The Dirt Field

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. Things got a little chaotic in life and I lost my voice, so to speak (although not my taste for bad puns). At first I just didn’t have time to write, then I was distracted by the things happening, and then I had a lot of feelings that were not blog-friendly, unless this blog were retitled, “Times I Have Held A Serious, Exhausting Grudge That Is Refueled On A Near-Daily Basis.”

The good news is that throughout this period of being unable to find words to share a lot of what is going on, the bike is still making me happy. Sure, I had some boring-ass rides before I went off to Colorado, rides where I slogged around the same local roads watching the minutes crawl by, but even despite some minor mental burnout, I’m still deeply in love with the bike. So much so, in fact, that after a shitty day last Thursday, I got on the trainer late at night to spin for an hour just because. There may be no other instance in the history of cycling where somebody got on the trainer to find happiness.

I’m not quite at a point yet where writing is coming easily, but this camp was a very cool experience and I’d hate to let it go by without some kind of report. For a detailed account of the camp activities, you can go here. For an account that focuses on things like feelings and frozen yogurt in the athlete dining hall, keep reading.

First, some brief background. Earlier this year, I was invited by USA Cycling to attend their Women’s Talent ID Camp at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, CO. The goal of the camp is basically for USA Cycling to identify potential new talent to include in their racer pool. In addition, it gives racers an opportunity to learn new skills and information relevant to competitive cycling. I headed out to Colorado on August 1 to join eleven other women and three coaches at the camp (including Katie F. Compton) that ran through August 5. My coach, Alison Dunlap, also made guest appearances on our longer rides and for a group discussion.

The trip out to the camp went smoothly, as long as you don’t count the frantic rush to pack at the last minute, the security line at Dulles that took three times longer than normal and left me chewing my hair with anxiety and then sprinting to my gate, the part where I almost threw up on the landing in Denver, or the part where I almost threw up on the landing in Colorado Springs. The highlight was the barbecue chicken pizza from the Wolfgang Puck Express at the Denver Airport. It’s amazing. While I believe I can’t say enough good things about this pizza, I’m pretty sure my friends at camp would disagree and tell me to shut up about the damn pizza already.

A shuttle from the Olympic Training Center picked me up from the airport along with several other athletes and delivered us to the door of the Athlete Center, the main building on campus and the home of the dining hall, possibly the greatest place on Earth. I was photographed for my campus badge (hopefully just the first of several Olympic-related things I’ll put around my neck in this lifetime) and then immediately used that badge to gain access to food.

The dining hall was amazing – a typical cafeteria set-up, but all of the options were healthy, delicious, and labeled with nutrition facts for making wise choices (or knowing just how guilty to feel). There was also the Recovery Station with ideal recovery-type foods and the dessert station, with a soft-serve machine that quickly became my dear friend. All of this food was free and available in varying combinations throughout the day. Since you weren’t supposed to take food out of the dining hall, my campmates and I became skilled at loading our pockets with fruit, hard-boiled eggs, nuts, cereal, and anything else you could smuggle in a cup.

After dinner and an introductory meeting, it was time to build my bike (a process best quantified by the equation: “amount of time budgeted for this activity” x 5 = “actual time required”) and settle into my dorm room with my two other roommates. They were awesome – we spent most evenings watching the Olympics (typical conversation: “Ryan Lochte is NOT hot. He looks like an ancient Greek man.” “Um, YEAH, he is. And I’d like him to feed me grapes and rub olive oil all over me.”) or discussing why the room smelled so bad (suggested hypotheses: Sarah’s penchant for leaving half-eaten yogurt sitting around, my well-loved Sidis). While living in a college-style dorm is an experience I had happily managed to avoid until then, it wasn’t as unpleasant as anticipated. The only thing that sucked was waking up at 3am having to pee and knowing that meant clothes, shoes, and a long walk down the hall to a brightly-lit communal bathroom.

