Our 2 week stay at the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center is coming to a close today.  We just finished our final workout of the camp, a nice 3 hour scenic roll with pleanty of sunshine and beautiful fall colors.  It was a great way to wrap up the training camp.  These last two weeks have been jam-packed with great quality workouts to better prepare ourselves for the upcoming season.  We had some great double pole intervals with about 30 girls from all over the country last week.  This week we raced straight up a mountain, hammered out a sprint race on rollerskis, and dominated bounding intervals up a mountain.  We are constantly working on improving our technique so we can be as efficient as possible by going over video almost every night with our coaches.  My teammates are also wonderful, and its always a great oppurtunity to train with them.   We are all competitive enough to push eachother to our limits, and at the same time we are all supportive so that we help eachother reach our goals. 

This being said, it has been an intense two weeks here and I am looking forward to heading back home to take a few days easy to recover a bit!

The first week of training here at the Lake Placid training camp has come to an end.  We have had some great workouts with teams from all over the U.S.  We did some fast double pole intervals early last Saturday, and yesterday we raced up Whiteface Mountain.  It was 5 miles straight up a mountain.  It was probably one of the hardest dryland workouts I’ve ever done. 

The start was delayed an hour and a half because it had snowed up at the top of the mountain, so we couldn’t rollerski to the finish.  So the finish was moved 2 miles down from the top of the mountain, and the start was 2 miles further down the mountain than last year.  So in the end, the race was the same length (and still all a mountain) but the course was a little bit different than originally planned.  And since I had surgery on both my lower legs this spring, I decided to classic the race instead of skating it. My legs have been improving by leaps and bounds recently, and I didn’t want to risk setting myself back by skating up a mountain as hard as I could. 

So on that sunny Monday morning the gun went off at 10:30 am and the group of about 25 females took off up the mountain.  The pace was fast, and since everyone was skating and I was classic skiing, I dropped off the lead pack.  I stayed relaxed and focused while still pushing myself so that I was cruising right at my lactate threshold.  I know that feeling from doing interval after interval after interval at that heart rate all summer, so when it’s time to go that speed it just comes natural.  By the time we reached the gate (the start of last year’s race) I had caught back up to the lead pack.  The pack started breaking up as moves were being made, and I was picking people off the pack one at a time.  The further up the mountain we went the more like winter it became, and it was actually snowing at about mile 4!  I felt strong, relaxed, and focused the entire race, but don’t get me wrong, it was extremely painful.  When I passed that finish line in 48 minutes, 4^th female overall, I knew I left everything I had out on that mountain. 

Today we had a rest day.  NICE!!!