Repost of San Diego Update

For some reason my latest update didn't go thru to a lot of people, so I'm reposting here because I hate spamming.

Mike
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Hey all -

Here's my latest 'newsletter' which is rapidly becoming my primary form of communication with the outside world.
Updating you all from San Diego this time, where my team has relocated to avoid the winter of the East Coast. We live in a dorm-like facility here, which is one of three training operated by USOC where athletes can reside (Lake Placid and Colorado Springs are the other two). I will be mostly in San Diego for the next 7 weeks, not including a week in the SF Bay Area.
I made some big jumps with my fitness and am finally starting to feel like an athlete again after my two year layoff; that is, I'm not tired ALL the time. My body is adjusting to the massive amount of training we do. We had some physiological tests on the rowing machine over the holidays to measure our short- and long-distance capacity, and I was near or better than my personal records on both, and I still feel like I have room to improve - which is good.
We are switching back and forth between boats and the rowing machines fairly frequently while we are in San Diego. There are 8 of us here, and we are trying different combinations in four man and two man boats to see who works well with who, and rowing the eight man boat a bit just to mix it up.
Our last month in Princeton was cold, with a lot of days where it dipped down into the teens. We were getting frozen off the water for a few days at a time (literally meaning or lake would freeze) which would force us indoors on the rowing machines for a couple of days. As a Californian, the chill was really difficult to deal with - it took a lot of extra time to get my body warm and I wasn't nearly as sharp as I am in warmer weather. Needless to say, glad to be in CA now.
This is an intense training period, and selection for the four man boat to race in the Olympics from the eight of us training here will really heat up in March and April.
Wrapping up fall in PrincetonIn November and December, my squad (the lightweight men) stayed behind in NJ when the other teams (heavyweight men, all the women) took off for different warm weather training locations in California and South Carolina (Clemson). We had the NJ facilities to ourselves, which was good, but it was starting to get really difficult to deal with cold. It can be really tough to wake up when its dark and 20 degrees out and try to get your body awake and ready to race out on the lake. I was resorting to getting up before 6 AM for a 745 AM practice in order to get my blood flowing by the time I had to be ready to go and was taking about four hot showers a day. Racing is getting better all the time; I'm figuring and remembering a lot of the subtleties that are important - I still need to get more consistent and expect that will come over the next couple of months. My scores on the rowing machine (ergometer) kept getting better with each test and workout, so I am hoping the upward trend will continue. We did a test right after Thanksgiving, which ranked me 8th on the squad, a test right before Christmas in which I finished fourth, and one before New Years, which I finished 3rd. They are different length tests so they measure different abilities/strengths but I am glad to catching up relative to everyone in general. The middle test before Xmas is actually the most important because it mirrors or racing distance of 2000 meters and about six minutes - I finished in 6: 16.2, less than 1.5 seconds off my personal record and I'll look to shave some seconds off that when we do it again in March. At this level, taking even a few seconds off is a LOT of work, but I think I have some room to get quicker. Scores on the rowing machine doesn't translate directly to the boat (that is, people who are fast on the machines are not necessarily fast in the boat), because there a lot of technical and skill aspects to being on the water, but it's a good relative measure of aerobic capacity and strength because there are no variables (wind, personnel combinations, etc). California
We are staying at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, which is near the Mexican border and Tijuana ( http://www.chulavistaconvis.org/olympic.asp ). It's a great facility where we are very well taken care of - cafeteria, amenities, on-site trainers, very quick walk from the dorms to the dining hall and the boathouse... Essentially when we stay here, we have no expenses and live in a self contained unit. However, I equate it to a minimum security prison because we are well taken care of and the weather is great - but we can't seem to leave. I've barely left the grounds since I've been here. However, it's a great facility for training, and it's great to be back in warm weather. We have a packed training schedule and I am having to eat a lot more to keep nutrition, which is good because up til now I'd been struggling to lose weight. It's good to hang out with athletes from other sports, which we don't get to do in Princeton. Teams that train here include track, archery, triathlon, canoe/kayak, women's softball (Jennie Finch and her kid live right below me for those that know who she is), field hockey, and they just a built a BMX ramp since BMX biking is now included in the Olympics (I really want to try the ramp but know I would kill myself on it). We got here on December 30, practiced twice New Year's Eve and twice New Year's Day. For the first time I can remember I slept through midnight on New Years... I also had to do my fitness tests on the rowing machine a few days before Christmas and a few days after, so not my most relaxing holiday season. But you gotta want it..... We practice everyday at 10 AM and 345PM. Two to three times a week we also have lifting sessions, but for inexplicable reasons those don't count as actual workouts with our coach. I am spending all my time with the same group of guys, and maturity levels have dropped rapidly in this environment (we rarely go more than twenty minutes without one of us dopping a cleverly-timed "That's what she said"). I also put my job with a private-equity fund on hold for now, so I do some twiddling of my thumbs between practices - I'm not used to not being busy. But it lets me focus more on rowing for now without worrying about other responsibilities (although it does hurt my cashflow a bit). We have eight guys here training for the four man boat that will race in Beijing. We are trying different combinations right now, meaning we row in different line-ups in the 4 for five days at a time and race them on the last day to test their speed. This stretch is more about training and getting fitter than selecting the final boat. We do a very heavy amount of work at this time of year in order to push our max capacity up - basically during the year we go through 6 - 7 'cycles' of increasing work with recovery periods of about a week in between, the idea being that when we recover between cycles our muscles will grow back stronger. I've been really wearing down towards the end of cycles, but now am starting match and beat my personal records when I am rested. So that is a good sign, and I am hoping I will keep improving over the next few months as we get closer to selecting the Olympic team.

