Vermont Camp Report

This past weekend was the annual QT2 training camp in Vermont.  As far as I know, this is the QT2 camp that started them all.  My first participation in this camp was in 2009 when it was scheduled as the biggest weekend before Lake Placid.  My most vivid memory is spending at least an hour sitting at a table one night with Cait and Chrissie as we composed a several-page list of all of the delicious things we planned on eating once the race was over.  I also made it up in 2010 when it was the same weekend.  Last summer it got moved to August since there were so many people doing Ironman Coeur D'Alene on the weekend camp usually fell, and unfortunately my broken foot took me out of contention, although it wasn't a bad year to miss because they had to get out of town quick before hurricane Irene came in and literally flooded the town.  Seriously, they've made a ton of progress but there are still plenty of reminders riding around of how badly that area suffered from that storm.

Anyway, that brought us to this year, where I decided to go to camp once again because, well, why not?  Currently I need all of the outside training motivation I can get even though I'm typically fine to do things on my own.  So this was perfect and easy to get to.  I headed up on Thursday after a bit of a setback when I got about thirty minutes into my drive and realized that I had forgotten my lap top.  So it took me quite a bit longer than expected to get there, but I did arrive at a reasonable hour and before they ran out of sandwiches. 

It was a very small group for camp this year.  A lot of people did the camp in Lake Placid who probably would've done this one without that option but didn't really feel the need to do both.  We all stayed in one big house which was nice and instead of sharing a hotel room with 2-4 other people as I'm accustomed to, I wound up in my own room and even with an extra bed.  On Friday we started things off with an easy swim in the lake at the state park.  It's a small lake but it's the kind of venue I love where the water is the perfect temperature and you can tell it's actually clean.  I wore a skin suit instead of a wetsuit because my wetsuit is very much showing its age and I need to save any and all future wearings to only when I really need it so as to extend its life as long as possible.  Remember when the absolute top of the line wetsuits were "only" $400? 

After the swim we changed into our run gear and headed out for the long run of the weekend.  I was glad to be getting this out of the way first because for me personally I was sure it would be the most difficult workout of the weekend, and I was certainly right about that.  In retrospect, having forgotten to eat anything all morning before probably didn't help, and the gels I took certainly didn't make up for it.  I ran with Dan, one of my teammates for a while, but after three miles or so he took off as I slowly deteriorated.  Honestly, that run was how I had expected my run in Timberman to feel, so I'll certainly trade a great run at Timberman with a crappy one a few days later at camp. 

We didn't waste much time once we got back to the house hopping on our bikes for an easy ride.  It was short and easy and the weather was great.  It left us with an uncharacteristic lull in the afternoon where we actually had some time to relax for a bit before heading to the pool for a quick video analysis.  I hadn't had one of those in a long time and I'm happy to say that my swim stroke apparently finally has a good catch.  Of course now this is at the expense of zero back end, but with swimming there is always something new to work on. 

Saturday we were back at the lake for a 1-mile swim time trial.  Given the group of people I figured I'd be swimming mostly alone, especially in the skin suit since most others were in a wetsuit (except Cait and another pro, AJ, both of whom I would only keep up with if I had some sort of gas powered motor) and I was right.  I swam a bit with this other camper, Tim (not Snow - he was off doing a 6-hour mountain bike race) and then pulled ahead and swam hard.  I finished exactly where I expected within the group, about three minutes behind the next closest and two minutes ahead of the one after me, so truly no-man's land.  But I pushed hard and was very happy with how it went. 

A little drive back to the house to hit the road for the long ride.  We split off into a couple of very small groups.  I started off with Tim (again, not Snow) but I knew once we hit this major hill that he was going to take off on me.  Just because he's a way better climber than I am.  And I was right, so I spent the remainder of the ride after the first hour by myself.  It really wasn't a big deal, I do that all the time, and I was riding six hours while a lot of people around me weren't riding as long. 

The weather had been fantastic, but as I climbed up toward Killington, the rain started.  I've ridden by Killington about five times in my life now, and it rains every single time.  Although apparently some others got hail there, so I wasn't quite as bad off as I could've been.  The ride was pretty uneventful aside from the rain.  Courtney had the van for intermittent refills, I was a little jealous of people floating down the river on inner tubes as apparently you can just go rent the things at these little road side stores and they drop you off up river and you just float back.  You could tell some places where the roads had washed out.

On the way back of course it rained at Killington again and I heard some scary thunder as I got closer to the house but I survived intact and made it back to change and head out for an easy transition run.  And then finally I was done!  As always for these camps, we were very late for our initially planned dinner reservation and wound up in a different restaurant because of it, although it was the restaurant we had always gone to in the past anyway. 

For the final day we started with an easy ride down to the bottom of Tyson Road where we would be doing a 6+ mile time trial, mostly uphill.  We had climbed it the day before and I wasn't really looking forward to it, though not dreading it either.  We lined up in the order we had finished the swim and took off in whatever intervals we had come in during the swim.  So, since I was three minutes or so behind John Spinney in the swim, I left three minutes or so behind him.  Tim started off two minutes behind me and I really thought he was going to catch me.  I had a hard time getting my heart rate up even though I felt as though I was pushing fairly hard, but given it would take nearly thirty minutes you can't exactly sprint like crazy from the beginning.  I didn't get caught and kept my place in line and was happy with the effort.

Then all we had to do was ride home nice and easy, go for a little one-hour run and another camp had come to a close.  I'm glad I went to this one.  I probably won't be able to go to as many camps next year so I'm glad I got these in.  This week has been a bit crazy with cramming a lot of the bigger training into the earlier part of the week because I'm doing a sprint race this weekend.  It is the fifth annual Circle Triathlon in Ashland, and right down the road from my mom's house on the lake so how can I not do it?  Besides, I have to redeem myself from last year, being beaten by my cousin Jeff while I competed in the boot.  No boot this year!  And some actual training will probably help, too.