During the last summer Remi Lindholm has been training harder than ever before. As is his custom, he has tested his limits – limits that keep receding as he develops as a skier.
Despite that, he has managed to get to the dark side of the border. Once again.
He worked himself into such a condition that his body reacted to training in the desired way for two months.
When Sportliv meets Lindholm in Vuokatti in mid-September, the body has finally returned to normal training readiness.
However, the overworked state of the summer made the 24-year-old colored man, who joined the A national team, thoughtful during the competition season.
– I trained so hard that you can’t know how the competitions will go. It could be that I won’t even be able to tour the World Cup next season, or I could be in my twenties.
Last weekend in Davos, he was already close to the latter. Lindholm finished 11th in the 20 kilometer free race.
However, Lindholm is not expected to be at the peak of his career this season. The peak will only come when the body has endured the brutal training for several more years.
So no need to worry. Let the bold experimentation of boundaries continue.
An active childhood enables the current amount of exercise
Remi Lindholm grew up in a family where sport has always been a central and self-evident part of life. Parents Johanna and Glenn were competitive skiers themselves. Both skied a few World Cup competitions in the 1990s, and Johanna also in the World Championships.
The parents have continued their active training to this day.
– When we’re the whole family here in Vuokatti, there’s almost a competition to see who can go for a morning run first. Most of the time, mom and dad get there first, and I go when I wake up, Remi says a little troubled.
Remi and his three brothers have adopted their parents’ lifestyle. The fact that Remi is capable of such wild amounts of training today is partly a matter of character, but purely physiologically it would be impossible without his background.
– Remi’s childhood exercise has been huge, and Glenn and Johanna have made it possible. They have taken the children to many different hobbies and they have been moving all the time, says the personal trainer Santeri Erola.
– It’s been in the yard the whole time. It has become such an enormously versatile exercise in different forms that it actually enables everything that Remi is able to do today.
This season, Remi Lindholm trains the most out of all Finnish national team skiers. There are not many people abroad who practice as much.
– There are individual skiers who train as much as Remi, but there are very few of them in the whole world. Report has it that Martin Johnsrud Sundby would have practiced a bit more, and I think that Iivo Niskanen the best years probably had roughly the same amounts, says Erola.
For Lindholm, heavy training is a relatively new thing. It took him traveling to the other side of the globe—to China, Mongolia, and Australia—to realize that he was unlikely to become anything as a skier if he continued to train the way he had been.
After completing his military service in the summer of 2019, Remi received an interesting offer from his father. Glenn Lindholm worked as a coach in China’s massive national team program, the goal of which was to train a few top skiers for the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Remi answered his father’s offer in the affirmative and packed his bag. He went along to coach Chinese skiers for three months.
The journey turned out to be really hard, but at the same time a turning point in terms of his skiing career.
The three-month trip in autumn 2019 included training camps in Australia, China and Mongolia. Remi Lindholm acted as a coach and at the same time trained himself.
The trip was a psychologically difficult experience. Remi had to adapt to a completely foreign culture and at the same time learn to work as a coach.
Besides, the amount of Chinese training blew Lindholm’s mind. Most of the time, they trained three times a day, and the Chinese athletes never complained about anything.
– Nothing I’ve experienced has felt as heavy, even though today I train harder than then. Everything was so new and there was so much to think about, says Lindholm.
After the instructive trip to China, Remi Lindholm has been training much harder. Especially after finding that the harder training suited him and paid off.
Remi was not a star in the junior leagues. He had never been able to participate in the World Youth Championships.
However, in the winter after the trip to China, he was in good enough shape that at the age of 22 he was able to represent Finland in the under-23 series at the World Youth Championships in Oberwiesenthal.
There, he didn’t quite reach the top 20, but he was the best Finn in both the 15-kilometer traditional and the 30-kilometer freestyle.
The competitions gave a little taste of what harder training would bring in the long run.
– In endurance sports, hard training is rarely rewarded right away. But after training hard for several years, you can suddenly come off, and then you just have to let it burn.
No one had expected results like last season from Remi Lindholm. He himself had no expectations regarding international competitions. The main target was his club in the Championship organized by Imatra Athletes.
Then, however, it happened that the first World Cup points of my career came right away in the first race of the season in Ruka. The top performances continued, and Lindholm got to tour the World Cup on a regular basis, ski the Tour de Ski, and participate in the Beijing Olympics.
– In previous seasons, Remi has been able to ski individual good skis, but none as good as what was seen several times last season. We are talking about a really significant leap for an athlete in the adult category, says Santeri Erola.
