was quite hard when both of the season’s main goals went wrong due to health issues, Pärmäkoski recalled on Monday at his annual media day in Tampere.
Pärmäkoski, who already skied his 12th medal in the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games, i.e. the bronze in the 10 km intermediate start (p), had firmly planned that his career would end in the spring of 2023. He achieved his first medal in 2011 and since that time is clearly the Finnish athlete who has won the most medal in Olympic sports.
Thoughts turned
– If I had been so bad in Planica when I was healthy and I think I had trained well, my career would have ended there. Now the result was so much worse than the athlete that it finally turned the thoughts to continue.
Pärmäkoski, who finished the competition season in mid-April, trained to his heart’s content in May. He was an agreed coach Matti Haaviston with that training according to the program would start at the beginning of June.
The program arrived in the e-mail as agreed, and the experienced athlete felt like he was in a cage. The idea of a total and disciplined framing of your whole life according to an exercise program felt like a mental stranglehold.
– It really bothered me a lot. I had to come up with something else.
The athlete drew a red pen from the program over everything except her husband Tommi Pärmäkoski the strength exercises designed by Haavisto and the power exercises drawn by Haavisto, which are fairly moderately included in the training program of the basic fitness season anyway.
– Everything else I did according to my own feelings, and it started to feel good.
In July, Pärmäkoski trained entirely in Kuortane, but participated in the only foreign camp of the national team summer in Italy’s Passo Lavaze. When the current team’s second medal haul Ivo Neck last spring stated that the A national team’s camping resources were torpedoing the financial situation of the Ski Federation for a bad time, he voted with his feet and disappeared until the beginning of the competition season.
Not out of the national team
Pärmäkoski, who had already made this decision once, at the turn of the decade, wanted a long camp at Passo Lavaze, but was otherwise not stressed about the situation. He missed the second foreign camp in Ramsau, Austria, because he regularly got sick while camping there.
Pärmäkoski, who has become significantly prosperous by skiing, invested thousands of euros in his further project in September by going to Utah, USA, and Soldier Hollow, where the 2002 Olympic Games were skied, for more than a month.
A long-time friend from the national team became a travel companion, training partner and guardian Riitta-Liisa Roponenwho skied his first Olympic competitions in 2002 in those landscapes.
The versatile training opportunities of Soldier Hollow, Park City and Midway made a great impression on the Finn. The athlete, who had just returned from America, almost drooled with enthusiasm when describing the exercises he did in the last week of the camp for the US national team, i.e. the Olympic champion-world champion Jessica Diggins with.
– Depending on the training needs, an increase was found from 5-6 percent to 16-20 percent. Yes, even on roller skis the butt starts crying for help, said Pärmäkoski, who is training in Lapland next.
“Can end tomorrow”
He knows that his decision to continue will automatically make skiing fans think that his career will now continue until the Winter Olympics in Milan and until the spring of 2026.
A skier who made four and later one-year extension decisions when he was young no longer hangs on such a promise when he is older.
– The career can end tomorrow or after the World Cup in Ruka. Or it could end after the Milan Olympics.
Before his first snow camp in Lapland, Pärmäkoski thoroughly cleaned his entire ski equipment and ordered new lubrication equipment and benches as well as new ski bags and clips. The reason is the complete ban on fluoride creams, which at this stage only applies to top international skiing.
No one seems to know whether the technical device developed to monitor the case and the monitoring mechanism work at least reliably enough and what kind of farce the next season could turn out to be from this view at worst.
– I understand that in a way it is considered illogical to lower skiing speeds, Pärmäkoski described the qualitative superiority of fluoride creams compared to all other products in the industry.
– In freezing weather, the difference is not very dramatic. But if you ski 50 kilometers in wet weather, it’s big.
The veteran athlete believes that he will see the test device that reveals fluoride residues on skis for the first time at the Olostunturi camp in Muonio before the Ruka Finland Cup and the World Cup.
– I asked the coach (Matti Haavisto) about that device and its reliability. He also couldn’t give precise answers at this stage.
Believes in Johaug’s return
Norway’s Trondheim 2025 will organize the next prestigious skiing competitions. It has already sparked a debate about whether in 2022 the three Olympic gold medalists who have won and finished their careers Therese Johaug would still establish a MM project.
– When the program includes 50 kilometers free on rough terrain, I would be very surprised if Therese didn’t even try. But it’s certain that he won’t come to the line if he doesn’t know that he can also win if he succeeds.