The Road to 2012

We had our National Team trials last weekend, so both Sam and I flew out to sunny California to enjoy some good weather and to take place in some exciting racing. Our big events were the K1 500 and K1 1000, where we were both shooting to place top 7 to maximize our chances of making the World Championship team. Overall, the racing went extremely well, with both of us achieving our goals. In the 500 I placed 4th and Sam 6th (both with PRs), while in the 1000 I battled a broken footstrap to come in 9th and Sam 7th, which ranks us as #6 and #7 overall. The K2 1000 also went quite well… we battled blustery conditions and a vicious sidewind to come in a close 3rd behind the Dolan brothers (www.dolanbros.com) and Tim Hornsby/Morgan House. Morgan actually won all of his events, so a big congrats to him! Pictured below is the K4 combination of (front to back) Sam Ritchie / Dion Maxwell / Taran Stucchio / me. It was our first time in the boat (and my first time in 4 seat– I couldn’t even see above Taran’s head!), but we still came in within 2 seconds of the winning crew which was great. Full results on the USACK website.

After the trials we also got a chance to clean our boats off with some Marine Restorer, compliments of Debby Page. We know have shiny, new-looking boats which will hopefully glide across the water even faster now that they have a shiny new finish. (It’s amazing how dirty our kayaks get in their neglected state behind the Princeton boathouse). 

We’re now back in New Jersey, where it’s been raining for 48 hours straight. (Gotta love the dirty Jerz!). We have a few more exams left, and a presentation of our senior thesis entitled: “Variable Drag Element on a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine for Improved Performance” (I know what you’re thinking, but hey, I wasn’t the one who came up with the title). If all goes well, graduation is June 2nd after which we will officially be in the ‘real world.’

So now its back to training basics as we prepare for the next trials in July, which will determine exactly which boats will race at the World Championships (Aug 12-16 in Dartmouth, Canada). Stay tuned for more updates!

Okay, all, It’s that time of year again… though again doesn’t really apply, since this is really our first Winter election…

I seem to have blown the suspense. USACK Elections are here! We had a bit of a hiccup last time, what with the whole restructuring of the national board, but we’re back in business. All of you readers who are paying members of USA Canoe Kayak should have received ballots via e-mail over the past few days. If not, make sure to send a note to the fantastic Gerald Babao (gerald@usack.org) and make it known that need some assistance.

I’m running for the Sprint Athlete Director position, and would love all of your support. I’ll end with a copy of the letter I’ve just sent out the the Yahoo “Kayak” group.

(On the horizon, a week away: Sam Goes West to Chula Vista, for a spring break voyage rivaled by no other. Seriously, comment if you have a better idea than two weeks at the Olympic Training Center.)

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Hello all,

my name is Sam Ritchie–I’m writing to ask for your support in USACK’s current election of a new Sprint Athlete Director to the Board.

I’ve been kayaking competitively for 12 years, and have represented the US on three US Junior National Teams, and one Pan American Team, traveling to Brazil in 2007. I’m currently finishing my final year here at college, after which I’ll be moving out to the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, CA, to start seriously training for the 2012 Olympics in London.

I’ve put in many hours over the past few months as a volunteer, working with Brett Heyl and other members of the USACK staff on various outreach initiatives to the membership. I’ll be co-authoring a column in the upcoming USACK monthly newsletter, assisting in website development, and keeping you all up to date on the goings-on of the national team through my website, www.kayak2012.com.

I’ve also created a web portal–usack.slinkset.com–to allow you all to speak directly to the USACK board, and offer the membership the chance to hear back on any and every issue it deems important. (Keep contributing to this, please! The Board will be responding to the most interesting ideas in the newsletter each and every month.)

Whatever the outcome of the election, I’ll be working hard as a representative for the athletes and members across the country–your vote, and my spot on the Board, would bring you one step closer to the heart of USA Canoe Kayak, and allow all of us a bit more faith in the organization we’ve believed in for so many years.

Make sure to vote, using the ballots you should have received via e-mail over the last week! If you have any questions, or problems with the ballot, get in touch at sritchie09@gmail.com.

~Sam Ritchie

Once again, for the FIFTH year running, I’m on a plane, heading out to the TED Conference. It’s a conference for big thinkers, visionaries and world-shakers. This may prompt some of you big thinkers out there to wonder, how the hell did Sam get invited? I’d like to tell you all that this is news of a comeback in the flatwater kayaking world. Was I invited to give a talk on one of the most prestigious athletic pursuits currently in existence? Is one of our own finally going to get some press time, to plug USACK and the rest of the sport?