The first full day of camp consisted of a morning ride to recon the time trial course we’d be riding the next day, lunch, a presentation from USADA, an afternoon skills ride, dinner, a presentation on nutrition/hydration/thermoregulation, a Q&A with Alison Dunlap and Katie Compton, and the part where I dropped dead in my bed and was too tired to blog. Anxiety about the following day’s TT course kept me preoccupied – we were doing a roughly 5-minute ride up Cheyenne Canyon, going back down to the bottom, and then riding the roughly 20 minutes to the top. Using our times from these events and our weights recorded the morning of the test, USA Cycling planned to determine each rider’s watts per kilogram output. While the numbers weren’t the only thing we were to be evaluated on at camp, they were important and I went to bed anxious to get the TTs done.

After a quick breakfast the following morning, we rode out to the base of Cheyenne Canyon for the testing. I was given the third starting spot. The coaches set us loose to do whatever warm up we chose (which for nearly everybody first included peeing in the woods), and then it was time to go. The first one went by quickly; I went out too hard and remember feeling a bit winded, but then I could see the finish line, so I stood to sprint and it was over. Then it was back down the road to kill time and spin around before the start of the next test. The longer TT was painful. I started more gradually than the previous test, but the worst of the longer run came halfway up the climb, when the grades got steeper and just kept winding up. The log cabin that marked 0.5 miles to the finish seemed to have walked farther up the mountain since the previous day’s recon, and my legs and lungs felt kind of like I was dying. While I tried to take the shortest lines possible, I got foggy at a few points and took a brief detour off the side of the road while paying more attention to gasping than steering. When I hit the last 200M where Alison had told me to stand and go all out, I stood and…well, creaked across the line like a limping animal. I was hurting but satisfied – I had laid it all out there and done my best.

The rest of the day was a breeze. We had lunch and an afternoon ride that included working on pacelines/echelons and then doing a team TT chase game. After dinner that night, we had a presentation on race tactics and then it was time to smuggle more food out of the dining hall and watch the Olympics. The dull, altitude-induced headache that had been lingering since my arrival finally dissipated and I was looking forward to the big ride the next morning.

After another hasty breakfast, we rolled out again at 8am for our long ride. The scenery was impressive – vast expanses of flat prairie with only a few houses visible in the distance and minimal activity on the road. The wind worked in our favor throughout most of the trip and we rolled steadily through about 83 miles in four hours. Our big drama of the day came when, during an all-out pacelining session, a police car raced towards us from a perpendicular street, turned sharply in front of our group, and then slammed on the brakes, causing us all to screech to a halt. It was clearly intentional and aggressive, and was shocking coming from somebody in law enforcement.

That afternoon, I managed to squeeze in a visit to Alison’s house to finally meet her adorable son before my scheduled individual meeting with one of the coaches. The meeting went well – we talked about my goals, the last year of racing, and my strengths/weaknesses, and I came away feeling like the camp had been a success. We had one final dinner in the dining hall (in which I ate enough for three dinners, just to make up for a future lifetime of no magic buffet) and a wrap-up meeting. Then it was time for bed and a 5:45am wake up call to begin the trip home.

The only thing I will say about that day of travel is that the Houston airport should be where they send people that are too bad for Hell.

So that was camp. It’s weird that it’s over, that Nature Valley is over, that all of these big milestones that I built my year around have passed and the racing season is coming to a close. This was an incredible experience: to be selected by USA Cycling, to stay at the OTC, to have a chance to learn more about riding and racing from experts, to know that being at that camp and performing well could mean a chance to represent the US at future races. It was tough – the slogan for camp was “early is on time” (a concept foreign to my daily life) and the schedule was intentionally kept tight, so we spent a lot of time rushing to get ready, rushing to eat, rushing to arrive 10-15 minutes early for everything. But that’s like life as a pro cyclist, and to get another chance to try that out was great. There is no uncertainty here. I want it.