Olympic Spirit

Post #5

Madison, Wisconsin - After a week of sunny, 60 degree Seattle weather, I'm back in snowy Wisconsin.  Rowing out there was so much fun and it was great to catch up with my teammates from this summer.  Unlike the two summers that I have trained in Seattle, the skies were clear almost all week and it was just amazing to see the huge, snow covered Olympic and Cascade mountains while we were out on the water.   You can see mountains a full 360 degrees around you and it's pretty awesome.  One of the coolest experiences was getting to row at night while I was there.  I was rowing with Michelle, my doubles partner from last summer, at about 7 pm and even though the water and the sky were pitch black and calm, the city was alive with so many people and lights.  I tried to capture it on my camera but ah! it was just so much better in person.

Seattle at night from Lake Union with the Space Needle on the right

You can just barely see the Cascades in the background through the drawbridge

Since I don't have a TV in my mini apartment, I have been glued to either nbcolympics.com or my friends' TVs for the past two weeks.  I happened to be at a friend's house when the women's bobsled coverage came on and I saw ITA athlete Emily on TV taking her first run!!!  She went on to place 5th overall - very impressive. Her blog can be found here: http://in-the-arena-emily.blogspot.com/.

The Olympics is such an exciting time because you get to see the essence of sport for two weeks.  The world gets to watch the extraordinary highs of success and the incredible lows of defeat that athletes from so many different countries go through.  We get to see team sports and individual sports.  We get to learn about sports we know very little about and watch ones we already know a lot about.  But regardless of the sport, everyone gets to share the Olympic spirit for two weeks and that is truly inspiring and special.

I love these kids!!

Post #4

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON - I started my community project this week in Madison and it was absolutely awesome!  I am working with a third grade classroom and the kids are so thoughtful, curious, and fun-loving.  I can't wait to spend more time working with them and getting to know them.  We had some time in the classroom during the middle of the week and then on Friday we went on a Valentine's Day field trip to an ice skating rink on the UW campus.  Some of the kids looked like pros on the ice (we do live in Wisconsin after all!) while others got their first ever taste of ice skating.  It was amazing to watch all of them experience the thrill of ice skating.  I spent a fair amount of the hour and a half timing the kids as they skated around the perimeter of the rink as fast as they could.  Now these are kids after my own heart!  They were so excited to try to break their best times, they kept asking to be timed over and over again.  I'll post pictures soon!!

On the training side of things, my team had an annual erg race yesterday morning.  All 40 (or so) lightweight rowers got seeded into races against each other and each of us raced 2,000 meters (the standard sprint racing distance in rowing) three times.  It's always one of the toughest mornings of winter practice, and this year was no different.  It was a particularly exciting practice for me because I beat my personal best time by 3.3 seconds, which is a pretty big amount!  Even though it was great to PR by that much, it was a bittersweet race because my goal was to go faster than I did.  The piece was going well for the first part and I was right on my goal splits, but the last part was where I didn't perform as well as I should have.  As I came into the sprint of the race, one of the coaches was behind my erg telling me to push harder.  My mind responded by being excited and ready, but unfortunately my completely exhausted legs didn't respond quite so well.  While I was disappointed that I didn't have a good sprint, my coach reminded me that we haven't done a lot of work on the it yet, so for this time in the season, it wasn't a bad piece.

After the erg race, I went to the airport and flew from Madison to Seattle.  I'll be training with some other US National Team members for a week out here.  The water never freezes in Seattle, so I'll not only get a chance to train with some great athletes, I'll get to actually ROW on real water!  That is always an exciting thing for us cold-weather rowers.  This morning I walked around a farmer's market without a jacket, hat, or gloves on.  Quite the change from snowy Madison!  Tomorrow morning is my first chance to get back in a boat and I can't wait.

Finally, for the ITA athletes competing in the Olympics up in Vancouver, GOOD LUCK!  I'm rooting for you!