TAD Triathlon Training Camp Part 1

This past weekend I had the pleasure of traveling to Colorado for another training camp. This one a triathlon camp with heavy focus on riding. I went back and forth a lot about going to this camp for financial reasons. Thanks to several people, I was able to make it happen. Katie let me borrow her extra TT bike, I was able to share a rental car with another athlete and the two of us stayed at a local’s house. Thanks to Katie, Melissa and Kaitlyn, I was able to go. And of course my very supportive husband who said I could go after hearing me go back and forth for probably two months.

We arrived to Boulder Thursday and were greeted by hail on the drive in. Got to love the sporadic weather there. We did an easy jog for over 30 minutes and I did the whole thing without any walking. This was the beginning of not listening to my PT’s running instructions. My body held up well though and it was the beginning of the awesome views while training.

Friday morning we started with a ride to Carter Lake which had a short climb to the lake. I do most of my riding alone so it was a nice change of pace riding with a group and getting back into drafting. On the way back several of us experienced having to push harder than we expected to not get dropped. Afterwards we did a short run off the bike and I kept mine to 10 minutes to not push myself. After riding, running and scarfing down lunch, we headed to the pool for some hard swimming. The few of us that shared the lane with Katie got to play a game of don’t-let-me-lap-you-200s while wearing whatever toys made us fastest... paddles and buoy for me! I was swimming right behind her and played don’t-let-the-gap-grow which I did fairly well at. The whole group then swam 25 sprints with bands (around your ankle) racing each other. Racing your coach is both fun and extra motivation, not to mention exhausting. It was a good swim!

After all that training, our day still wasn’t over. We got to quickly shower, shove some more calories down and then go to RallySport for a strength learning session with Erin Carson and then a nutrition session with Breeze Brown. Both were very educational and I particularly enjoyed the nutrition part because it gave me some more stuff to look at and numbers to run. It was definitely a long day but I enjoyed every part of it.

 Saturday we had the big ride on the schedule… the ride to Ward which was a few hours of solid climbing up a mountain. Several of us were a bit nervous about this ride for the distance of the climb and the finishing altitude over 9000ft. I was already lacking in oxygen since I live around 1000 altitude. Wes from Pro Bike Express was doing SAG. We rode to the start of the climb, stripped off our layers to leave with Wes and then started the climb at various paces. I started with one of the guys but decided to go ahead as I didn’t mind doing the climb by myself. The views were gorgeous! The ride was tough and tired but not bad. What you would expect out of a climb. I thought looking at the map ahead of time that the climb was over 20 miles. At some point I asked someone I was passing if they knew how much longer until the top and she said about 3 miles until Point to Point which was definitely not 20 miles. I’m glad I asked though because it was where I saw the PBE truck and had to make my turn. I made the turn and met up with Wes, Katie and two other athletes. Together we would do Point to Point. This is where we heard the first lie.

Katie and Wes (although I think mostly Wes) told us there wasn’t a lot of climbing until Ward… a bunch of downhill and maybe a mile climb and some more downhill. Lie. Such a lie. There were two short downhill sections and rest of it was uphill, about 1400ft gain over almost 10 miles. Which isn’t horrible but at that point we already climbed a decent amount. I stayed on Katie's wheel for a while but I was over my power range so I let them go. By the time I reached Ward I was pretty exhausted. We were told we could ride down to town to fill up bottles and go the bathroom. After going down what ended up being the steepest part of the whole day I immediately wished I had just peed behind the truck so I wouldn’t have to ride back up. And you’ll have to wait to hear how rest of the ride went because I don’t feel like typing anymore right now. To be continued…