The Road to 2012

It’s true. This post is shamefully, awfully late. We’ve added a few updates to the gallery and tweaked the look of the site here and there, but any sort of updates on our Road to 2012 have been absent. I’m writing this from work at DEKA Research and Development up in Manchester, New Hampshire (more on this later) where I’m living and training for the summer. Dave is back in Washington, DC working for Boeing. Neither of us can talk about what we’re doing, as we’re operating under NDAs or Secret clearances… pretty cool, though not as exciting as it should be.

So much to talk about! For now, I’ll start with a quick list of the events in our lives, both academic and athletic, since the last post.

• Triathlon! I attended the Lone Star Half-Ironman in Galveston, TX and the Endurasport Olympic Triathlon in Pomona, NY, and won both (for the 20-24 age class). I’m still gearing up for the full-length Ironman at the end of August, so, more on that to come.

• Olympic Trials! Dave traveled out to Oklahoma City this past April to race for a spot on the US Olympic Team. He ended up with some impressive results, finishing 6th in the finals. Unfortunately it takes a win to go to the Games, so we’re going to have to hold off until 2012 to make our statement.

• The school year’s over, along with the brunt of our work for our Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering degrees. Next year should be much simpler on the brainy side of life, giving us plenty of time to focus on the brawn. The US Men’s team has been fantastic in 2008–we’re going to need the brawn.

• We’ve decided on a senior project in the engineering department. For those of you who haven’t seen this already, go over and check out the Flyak;Einar Rasmussen has been working on this hydrofoiled modification to the K1 for years, and it looks like it’s about to go into production. David and I are going to take this concept and apply it to the K2. It’s a slightly tougher problem, as we won’t have a paddler sitting at the rotational center of the boat (important for pitching the front foil up out of the water and alleviating some of the hull drag, allowing the boat to speed up for “lift-off”. We’ve got a few ideas for overcoming this, including generating bubbles from the leading edge of the hydrofoil to keep the kinematic viscosity low until take-off–props to Mike Harbold, 3x Olympian and former WCC coach for this insight.

• I’m learning the Blues Harmonica, mostly on my own but with some help from Adam Gussow over at YouTube. One of the unfortunate truths of full-time training is the overwhelming boredom that sets in once the initial excitement of it all wears off. I’ll always be the kid with the odd hobbies, but composing the 2012 Blues might just make up for all that. (Other obsessions in my life–I’m learning to ride motorcycles this August, I’m playing Jazz guitar again, and I’m finally, finally learning to cook.)

• David and I will be making an appearance at the Lake Placid Invitational on the weekend of July 5th. Come out and support the dream!

Back to work. Thanks for reading, everyone, if you’re still checking up on this. David will add his voice again shortly. One fun little addition to the site we’re expecting to begin shortly–video posts from our respective locations, via YouTube.

Just a short little post this time to let you all know that we’ve updated the Photo Gallery portion of our website. It looks even cooler than it used to, with the added feature of multiple Flickr sets and great navigation between them all. The set you see at the top (titled “Cell Phone Pics”) is set to auto-update with the latest mobile phone pictures from each of us. We’ll try to snap as many as we can of school and the various training SNAFUs we have to deal with (the morass behind the Princeton Boathouse being the most absurd of all of these).

In addition to this auto set, we’ve posted pictures from last summer’s Pan American Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as some of the training camps we went through along the way. Let us know what you think!

This site’s dedicated to the power of dedication and the long-term goal. The title of the blog is a perfect example–we’ve put up a website declaring our intentions to embark on what will prove to be one of the hardest journeys of our lives. There are going to be plenty of opportunities to give up, of course, but that’s exactly why the Olympic Games hold such mystique in people’s minds. So many people take on and let go of athletics as children that we admire the few who can keep their claws buried in a dream and ride it on to its fullest potential.

I’ve got my personal heroes in life, all people who are the Best in the World at what they do. (In this context “Best in the World” means the best at achieving the goals they’ve set out for themselves.) My old coach, Mike Harbold, was fantastic in his ability to inspire me to train hard and make those long-term goals tangible. He’d been there before, to the World Championships and even the Olympics. He brought back stories, good enough stories that I was willing to go out and kick my own ass every day after high school when the rest of the kids were doing the things teenage kids usually do. He was the Best In The world, in that he did what he set out to do. There are Professors here at Princeton who are the Best in the World. Every single person at the TED Conference (see my earlier post) fits this mold, and David and I are hoping that someday we can follow the lead of these Heroes we admire and become the Best in the World of sprint kayak. This isn’t the same as becoming Olympic Medalists, though that would be fantastic–it’s more about living up to the goals of dedication, commitment and inspiration that we set up for ourselves.