Unfortunately not. As with my paddling, I’m riding on the laurels of my past achievements; last year, I was invited to TED as assistant photographer. That was back before Dave and I had discovered our fiery passion for updating this website, and, unfortunately, the account of my experience is lost. This time, at TED’s first appearance in Long Beach, CA, I’ll be one of 100 TED Hosts, responsible for familiarizing the 1400+ Conference goers with the new venue. Dave will be holding down the fort back in frigid New Jersey, partying like the madman he is, out at Cloister, one of Princeton’s ten eating clubs. I know he’s looking forward to Two Articles of Clothing night this Thursday, so make sure to leave comments giving him some suggestions on what to wear.

Nothing of substance to say here now–only, look forward to some fantastic updates over the next few days. Here’s a sample talk to get you acquainted:

Dave and I try to bring you all the best training tips and stories on the internet–up until now, I thought that we had succeeded in holding this high office. Then, I found Club Trillion. Mark Titus, a walk-on at Ohio State, named the blog after him and two of his walk-on buddies, down at the end of the bench, all members of Club Trillion. To earn a ticket to the club, you have to get into the game for a single minute and do absolutely nothing that would add to your stat line. Your row in the stat sheet at the end of the game shows up with a 1 followed by thirteen zeroes–technically TEN trillion, but no matter.

Here’s the link:

http://clubtrillion.blogspot.com

In other news, please look forward to Dave and my upcoming announcement about the new and exclusive Club Last-At-Trials.

USACK is starting a newsletter! Brett Hyle’s putting it all together, so make sure to send him a nice note here. Brett also wanted me to let all of you know that USACK is looking for stories about you, your training, your coaching and your camps. ANYTHING will do. Send off a story and some pictures to addtoweb@usack.org, and Brett will immediately go to work getting you published to USACK’s website!

Back to the newsletter. During some brainstorming sessions at the latest Lake Placid Training Camp, Brett asked Emily Wright and myself if we wouldn’t mind writing a short column for the newsletter each month. Here’s what we came up with:

FEM AND SAM’S USACK COLUMN

Of which this is the first; of which there will be many.

Nearly two dozen years ago, hundreds of miles apart, two kayakers were born. Their names were Sam and Fem, and they each had a strange knack for voicing opinions in short essays of 500 to 1000 words. Fast forward 21 years. Sam and Fem both realize simultaneously that USACK’s biggest flaw–perhaps its only flaw–is its failure to produce a hilarious and cheesy column for the monthly newsletter. The curious pair decide to author such a column, because–improbably–the one thing they both do better than paddling is write funny columns about paddling.

Allow us to introduce ourselves. Our names are Sam Ritchie and Emily “Fem” Wright; we’re both members of the Sprint Kayak National Team, based out at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, CA. The idea for this column came about when slalom Olympian Brett Hyle, seeking to get USACK’s membership excited and engaged, suggested setting aside space in his newly-created newsletter for a column focused on the lives and interests of USACK’s athletes. He offered us the chance to write about anything we wanted, provided it had at least some tenuous connection to training or kayaking. Naturally, we accepted. Immediately.

Starting next month, we’ll join USACK as regular contributors to the monthly newsletter. Between columns, we’ll keep you all satisfied with numerous posts to our up-and-coming blog on the USACK website. We’ll be answering questions sent in by our readers, crafting essays on all sorts of athletic topics, and providing an entertaining glimpse into the unique lifestyle of the full-time flatwater kayaker.

Here’s a quick list of some of the items we hope to provide in coming editions:

• Gear Reviews
• Race Reports
  
• Technical analysis, using videos of the best paddlers
  
• Advice on training, both on the water and in the gym
  
• Updates from the Sprint National Team
• Anything else that we deem worthy.
  

To make this really work, we’re going to need three things from you all, our readers: questions via e-mail, comments on our posts, and feedback. We want to hear what YOU have to say, so that we can get to work shedding light on the topics you care about. We’re going to answer your questions, conduct interviews with the world’s greatest kayakers, tell hilarious stories, write comics, post videos; and, if we do our jobs right, give you all some insight into what it’s like to do what we do.

See you all next month!

