The Road to 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.