This morning I worked out on a spin bike for an hour and a half at a New York Sports Club.
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Domestic Travel
Yesterday evening I drove down to Salt Lake to get fresh fish for a sushi dinner I had with friends. It was warm and raining. It felt like summertime. I loved it.
Training in Park City
The U.S. Nordic Combined Team has been roller skiing outdoors with supplemental oxygen. The team purchased a bunch of small carbon fiber oxygen tanks for them to carry on their back. I hadn’t checked them out before yesterday. They are not too heavy, but they are not an insignificant weight either.
COE Food
I skipped a couple of days of blogging because I didn’t have any content. For the most part I haven’t had any trouble at all coming up with content for this blog, however I’m doing the same thing every day (training indoors at the Center of Excellence) at the moment so it’s a little repetitive. That being said, there was a positive change at the COE this week as the food budget increased on May 1st. Matt, the nutritionist, started making awesome meals for the athletes. Here’s a sausage and egg sandwich I had after yesterday’s workout:
Athletes Training in the COE
Today is my mom, Sharon Hoffman’s birthday. Happy birthday mom! My dad sent me this picture of her from this morning. I’m glad I’m not in Aspen as it’s a little too white for my liking on May 1st.
Tedious Training
I was back in the U.S. Ski Team’s Center of Excellence today after a full day off yesterday. I started the day bright and early with physical therapy followed by a tough leg and core strength routine. In the strength routine I did sled pulls, an exercise where you walk down a track (both forwards and backwards) dragging behind you a weighted sled (via a rope tied around your waist). Dragging the sled backwards is tough; it feels as though your thighs are being shredded. This afternoon’s workout was a two and a half hour spin on the trainer. I was struggling mentally today with tedium and boredom. This evening my friend Heather McPhie (the third ranked moguls skier in the world) and I babysat our friends Alex Moore and Carly Debenham’s three little girls (all under the age of four). They are really cute. Here is Hannah Moore:
COE Free Day
I had a full day away from the U.S. Ski Team’s Center of Excellence today. This was my first day off since I arrived in Park City, and with all the indoor training and physical therapy, I won’t have many days away from the building for several months. My physical therapist gave me the day off of shoulder work when he heard I had the day off of training. I spent the morning doing more spring cleaning; this time I went through and recycled hundreds of notes, hard-copy e-mails, training logs and plans, race information, results, and other documents I had collected over the last six years of racing full time.
Strange Heart Rates
I ended up with a pretty bad sun burn after spending all of yesterday afternoon in the sun playing Bocce.
Quiet COE
Being stuck training indoors is not much fun at any time, but the frustration is compounded in the U.S. Ski Team’s Center of Excellence (COE) on weekends. The building was basically deserted today. It’s not necessarily the case that athletes from the other USSA sports don’t train on the weekends. They generally do their “cardio” on weekends, outdoors. The fact that cardio is only a small portion of their training, as opposed to all of their training, highlights how different endurance sports are from other sports. I did a two hour spin on the trainer and an hour on the elliptical in the quiet COE today. For part of my session this morning, an aerial athlete Emily Cook was in the gym with a physical therapist (PT). The PT was riding a road bike around the gym which was odd enough to keep me entertained for a while.
TV
It was teaching day at the U.S. Ski Team’s Center of Excellence. There are currently seven unpaid interns on the strength and conditioning team. We, as athletes, are grateful that they are willing to spend months here helping us out. The great strength and conditioning staff tries to challenge the interns and teach them about all the different aspects of their job. Here they are working with the force plate and displacement rope:
