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!

Back to Indoor Training

Post # 3

MADISON, WISCONSIN - First and foremost, huge congratulations to all of the ITA athletes that have been named to the Olympic team!  I am anxious for the Games to start and can't wait to watch Emily, Torin, and Caitlin compete.

I've been back in Madison for about two weeks now.  I helped drive the trailer carrying about 20 boats back from Florida and it took us 2 days and about 24 driving hours.  The truck and trailer together are longer than an semi, so driving it can get a little tricky sometimes.  Luckily the weather wasn't too bad, except that it was really windy on the first day so the trailer was swaying back and forth on the highway a lot!  I finally got to my house at 1:30 am and went to bed before getting back into training the next morning.

Here are two pictures of when we drove home.  Next to cars, our trailer looks huge, but put it between some semis, and it looks really little!

I've heard different reports on how thick the ice on the lake here in Madison is right now, but it sounds like it's somewhere between 8 and 16 inches.  With that, my team and I are hard at work on the indoor rowing machines (ergometers, or ergs) and in the weight room.  We've had some tough workouts but I had a really good week of training and it feels great to be working hard. 

It looks like my community project will be coming together in the next couple weeks.  I'm so excited to get started!

Training Camp in Florida

COCOA BEACH, FLORIDA - I am just wrapping up a 2 week training trip in Florida.  My team and I train in Wisconsin during the year but since the lake freezes, we take a couple trips south to get some time on the water.  It is a great way to break up the indoor season so that we don't have to be on the rowing machines for the entire winter.  To orient you a little bit more on my training situation, I rowed at the University of Wisconsin during college and now I'm continuing to train alongside the team even though I graduated.  So while they are training for the collegiate national championship in June in big, eight person boats, I am training for my races in the single.  The picture below shows how practices usually are.  I'm in the red boat!  As you can imagine, I have to push myself to keep up with the speed of the eights, but it is great for training.  

During the first half of the trip, the weather was unseasonably cold.  On one of the mornings last week, we woke up to 16 mph winds which made the air temperature feel like 19 degrees!  We must have brought the cold with us from Wisconsin because the news reports said that it was the coldest it has been in decades for this area!

One of the coolest parts about rowing in Florida is that the wildlife is unlike any other place we get to row.  We see groups of dolphins swimming around the boats during almost every practice.  The other day we saw at least 20 at one time!  We've also seen lots of fish and a few manatees, although not as many as in past years because of the cold.

I love training camps because you get the opportunity to focus solely on rowing.  Morning practices go from 8 to 11:30 and afternoon practices are from 3 to 5:30.  Although practices are long, we have been able to put in lots of good miles and it has been a really productive trip all around.  One more practice this afternoon and another tomorrow morning before we head north to Madison!

Hello!  I am so excited to be part of In the Arena and eager to get involved in the community!  I hope to add something not only to the Madison community, but also to the larger ITA community.  As the first ever rower on the Arena Roster, more of you will get to learn about the mysterious sport that I do, and I hope to learn more about the sports that the other ITA athletes do!

As I write this, I am on a plane leaving Oklahoma City.  I was down there for a couple of days rowing out of the local boathouse with Jen, a 2008 Olympian. Not only were we there to get some good rowing in, we got to see the plans for the new US Olympic Training Center that is just starting up in Oklahoma City.  It’s going to be a facility for a variety of sports: kayaking, rowing, archery, and volleyball. There are lots of plans in the works, from a world-class boathouse (complete with an altitude chamber for better training!) to an athlete village and even a wind wall along the rowing race course to keep the water calm.

While we were there, Jen and I gave a talk to the local high school rowing club about how each of us got started with rowing and what some of our experiences at the high school, college, and national team level have been like.  It was a great opportunity to connect with the community there and to be an inspiration to the up-and-coming athletes. A couple of them even came up to me afterward and told me how special it was to meet me and hear me speak.  I hope that ITA will give me the opportunity to inspire more youth like the ones in Oklahoma!