Craftsbury Green Racing Project

November 6, 2009 (Lake Tahoe, CA) – Soon after we arrived in Craftsbury, Pepa Miloucheva began talking about a fall training camp. There were two things we needed to accomplish with this camp: we needed to get on snow, and we needed to train at altitude. She was convinced that the place to do this was the glacier in Ramsau, Austria, where a number of national teams would be training. When push came to shove and we realized we had attracted very few sponsors, Austria was expensive, and the weather might be terrible.

Instead we considered the Canadian Rockies, the Colorado Rockies, Mount Hood, Sun Valley, and then realized that the solution lived within our house. Her name was Shay, and she was a rower who grew up on the shores of Lake Tahoe. Flights to Reno were cheap, and Shay’s mother offered to let us stay at her house in Incline Village, Nevada, for free. There wouldn’t be snow, but we’d be living at 6,000 feet. Perfect.

So two weeks ago we found ourselves climbing out of a plane in Reno, where it felt like it was 100 degrees compared to Vermont. We drove over the Mount Rose Highway and found our new home, did a quick jog, and then watched our first sunset over the lake from under the quiet ponderosas that surrounded our porch. The next day, we trained for four hours. We all had an idea about how we would adjust to the altitude. This was not it. We thought training would be easy, and it’s true that one workout involved walking up the alpine area behind our house as slowly as we possibly could. But in terms of volume, this week was one of the bigger weeks of my whole year. Just because we weren’t doing intervals didn’t mean that we were sitting on our butts. Quite the opposite. Our training, despite its exhausting volume, was more exciting than what we were used to. First, there was the scenery on our long runs on the Pacific Crest Trail and the Tahoe Rim Trail.

Then, there was the golf course. It turns out that when people have money, they pave their cart paths all the way around, and they are perfect for rollerskiing. It was great to finally be able to ski some terrain and transitions that were more like what we will encounter on race courses.

Finally, there was the Earth Gym. Shay’s mother is very enthusiastic about a form of yoga involving rocks, sticks, and straps. Her backyard was filled with these things, plus a collection of dumbbells, rock walls which we used for box jumps, and a sort of jungle gym for chin-ups and hanging abs. To increase the difficulty of our strength workouts, we tied weights around our waists for chin-ups, and Pepa pushed us into the dirt as we tried to do push-ups against her resistance. While we certainly got some laughs from our new strength regimen, I think we’ll all be happy to get back to the real gym. After more than a week of this “easy” adjustment- long, slow runs and rollerskis, plus plenty of time in the Earth Gym – we had our first set of max intervals. Pepa decided to have us bound up the alpine area, which, ironically, was testing its snowmaking equipment, so we passed mounds of fluffy snow on our way up.

The workout was a wake-up call for all of us. The altitude hadn’t been too difficult in the long workouts – in fact, I had almost forgotten about it. But our hardest effort resulted in us appearing to move in slow motion. Ollie went out a little too hard and cramped up partway through the workout. One of the satisfying things about a hard workout is that you feel fast, but we didn’t. We felt sluggish, and I was gasping for air well below my max heart rate. As Tim would say, woof. We promised we would pace ourselves carefully when we race at West Yellowstone.

On our last afternoon jog, I explored the trails behind our house. I hiked up the hill into the woods and found a big rock to sit on, where I could look out over the lake. The sun was setting and both the water and the mountains on the other side were a dusty blue. A bird jumped from branch to branch in the trees above me, getting closer and closer the longer I sat still.

We hadn’t found snow, so the camp had only accomplished one of Pepa’s
two original goals. But I, for one, didn’t care. We had spent two
weeks in the California sun instead of the Vermont rain. We’d gotten
the benefits of altitude (or so we hope – Pepa will soon run another
VO2Max test to find out) in a beautiful place.
It was the first in a series of the Green Racing Project’s traveling adventures. I hope the next few are just as good.”