Whitehorse? No...Whitefish!

September 09, 2012

Whitehorse? No...Whitefish!

Well, Whitefish was awesome! I think it was the best training camp I have done so far, mostly because it was about 60% hard training and gain-making and 40% vacation! We were staying in some condo's right on Whitefish Lake and it was less than a minute walk from our condo door to the dock. Recovery was made easy with that dock floating there. We were getting high 20's/low 30's almost everyday and that only made us appreciate the lake even more. After every workout we would change out of our sweaty clothes and into our suits and meet back up in the lake for a cool-off dip. One day I accidentally took my afternoon nap on the dock, the sun was just so warm to get up and I managed to get only I minor sun burn from that hour. Woohoo!

This was a common view for me those 10 days.

Suzanne, I would say, was my main swimming buddy :)

We went diving one afternoon looking for a lost earring. It's fun to be a dork sometimes :)

One of my three favorite workouts we did was a longer workout where we classic skied up the Going-to-the-Sun Road and then switched into our running shoes and ran down to a glacier-fed lake to take a dip. Going-to-the-Sun Road was beautiful; it was 1,000m in elevation from the bottom to the top and we were quite popular with the other tourists! We got some great comments like, "Woohoo, you guys are AWESOME! Along with, "You guys are the funniest looking creatures I've ever seen!" We ended up having to explain to a lot of people who we were and what were doing, whether they really understood what we were telling them we'll never know.

Marlis on her way up to the sun.

The happy crew at the start of the climbing.

The beautiful lake we cooled off in mid-run. The water was crystal clear!

A view from near the top, you can see the road winding all way down.

...We only shower in waterfalls from now on.

The second of my three favorite workouts was a tempo double polling session with sprints that we did as a group. It is high on my list because I was feeling great and I was able to do the whole workout with the two ladies on the National Ski Team (Chanda and Peri) and the older girls on my team! It was also awesome to have two coaches biking beside us as we went to tell us what to correct as we were doing it. (Sorry, no pics from this one..)

And my third fav workout was the afternoon that we swam across the lake! It was my idea, but it was harder than I thought it would be. We didn't know how far it was so we got Coach Jeffries and Scott on paddle boats to make sure we didn't drown. It ended up being 1km each way and took me 4 huge gulps of water, 1 coughing fit and 52minutes of swimming (85% breaststroke)! We weren't going for any speed records, that's for sure. I felt pretty proud of myself afterwards as that was my first open water swim!