Going West

Post # 12

Somewhere on I-80 in Indiana – Accompanied by a few leftover birthday cupcakes beside me, I’m sitting in a cramped backseat of the Wisconsin truck driving back to Madison. With fourteen hours of driving behind us and four ahead, it’s safe to say we’re itching to be back. A few quick updates from the weekend:

On Friday, I celebrated my 24th birthday. For the past nine years, my birthday has fallen during the weekend of a championship race and this year was no different. However, I will admit that this year was unique in that it fell on a non-racing day between two racing days. Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes and for wishing me and Michelle luck in racing.

Racing results from my final can be found here and pictures from Thursday morning are here.

The Wisconsin lightweights raced at a different course 45 minutes south of where I was in New Jersey at the Eastern Sprints championship race. What a banner day they had! They defended their title in the varsity eight by winning gold for the fifth year running. The second varsity eight and freshman eight also came home with gold medals. Full recap is here.

Finally, the Wisconsin men’s varsity eight came away with a fourth place finish at their championship race in Worcester, Massachusetts yesterday. Their morning heat was arguably the most exciting race of the day. In a six-boat race where the top two boats advance to the “A” final, they beat out Yale to take the second place spot by mere fractions of a second. Results here . Check out this photo finish!

Off to do some epic unpacking from my month-long trip. I'll be back at Randall tomorrow morning and can't wait!

Second Home

Post # 11

Princeton, New Jersey - We had the most amazing dinner last night in the most amazing house. But first, rewind. Michelle (my doubles partner) and I have been in Princeton at the national training center for three weeks now. We have been putting in miles on Lake Mercer, the site of countless hours of training over the course of five months leading up to the World Championships last year. We're back, and it feels just like a second home.

In Princeton, many community members generously open their doors to national team rowers, providing them with a place to stay during training and competition. Michelle and I are lucky enough to stay in a beautiful barn-turned-house designed by the architects that live in it and are hosting us. I'm talkin' beautiful courtyard, thirty foot ceilings, exposed brick from the original barn, and much, much more. It's so unique that I almost feel out of place. I guess that's what living in college apartments for the past five years will do to you!



Our coach, Bryan, has won two Olympic medals (one gold and one bronze) along with countless other national and international medals. He is one of the most (if not THE most) decorated rower in US history. Turns out Bryan is also an incredible chef. He cooked an amazing meal for a dinner party at our house last night. There were twenty three people in attendance, including three generations of US national team rowers plus several other community members. We had a great time catching up with old friends as well as hearing stories from former national teamers.



The spread: grilled yams, grilled asparagus, couscous and beet salad, grilled steak, shrimp, grilled pineapple, and spring salad. Yum!

The second race of the season begins on Thursday morning. Michelle and I are racing six other crews in the lightweight double event. More updates to come as we approach the weekend!

Let the Racing Begin

Post # 10

Princeton, New Jersey - Over the past three days, I have been racing at the USRowing Spring Speed Order.  It's the first race of the season for us and a chance for everyone to get together after the long winter of training and see where we stack up.  There were three races in the single - a time trial, a heat, and a final.  For the heat race on Friday afternoon, I had to get either first or second place in order to move on to the "A" final.  I was able to win that race, and moved on to the final race yesterday.  In that race, we essentially had the top six lightweight scullers in the country competing so there was pressure all the way through.  Out of the seventeen lightweight competitors, I placed fourth overall with a time of 8 minutes and 6 seconds.  While I wish I could have gotten a couple places higher, I am fairly happy with how I placed.  The final race was a great one.  Lots of boats were making moves on each other and that made it extra exciting.  It turned out that I didn't have enough speed at the end of the race to hold off the third place boat but it was awesome to be back on the race course.

The results can be found HERE and there's a picture of me racing HERE.

This is my first time attempting to post video, so my fingers are crossed that this actually works.  The videos are from Friday afternoon when I was launching off the dock for my race in the heat.  It might be hard to hear, but after I set the boat down into the water and got in, there was a big spider crawling around!  I REALLY don't like spiders so I had to get out of the boat and make sure it was spider-free before I left the dock to race.

One final note - you'll notice that I have a pink weight taped inside the boat.  That's because all of our boats are required to weigh at least 14 kilograms.  Mine was just under that weight, so I had to add a little bit of weight to it!!

 

Terrace Town!

Post # 9

Madison, Wisconsin - For the last few weeks, the third graders have been working hard on Terrace Town, a program that involves about fifteen Madison schools.  Each class plans and builds an eco-friendly city, filled with government buildings, co-housing, schools, parks, businesses, and homes.  Then, each class  puts it on display for the public at the Monona Terrace, our local convention center.  Today, the kids not only got to set up their town in the convention center, they got to do a bunch of other activities as well.  They even got t-shirts and hard hats from the Monona Terrace to celebrate their accomplishment!  Here are some pictures from yesterday and today.

Our town, set up yesterday in the Randall classroom

Our town, set up at the Monona Terrace.  Here are the four boys with the Sports YMCA that we worked on this week!  