Before last season, Lindholm had participated in only one World Cup competition, in Lahti in January 2021, where the result was 48th place. Last season’s best finish came in Falun, where the result was 14th place in the 15 kilometer freestyle.
In his three starts at the Olympics, he made it into the top 30 twice, but those races weren’t the sweetest experience of the season.
– The hardest thing was the first points of my career in Ruka. Before that I wasn’t really much of a skier, if I still am now. In the final stretch, however, I hit Perttu Hyvärinen and Calle Halfvarsson. It felt great.
In that race, Sunday’s pursuit in Ruka, Lindholm crossed the finish line as the 20th skier. Later that evening, at home in Vuokatti, Remi watched the TV broadcast of the competition as a replay and felt his eyes fill with happy tears.
He had reached a new level as a skier. Such hard placings in the World Cup were so unfamiliar that he didn’t know how to get the prize money into his account.
– You have to apply for the prize money online. I didn’t know how to do it, so I never got that 200 euros. But it doesn’t really matter, Remi smiles with a grin on his face.
Instead of Lindholm continuing his hard training and driving around Finland to smaller national competitions, he got to prepare for the first World Cup games of his career outside his home country, in Lillehammer. That started a hectic competition season, and a career as an international skier.
Effective cooperation with a young coach
A short car ride east of Vuokatti is a small cottage that Santeri Erola acquired earlier this year. There, Remi has helped with the renovation work and has taken a sauna several times during the past training season.
The camera follows Erola and Lindholm’s flirtatious interaction. The decision to show their bare behinds on TV is made together and on their own initiative – without any pressure from the Sportliv team.
Personal chemistry goes well with friends whose age difference is not more than four years. Their collaboration began during the spring before the breakthrough season.
Today, 28-year-old Erola and Lindholm first became friends. A few years ago, they lived under the same roof for a while, and noticed how similar they thought about training.
They agreed that Remi should continue with hard endurance training, both in volume and intensity. But some things Erola wanted to change.
– Certain things were treated with indifference, such as preparing for the games and controlling a good state. When such small things were eradicated, more quality was achieved, Erola explains.
As a personal trainer, Erola has had to limit what Lindholm can do, instead of forcing him to train.
– Remi trains really hard and the limits are tested – actually weekly, if not sometimes daily. A lot spills over when you go so close to risk.
When Remi puts himself in a tight spot, he’s in a pretty bad mood. During the exercises, he feels pain, and afterwards also feels bad. Sometimes, after really hard training, the body runs at such high speeds that the night’s sleep may last only one hour.
In order to reach such a state of exhaustion, he has to train more and harder, as his endurance qualities develop. Experiments with boundaries are starting to become even more radical.
The summer’s two-month long overloaded state was the result of a half-crazy week of training that Lindholm did with a few other skiers in Ylläki in July. Instead of the normal 30-hour training week, he trained for 50 hours.
– I wouldn’t say that you need to train 50 hours a week to become a good skier, but I like testing the limits. A 30-hour training week doesn’t feel like anything after you’ve put in 50 hours once, Lindholm explains.
Earlier in the summer, he had tested his limits by extending one of his Sunday workouts. Instead of the usual 100 km flat push run, he pushed to go 200 km on slow roller skis. The duration of the run was ten hours.
How did it feel in your abs to push flat all the way?
– I felt it a bit, but I’m used to it, since I practice the deadlift almost every day. If you’re in good enough shape, it shouldn’t feel too bad. After that, it was a day of rest and I played a bit of poker.
Coach Erola doesn’t think it’s bad for Remi to test her limits, but she has to watch that training excesses don’t happen too often.
– Training on Remi can easily lead to thinking that “I can train more than anyone else” – and then it is no longer the best possible option in terms of competitive skiing. There are, and there will certainly be, individual cases like this.
Dare to train hard – dare to rest enough
This year, Lindholm’s training amounts will rise to between 1,100 and 1,200 hours. Last year, he practiced 1,010 hours, and 970 the year before.
– These classes are based on the fact that he tolerates training really well. Remi doesn’t get sick or injured terribly easily. There were no sick days last year at all, Erola reveals.
A few weeks after Sportliv’s Vuokatti visit, things get weird. Lindholm announces on Instagram that the little one broke, after tripping – even though it was clear – at the foot of a tree.
However, the unfortunate accident does not spoil his competitive season. Three days after the accident, Lindholm announces that training is underway again.
When you train as hard as Remi Lindholm does, a few days of extra rest can only do you good in the end. He also realizes that himself.
– If you dare to train really hard, you must also dare to rest enough. If I’ve been training super hard, I might rest for up to three days straight. Otherwise, the whole training will go to waste.
And when Remi is rested, he can resume his super-hard training routine.