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Archive for September, 2009

Fort Kent

Monday, September 21st, 2009

I spent the past week training in Fort Kent, Maine.  After a weekend full of traveling to Chicago and back and then to Maine, the lack of sleep had combined with fatigue from training to put me in the mood for some rest.  I spent the week doing some easy volume training with the focus heavily on shooting through combo training as well as slowfire.  My newest focus is on following a nearly identical pattern every time I shoot while maintaining a constant rhythm.  This is not only practiced by live shooting.  Sometimes I just sit with my rifle in my lap and go through the motions of bolting and pulling the trigger while breathing as I would during a race.

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USOC Media Summit

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

I spent the last two days—36 hours to be exact—in Chicago for the USOC media summit. This was an opportunity for Olympic hopefuls to fulfill many media requests all at once by congregating everyone in one place for a jam-packed four days of interviews, photo shoots, and the first step in the USOC’s Olympic ambassador program. All of it, I had never done before. Some of it was overwhelming, some exhilarating, and some just surreal. The one thing I can say about this weekend is that it gave me a boost of confidence in all the work that I’ve put in so far to qualify for the Olympic games.

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Whiteface Hill-bounding

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

It’s the workout that we all “love to hate” yet all anticipate as a marker of progress…the Whiteface hill-bounding workout. It’s not a time trial; it’s a workout that we do up to two times per month. But it is also a test of many things we train for over the course of a summer. First and foremost, the purpose of this workout is to raise our VO2max, because it is essentially a max effort. Second, the workout requires pacing because each set lasts 12 minutes, which is a long time to be in level 4 and 5. Third, the workout requires the athlete to place mind over matter because in the last four minutes, when it seems that the lungs refuse to inflate with air and the body hangs over the poles in between each 15-second repeat, the athlete must convince him or herself that it is possible to go faster, such that the legs collapse at a timely moment, 12 minutes after the first whistle blows.

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Waking Up to Fall Training

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

It’s hard to believe that at this time last year I was just finishing up sophomore summer at Dartmouth and moving to Lake Placid for the first time as a resident. Now I’ve been here since June and the transition from summer to fall is almost imperceptible…aside from the fact that temperatures went from the high 80s to the 50s in the course of one week.

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