We don't get off the base very much - last time I was here in 2004 we stayed for five months and I invested in a car, but we are only here for six weeks, so for right now I am 'landlocked'. I finally got off site the other night and went and played dodgeball - yes, dogeball - at a bar which hosts tournaments on Sunday nights. SO FUN. Few things I have done quite relieve the stress of training quite like sprinting around a little room and winging a rubber ball at people. Watching groups of rowers (oversized and competitive by nature) playing dodgeball must be amusing - we got smoked by some teams that were really serious, but we did manage to take out the best team in the tournament in one of our games (despite our 2 and 4 overall record). It wasn't quite racing at the Olympics, but it was really fun nonetheless....

Waiting....

Stuck in downtime here.... this is one of the hardest parts about the sport - the waiting. We were supposed to do a racing/competitive workout at 7 AM, so we dragged ourselves out of bed at 6 AM, went to the dining hall to get some food in our systems to wake ourselves up, only to have our coaches decide that they didn't like the direction of the wind on the racecourse, so they sent us back to our rooms until 10 AM. Now I've got three hours to kill and still have this workout hanging over my head...

One of the reasons sports like this can be such a time-suck is that a one hour workout doesn't take an hour - it's more like five hours between getting to and from the boathouse, stretching/warming up, cooling down, getting your water bottle/sports drinks and snacks, and recovering afterwards. I didn't really realize all this until I started grad school and I intended to keep training full-time while going to class - until I realized there was no way I could fit everything into my day.

The time-drag factor is exacerbated here at the San Diego training center because we've got nothing else to do - no jobs to get to, no wives/girlfriends to see. It's just us and the training. You can pack a lot of focused training into your camp here, but not much else.... somehow despite having several hours between practices, I can't seem to get anything else done during my day (and that's coming from someone who considers himself generally productive).

On a totally separate note, we are still giving blood to the sports physiologist. I'm really tired of getting my finger pricked. I keep hearing that I have high lactate levels. That's bad because it means my body produces a lot of lactic acid but good because it means I've got a high pain tolerance. Either way, I'm getting tired of bleeding all over my oar handle...