It’s tough to train as a full-time student, but we’ve been getting by. School’s given us the chance to experiment with our training in ways that a full-time athlete doesn’t have the freedom to do. We followed Mark Rippetoe’s advice in Practical Programming for Strength Training and developed an ambitious strength program that had me benching close to 300 pounds. We’ve played around with yoga, cycling, swimming, running, all sorts of different puzzle pieces which some day are going to fit together into the skill set we’ll need to make the Olympic Team. We don’t have it all yet, but it’s interesting to be aware of how every decision we make will reverberate forward into our athletic futures. To be the best in the world, you’ve got to dedicate mind and body to the exclusion of all else. This is unfortunate for someone with as frenetic a list of interests as myself, but the discomfort is part of the draw.

And now, the actual meat and information in the post–in the spirit of this site’s aforementioned love of making bold claims about distant events, David and I have locked down the sweep of our lives for the next couple of years. We’re both working on pretty wild internships this summer (more on this later!) which will give us the freedom to train, me for my Ironman (with much paddling thrown in–Ben Fouhy can cross-train like an animal, so I can too!) and Dave in the kayak. Following Senior Year, we’ll be racing in Europe and then moving in with the Kayak Team at the Chula Vista Olympic Training Center. After a few months we want to make the next step up in average ability, traveling to Florida with the guys to train with the Canadians and international paddlers flying in for camp. Trials for the World Championships next, followed by another hard racing season… then, we’re hoping to move out of the country and train with the Best in the World. Two years of full-time training, all boiling down to the minutes-long frenzy of the Olympic Trial.

So, there it is, all laid out. All of you reading, comment away, because perspective such as this really clarifies how important it is to have the support structure that we do. The goal of a single race seems incredibly narrow, almost selfish–but of course its about more than the personal gain. It’s about pushing the edge, inspiring those close to us and becoming the Best in the World.

So its been a busy 10 days since my last update, with midterm exams, summer job interviews, and training on and off the water. Although the weather has been much warmer recently, it’s been quite windy, sometimes gusting up to 40 mph, which has made getting quality mileage quite difficult. Given the circumstances, I’ve only been able to get about 80km and 3 weight sessions in over the last week. Not an ideal number but I’m happy to have gotten that much in over this busy time. I’m desperately looking forward to next week, by then midterms will be over, I’ll know where I’ll be working over the summer, and I’ll finally be in spring break!

Sam and I will both be in D.C. for our weeklong break; hopefully we’ll get in a lot of base mileage on the water, paddling twice a day or more. Although we’ve both made large gains in weight training over the winter, it will take lots of technical work in the kayak before this strength shows up on the water. More updates to come over spring break, I’ve got my digital camera now so hopefully I’ll have some pics up soon. Also, my good friend John DeRiggi is training for a triathlon and raising money for leukemia and lymphoma. His donations page is http://www.active.com/donate/tntnca04/tntncaJDeRigg , and since it all goes towards non-profit research all donations are tax-deductible. If you’re able, help donate to fund the means to fight these deadly diseases.

We’ve had a huge surge in the amount of people visiting the site– thanks to all who have been checking the blog and tracking our journey. A huge thanks also to our new corporate sponsor, ThinkFun, and all the individual donations that have been coming in over the past few days! Your support gives us the means to reach our dream of competing in London come 2012.

In terms of training, we’re finally getting back on the water. Last week was brutal, the temperature was mid 30’s so the lake was barely thawed. There was still a bit of ice along the edges, and I was surprised to take this picture of myself on one particularly cold day:

Yes, those are icicles on my hair… I didn’t realize that they had formed until I got off the water and tried to dry my hair off. Thankfully, the weather is finally now warming up with temperatures in the low 50’s for the next few days. I’ll be getting in good mileage and trying to make use of the little time I have available to prepare for the Olympic Trials in Oklahoma City taking place April 18-20. I’m excited just to take place in the event and hopefully the experience will help for our big trials before 2012.

PRE-TED CONFERENCE

I’m sitting here on a Sunday afternoon with clothes strewn around my room, trying to figure out what to pack for the mind-blowing week ahead of me. Through a wild stretch of luck this past year, I managed to get myself invited to the TED Conference in gorgeous Monterey, CA as the assistant photographer. For those of you who don’t know TED, take a look at Thomas Dolby’s fantastic description of the conference. I’ve been going to this thing since 2005, but this will be my first year as a volunteer and should get me backstage and talking to a lot of the big speakers.

Though next week is a rest week in the program, I can’t wait to get out on the California coast on my triathlon bike. No, let me boil it down a little further–I can’t wait to get on my bike without donning four pounds of warm clothes that don’t really do too much to fight the bitter, bitter cold of this blasted land. More on TED: From a mental perspective, this is one of the only weeks of the year where my mind is boggled on an hourly basis. It’s really quite exhausting, but I come away better every year, open to possibilities and with more connections (and TED freebies) than I could imagine. I’m showing up at TED this year armed with my kayak2012 business card:

a nice little something that I’m hoping will garner interest in our goal. Really, be sure to take a look at that link up above and get a feel for what TED is all about. The talks on their website can change your life, and they’re all free for download! Post comments here on the blog about what you find

LONG-TERM TRAINING PLANS

In other news, David and I sat down today to discuss our long-term plans for these Olympic dreams we’ve been so bold about sharing with all of you. It’s becoming clear that to really reach our full potential, we need to throw all of our effort into this one boat and push for the K2 spot on the Olympic team with all of the will-power at our command. That’s going to mean plenty of sacrifice, but it’s also going to mean that we need to be fairly fierce about working our way into the best K2 training groups on earth. We’ll be starting out with the US team in Chula Vista after we graduate, something we’re both very excited about. From there, if all goes well, we’ll pull our way up to the next rung of ability and begin the slow, painful climb up towards the upper reaches where the giants roam.

