June 02, 2013 (Bend, OR) – I’m always surprised by how fast camp seems to go…it feels like we’ve only been here a couple days but here we are taking out the trash, locking the doors and moving out. Almost the entire team is headed to Park City, Utah for our spring testing (Liz is flying to Norway to join the National team in a on-snow camp – you go, girl!).

I promised in my last post that I’d talk a little more about strength, so here we go. I AM SO SO SO SORE RIGHT NOW! In spring when we haven’t done any lifting for a while and suddenly get back into it, it hurts a lot. But it’s also a fun kind of sore – because you know your shredded muscles are rebuilding themselves and you’ll be able to lift more next time.

I usually really enjoy going to strength sessions, because it’s such a change of pace from usual “skier” workouts. We tend to lift hard, with Olympic lifts as well as your typical pull-ups, dips, planks, ect. And as totally awesome as lifting in the Center of Excellence is (the US Ski Team headquarters in Park City), it’s also fun sometimes to go to local gyms because of the people watching.

There’s your typical focused lifters, the people who show up with a plan and stick to it. I put us squarely into that category. But from there things get more exciting. There’s the “kettle bell people”, who really get into the alternative weights, doing kettle bells, TRX, bosu balls, and generally fun stuff. Another category is the “machine people”, who go from one machine to the next, basically circling the entire gym. They usually have water bottles and towels that they tote along with them.

Then you have the “big dudes”, the ones who lift the biggest weights possible, are super loud about it, and don’t always have great technique even though they’re always looking at the mirror. Hey, it’s hard to look at your muscles and focus at technique at the same time, people!

There’s also the “juicy mamas”, who wear the full velvet workout suit and stick to the elliptical. I have no idea how they don’t manage to get soaked in sweat, but they always emerge from the gym looking well polished. I love watching all the different people and it takes all kinds to keep a gym interesting!

Another thing we’ve been pretty diligent about is mobility and stretching. It sounds redundant, but when you are tired and hungry and ready to get out of the gym it’s sometimes hard to take a minute to stretch out and make sure you won’t wake up stuck in a little ball the next morning. So we do a lot of mobility exercises (basically active moving stretches) as part of our warm up for strength. These get us a lot of funny looks sometimes, but hey – nobody said every part of this job was glamorous, right?