New Favorite Sport

I've developed a new favorite sport - played Dodgeball in a bar with a bunch of my teammates the other night. SO FUN. Maybe it was because it was my first time off the base since I got here to San Diego.

A bunch of us piled in my friend's car (and I mean piled - 8 of us fit in a Range Rover - we have limited cars here) and drove out to a bar by Mission Bay which has Sunday night dodgeball tournaments. Yup, just like in the movie. A lot of serious players who apparently play in tournaments in Vegas. We rolled up, signed up two teams of four, and immediately got all nervous about getting embarrassed by dodgeball players. Which of course happened, but still, it was awesome. It's amazing how much adrenaline you can get winging those rubber balls at people. We ended up winning two and losing six games, one of our losses to a bunch of scary looking girls wearing t-shirts that said 'F*** Like A Porn Star' (seriously). BUT, we managed to take out the best team in the tournament - pure luck, but we'll take it. The MVP was definitely my buddy Wyatt Allen's girlfriend Rachel Jeffers - somehow she was always the last one left our team and won us a couple of games.

Regardless, the sight of a bunch of oversized rowers playing dodgeball must have been highly amusing to anyone watching. I can guarantee we will back, keep an eye out for us in the dodgeball circles.

Brief flicker of humor

Posting at 10 Pm on Sat night. Awesome. But that's how I roll these days.

Made coach laugh today. It's really rare, so I feel it needs to be documented. Practice ran into the early evening when it was pitch black. Frustrating, I actually hate rowing in the dark because it makes me tense because I am often responsible for steering and I have no idea where I am going. Also can't see my timing/rating monitor. But anyway, our coach motored up to us and said that he was glad we were out so late because it was valuable, and one of the guys in my boat commented that it was zen-like or something to that effect. I couldn't resist and commented on how it was not only zen-like, but also much like Ralph Macchio doing wax-on, wax-off late into the night. The timing/delivery must have been pretty good, because I'm realizing that it's not that funny when I'm writing it here, but I got at least 30 seconds of laughter out of it, including coach. Which, like I said, is rare.

Boring. I know. But like I said, that's how I roll these days.

TGIF

OK, I realize this is pretty similar to my last post.... but it's Friday night at the training center. Needless to say, we are not heading to happy hours. In fact, I had no idea it was Friday until a few hours ago. Time really loses any sense of meaning here - days of the week mean nothing. I was pretty sure it was a weekday by the television that was on in the middle of the day, but it was kind of scary when I realized I couldn't tell what day of the week it actually was - because I had no reference point. It's kind of like the time I was rowing on a lake at the tail end of a long European racing and training trip, and realized I couldn't remember what country I was in. Things just blend together into a string of practices...

Other random training observations - somehow our weightlifting sessions don't count as practices. So we have two practices a day here, plus weights. I would have thought that was three practices a day - but you say tomato, I say tomoto...

225 days til the finals in Beijing.

New Year's at the Training Center

So I rang in the New Year with more workouts... I arrived at the US Olympic Training Center in San Diego on Dec 30, rowed twice on New Year's Eve and twice on New Year's Day. Suffice to say, I didn't do a lot of partying that night. I think it was the first time that I can remember actually sleeping through midnight.... Ordinarily New Year's would definitely be off from practice, but not this time around. I suppose it is only fitting because it's what I'll be doing non-stop for a good chunk of this year.

Arriving at the training center was pretty surreal. I spent six months here leading up to the 2004 Olympics, and when I stepped back in it was like getting into time warp. I'll write more about what life is like down here when I get some more time, but it's a pretty simple life that revolves around training, eating and sleeping. The weird thing is that it feels like I never left.... the whole time I was off in business school, living and training in Princeton - seems like it never really happened and that I stepped into a weird time warp. Such is the curse of this place.... a minimum security prison. We are well taken care of - but we can't leave....