Sadie and Jenny with their buildings

Me and Oscar after creating pictures to go in the Terrace Town art center

Juliana, Jenny, and Sadie tip their hats to a completed Terrace Town

Juliana is goofing around!

Tennessee Photos

Getting ready for morning practice!

Amanda passes the time in the hotel between practices

Fog lingers during the middle of morning practice

Wisconsin lightweights warm up for their first race of the season

Crews launching off the docks

3/4 of the way through the race and Wisco is dominating!

Back in the Swing of Things

Post #8

Oak Ridge, Tennessee - This week we've been in Tennessee on our spring training trip.  Usually, early spring means windy conditions but it has been perfectly calm water every morning that we've been here.  It has been a rower's paradise!  It's a little chilly in the mornings when we launch, but by the time we get moving and the sun gets higher in the sky, it warms up to a great rowing temperature: not too hot, not too cold.  Pictures to come as soon as I get back home!

Two days ago, we launched off the dock at about 7:30 am and into dense fog.  I was the first boat to launch and suddenly I found myself completely surrounded by fog!  I couldn't see anything at all and had no idea where I was relative to the landmarks.  Finally another boat of my teammates emerged so we stuck together and followed the shoreline (after we found it).  Luckily, the sun broke through and the fog lifted after only twenty minutes, but that was an eerie rowing experience!

What I'm most excited about is that our lake in Madison, Lake Mendota, melted on Tuesday so we are *officially* back on the water full-time.  The transition from the rowing machines (ergs) to rowing on water means that we get to take all of the strength training that we've been doing on the machines and add the on the water technical component to it.  We have been doing lots of time trials on the sprint course in Tennessee and I'm happy with the times I've been posting so far.  Exactly three weeks from today is the first race in New Jersey.  I'm going out tomorrow morning to time trial with some bigger boats (4 people per boat) from UW and the University of Tennessee.  My teammates are opening their season by racing in the eights tomorrow as well.

Finally, news on the classroom front.  Just before spring break, the students had been busily preparing their latest stories for publication and the progress has been great.  I'm anxious to get back on Tuesday and see how the editing is going!

Spring has Sprung!

Post #7

Madison, Wisconsin - Spring has sprung in Madison and we are all feeling it.  The lake is melting (though never quickly enough) and everyone at the boathouse is anxious to get the docks in and get back to practicing on the water.  The area of Lake Mendota, the lake we row on, is fifteen square miles so it takes a lot of warm weather to melt the ice on it.  We had a couple of really warm days this week so we took the rowing machines outside.  Here's a shot of the UW men's rowing team out near the frozen lake earlier this week.

When I first moved to Madison, someone told me that the cold winters here are good because they make us appreciate the warm weather so much more than we otherwise would.  It's so true!

Living "In the Arena"

Post #6

Madison, Wisconsin - The past month of working with the third graders at my elementary school has taught me so much already.  Broadly speaking, I see firsthand that there is so much potential for our youth but also so much need in our public schools.  I knew that the U.S. education system was in need of more support from the government and community before I started working with In the Arena because that's what we hear from politicians, newspaper articles, college professors, and other sources that report on the issues facing our education system.  But what has struck me in the past month is how much I've learned from actually rolling up my sleeves and getting in the classroom (or..."in the arena").  On a weekly basis, I get to listen to these kids, read their stories, and begin to understand the incredible spectrum of experiences and backgrounds that each of them comes from.  I get to see the amazing potential that the students of room 108 have and help them begin to figure out what kind of people they want to be.  Wow - that alone is an incredible thing to be a part of! 

Here's a poster hanging in the classroom.   It's hard to argue that kids trying to live by these words of wisdom don't have potential!  It reads:

1. You can do anything if you try

2. Working together pays off

3. Showing courage in order to solve a problem

4. Don't be an enemy to your enemy.  Be a friend to your enemy - help someone even if they're teasing you

5. Depend on others to survive

6. Don't argue when you're in a bad situation.  Cooperate. 

7. Don't give up trying - keep moving forward

8. (my personal favorite) Little people can do big things

9. Be kind hearted and nice to others

The needs of schools are also something that I have begun to understand.  With more kids coming into the school system, our elementary school faces a need to increase resources and funding at a time when both are difficult to get.  In fact, resources and funding are things that many of the nation's schools lack.  One of the headlines on CNN.com last week featured an article about how Kansas City will be closing almost half of its public schools due to budget cuts.  Talk about causing a huge ripple effect in a community!

The most important part of all of this is that I've only been drawn into the elementary school community and learned the things I've learned by witnessing them firsthand.   Instead of seeing it through the eyes of politicians, newspapers, etc., I get to see it through the eyes of the students.   Until I started ITA, I could not fully grasp how incredibly important our youth and our schools are to the community and how they are beyond worthy of our time and energy.  Needless to say, I am walking away from these first few weeks with a much greater appreciation for ITA and its mission to get athletes "in the arena" and I am so thankful to be a part of it.  I never knew there was such an opportunity to make a difference in the community, and all that time it was right in my own backyard.  

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!