The Road to 2012

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.

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!