To start down this road while still at school, we’re going to need to raise some serious funds and work with either Princeton or our local Canoe Club, the WCC, to purchase two kayak ergometers so that we can continue our kayak specific work during the winter season. We want to thank everyone who’s donated so far–you can track our progress towards these two ergs with the ChipIn widget over to the left in the sidebar. We’re almost a third of the way there! Seriously, all of the guestbook posts and personal messages we’ve gotten have been really inspiring.

Here’s an example of the bike rides that we’ve been doing during the long weeks of base training here in Princeton. I knocked this 52-miler out today,starting out with a 20′ warm-up and transitioning into one hour at tempo/threshold pace on my Triathlon bike. The aero position cuts down the frontal area I present to the wind, and the aerodynamic cross sections of the bike tubes essentially make it far more invisible to the wind than circular tubes would (think drag on a baseball versus drag on a wing). I averaged around 24 mph for this hour, finishing somewhere along that top section in the map below, and pulled my tired self around Princeton for another couple of hours. Unfortunately the sun had set by the time I reached familiar territory, five miles out from home. I won’t go into details of the stupidity of this little venture, but I WILL say that it’s terrifying bombing a hill at 35 mph as shadows loom ahead of you, projected by oncoming cars bearing down from behind.

So the training’s been heating up here, unlike the weather which has been teasing us with warm, humid days in between icy days that are starting to drive me crazy out on the bike. I’m about to start my longest week of training before the big Lone Star Triathlon down in Texas (March 30th!). This has me out on the bike for about 11 hours total, swimming about 5 and running for 4 hours, with 2 hours of weights packed in there around the edges. My cycle moves back to rest next week, and then I ramp up for a couple more before my peak week before the race. This will be my first Half Ironman, but the training’s been feeling really good and with luck I’ll be able to nail all the little details leading up to the race and knock out a really good time.

In other news, David and I are both new members of POWERBAR Team Elite! We got the news a few days ago, and want to thank Powerbar for supporting our Olympic dreams. The toughest part about training so hard as a full-time athlete is that it’s often tough to fit proper nutrition in around Engineering classes and Dave and my duties as Residential College Advisors. Basically, we’ll be subsisting on meals in bar form from here on out.

For future posts I want to start including some of the raw details of our training, and laying out exactly what we’re doing to try and make it to the highest level. One of the biggest things that separates us from the other guys is the amount of reading and research we do on exercise physiology and kayaking in general. We don’t have the free time that some of the other kayakers do, but we do distinguish ourselves by training SMART. An update I really want on the site is the Training Library we use, to direct anyone interested to some of the best books out there on all of the many aspects of training at the Olympic level. There’s so much junk out there–I’ve spent tens of hours combing over different training guides and exercise physiology textbooks, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job boiling the list down to a select few from really knowledgeable sources. That said, tens of hours isn’t that long a time–if anyone has any suggestions for us to take a look at, shoot us an e-mail or comment on the post!

Several updates have been made to the website in the last few days. We’ve completed the templates for nearly all parts of the site, with big changes in the biography, results, media, calendar, and sponsorship sections. Sam also added a way to view YouTube videos of us in the Gallery section, so check back soon for video posts. There are still a few more aesthetic updates to come, but at this point we’re almost complete!

Training is going quite well, with both of us braving the New Jersey weather– which has been quite horrible recently. Lots of cold, rainy, and occasionally even snowy/icy weather. We’re spending the majority of our time swimming, doing weights, running and biking for now, but I know both of us are really looking forward to getting back on the water soon. More updates shortly.

So for my first post, I thought I would give an update as to what sort of training we’re currently doing. Sam is concentrating hard on his Ironman training, doing tons of biking, running, and swimming, while working to maintain his strength on the weights. Big thanks to TrainingPeaks for providing Sam with these great quality workouts. As for me, since I do not plan on competing in the Ironman I’ve geared my workouts more towards kayaking, meaning more weights and a lot of kayak erging. I did, however, get a little taste of Sam’s Ironman workouts this morning. We went out on a nice 52 mile bike ride, and it was really hard! We averaged just under 18 mph, which was quite difficult with all the hills on the route. One hill in particular was excruciatingly difficult, but I’m glad to say I made it through the whole ride in about 2 hours 55 minutes, and just in time to reach my 11am class! More updates and pictures will follow soon. We’ve been working hard on developing the website; it should be fully operational quite soon.

Also, thanks to everyone who has signed the guestbook.