Friday, March 02, 2007

Colorado Springs

I started my trip to Colorado in fine style last week, by missing my flight. I left the house about 2.5 hours before my left was supposed to leave, which I thought would be plenty of time. It took a little less than an hour to get to the airport, but then I must have stumbled through a rift in the space-time continuum or something, because by the time I got to the counter to check-in, I only had 20 minutes left... which was too late. It's a good thing Sarah left on Monday, she has a thing about getting to the airport super-early, so she would have been ticked. So, I had to wait around a couple extra hours to take the next flight out.

I drove down to Colorado Springs from Denver in rush hour traffic, but it wasn't too bad. It was sunny and warm and there were always mountains in the distance. The hotel was nicely situated. It was about a 10 minute walk to the competition rink and there were a bunch of restaraunts also within easy walking distance. I got something to eat Thursday night and did a quick workout (one of Ross's minute drills), but that was about it. I did find it interesting that the altitude didn't bother me as much when exercising as it did last year when I was in Vail. On the other hand, Colorado Springs is at ~6000ft, whereas Vail is at ~8200ft.

Sarah's team skated early Friday morning. It was an interesting flight. The team that won was clearly the best, and the teams that brought up the rear clearly belonged there. But the majority of the teams (maybe 9 of the 13) were not too much different from each other, so the marks were all over the place. Sarah's team skated well though; they certainly improved a lot from where they started late last Fall. Good coaching no doubt!


Later on in the day, we visited the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs (with the kids on the team and their parents). It was kind of interesting, but not really as cool as I expected. I thought we might get to see more of the 'scientific' training equipment, but that wasn't the case. We saw a few of the athletes: a bunch of wrestlers training, a cyclist that was riding his mountain bike while rolling his road bike alongside, and a female weightlifter (her back and shoulders were huge!). We saw the velodrome from the bus as we were leaving, it's a few blocks from the training center.


Saturday we watched skating all day. Sarah was pretty relaxed since her team was done competing. Actually, it was much better than watching skating by myself, which is what I'm used to.


Sunday, we packed up and headed to Winter Park, but I'll save that for another post.

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