Chula Vista is awesome. My time here is almost up and I will soon be moving to my “long term” resident location at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, and even though Colorado Springs is equally awesome I will be the first to admit that I will miss training in Chula. The warm San Diego weather, the friendly people, and most of all the little training group we have had out here since early January will be the things I miss the most (we have had as many as eight triathletes out here although we are currently down to four – Ethan Brown, Steve Sexton, Jen Spieldenner and me).
Training in Chula Vista was my first opportunity to devote myself “full time” to triathlon training and I believe I developed a lot as an athlete. I think I am a bit spoiled now, though. At this time last year I was trying to combine a full early season racing schedule with trying to graduate from college. OK, I wasn’t trying very hard to graduate, but with final exams and final projects school still took up a lot of my time. Training at the OTC is completely different – instead of trying to “fit” my training around other parts of my life, training is my life and everything else comes second. So what is it like to train out here? Check out the pics below. Hopefully I captured a little bit about how things work out here.
Otay Lakes Road – the only place around here to do “quality” riding. But thirty minutes of flat riding out on Otay gives access to some great climbs or rolling hills.
The track is sweet and the scenery isn’t bad, either.
The cafeteria is my favorite place on campus! This breakfast made me very happy.
The sports med building is another place I spend a lot of my time. This is the Normatech MVP unit. It uses air pressure to provide compression. I have it set at 80 mm Hg. 15 or 30 minutes using this and it doesn’t even feel like I did a workout.
The cold tank. 55 degrees.
Joey the therapy dog comes every Friday. He is like the OTC’s collective pet. He knows like 57 tricks or something sweet like that.
He even gets his own ID card!
The Alter-G treadmill – it allows you to run at certain percentages of your body weight – down to 20%. It’s great for injured athletes or people like me who want to get in a few extra miles without the leg pounding. Apparently my legs were going too fast to be captured by the phone’s camera.
So what effect will all of this great training have on my triathlon season in 2009? So far it seems to be going pretty well. With some higher priority races coming up I’ll find out soon!