Hailing from Rochester, New York, Emily is currently living at the farthest geographic point from her hometown without leaving the continental US. At the training center, where the ratio of kayakers named Emily to kayakers NOT named Emily can reach 3:7, our columnist is known as “Fem,” short for “Femmy Emmy”. You can find more about about Emily at www.emilywright.org, or email her directly at emily.mary.wright@gmail.com.

Sam has been racing flatwater kayaks since age 9–up until that point, his athletic prospects were bleak. He joined a local soccer team at age 4, and quit weeks later, running off of the field to an adjoining playground. It was scarring for all involved. After earning his engineering degree from school this spring, he’ll be moving out to join forces with Fem and the rest of the National Team in Chula Vista. Read more about his life as a paddler at www.kayak2012.com, and make sure to get in touch at sritchie09@gmail.com.

We’ve been down in Satellite Beach, Florida for the past week for a 13-day training camp. This is the first time that we’ve been able to get on the water in January, and it feels fantastic! The weather has been really great (apparently cold by Florida standards, but not bad compared to D.C., where the Potomac is still frozen!). We added some pictures and video to the gallery, so you can check out where we are training.
There is a system of canals here that we paddle on—the longest one is about 6 kilometers in length. We can also go out on the Banana river which goes on for a really, really long time, so there are plenty of options. Debby Page has kindly let us stay at her home, and Taran Stucchio, a senior national team member with hefty culinary ambitions, has produced some really tasty meals for us. Debby’s home is right on one of the smaller canals and has a dock in her backyard, so it’s a perfect training location. Thanks Debby for giving us a place to stay!
We will be here for another five days, and then head back up to Princeton for our last semester, which starts on February 2nd. We have more dry land training and kayak erging planned, hopefully followed by some time out at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista in mid-March. Check back for details…

I’m just getting back from a wonderful training camp up at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, attended by some of the nation’s finest paddlers and hosted by Scotty Greifenberger, a member of the USA Canoe Kayak Board. Nathan Luce, the national team coach, announced this camp just a few weeks ago, while Dave and I were out in Chula Vista; we would be cross country skiing, he said, some of the BEST cross training available to us water-locked kayakers. Having heard stories for years about the prestigious XC skiing camps hosted by some of the best kayaking countries in the world–Poland, Hungary, Germany–I decided that, even though I knew nothing about the sport, it was time to learn.

Dave and I, along with Maia Farrar-Wellman, arrived up in Placid on New Year’s Day, after a 10 hour drive, and settled down into our rooms. I stayed with Taran Stucchio, an exceptionally tall kayaker from New York, while Dave bunked down with Tim Hornsby. First skiing session was the next morning. We enjoyed the snow, drank hot chocolate, and crashed early, excited for the camp ahead. In the AM, Scotty drove us out to the old Olympic XC course, helped coordinate our rentals, and let us loose under the care of Caitlyn McElroy, and Emily Wright, both Xtreme XC studs.

It became clear almost immediately that skiing was incredibly hard. All 6 of us inexperienced athletes had dressed quite warmly, and within minutes were shedding articles of clothing; stashing extra shirts in the woods, tying jackets around waists, sweating profusely all the while. Terrible. My heart rate crashed up through 170 and stayed there for a solid hour. The workout felt great, though technically it was quite awful, and I grew even more excited for the camp. That night, of course, we all slumped down at around 8pm, much more tired than we had expected to be, and sore in the strangest places (or so Taran claimed?)

Other notable training camp moments:

• Watching the bobsleds tear up the course on their qualifying races, very cool
• Getting up on the OTC Record Board, 1st in the Weighted Pullup category (and realizing that to get a squat record on the board, I would have to triple my current number …)
• My exceptional crash, which the fantastic Emily Wright blogged about here…

The camp was pretty brutal, though very satisfying–we’re all really hoping that the coaches extend this one to three weeks for the upcoming Winter of 2010. Our skills DID improve, mostly due to embarrassment after being goaded by our 14 year old pal Bug Lokken on the slalom team (shown below in all his pubescent glory).

Oh, I forgot. The TRUE highlight of the trip came during a visit to Starbucks. Imagine, Dave, Tim, Emily and myself sitting by the fire, warming our hands, waiting for our drinks. Dave’s is the first to arrive. The barista calls out: “Venti Mocha Double Raspberry Frappucino!!” See below for a little vid of what happened next.

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.