The Workout
Ms. Randall does two workouts each day. She trains with a private cross-country skiing club at Alaska Pacific University. She meets the team at 8:30 each morning for what is usually a 2?-hour workout on roller skis. Once a week, the team has a session that lasts as long as four hours and can include runs of 12 to 15 miles on mountainous terrain.
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Mark Meyer for The Wall Street Journal
Ms. Randall does strength training at a local gym twice a week.
During the regular session, Ms. Randall and her teammates spend the morning skiing intervals up and down the area's hills. They will often cover more than 25 miles in a morning with ease, though the distance varies depending on whether the team is working on endurance or speed. Speed work requires interval training, which can be multiple one-minute bursts of sprinting with little rest in between.
The danger, Ms. Randall says, is the skis don't come with brakes, and skiers can reach 45 miles per hour on them. "If you have to stop suddenly, you pretty much have to dive off the road," she says. "That's why you wear a helmet."
After lunch and a nap, she works out on her own. Twice a week she does strength training at a local gym, though even that 90-minute session begins with a 30- to 60-minute run or roller ski. She says half of her exercises are weight-training focused on specific muscles, while the other half is focused on strengthening her core balance.
That's where the pull-up bar comes in. Ms. Randall will hang from the bar, bring her legs up into a pike position, then slowly lower them repeatedly. She'll do the same routine with weights strapped to her ankles. Then, keeping her ankles together and her legs raised, she'll swing legs back and forth in front of her face like windshield wipers. "Just as I start to get good at something, my trainer figures out something to add to make it harder," she says.
On other days, she works on her endurance, either roller-skiing or running for 90 to 150 minutes on the rolling trails near her house at what she calls a "conversational pace" of eight-minute miles. She'll often run with ski poles, and, this being Alaska, bells or pepper spray to ward off bears or moose. "The moose have this incredible knack of getting in between me and my car right at the end of my runs," she says.
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Reuters
Ms. Randall at a Ladies' FIS World Cup qualifying race in February.
She also works in long-distance cycling, doing road work in the summer and mountain-biking in the fall. The off-season includes a two-week ski camp in May in Bend, Ore., and another weeklong camp on Eagle Glacier in Alaska in June, where she skis five hours a day.
This year, she will put in 10 days of skiing in an indoor ski tunnel in Sweden in August, then do a weeklong camp in Fairbanks, Alaska, in late October.
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