Olympic Training Center Report (w/ Athlete Quiz!!)

Earlier this month I spent about a week at the Olympic Training Center (OTC) in Lake Placid, NY, for my first official biathlon training camp. Every day we did 2-6 hours of shooting  training:  one session at the range in the morning, another in the afternoon, and dryfire in the gym after dinner. Dryfiring is when you practice shooting without any bullets. Most of the exercises are designed to train the body to memorize the proper shooting position and process so that it all happens automatically, even when your heart is pounding and your brain is deprived of oxygen! The camp’s level of intensity made for an extremely productive week in terms of my shooting progress. Now the trick will be to keep up a good shooting routine back in Craftsbusy (unintended typo!).

The OTC hallways are decorated with posters promoting healthy living that say “ELITE: Ensuring Lifestyle Integrity in Training Environments,” but my brother suggested that they should instead read, “Eating Like You’re Totally Empty.” As you can imagine, the OTC dining hall is always bustling with ELITE athletes. It was fun to see all the different shapes and sizes of people and to guess which sport they do.  Let’s see you how you do on the OTC athlete quiz!! I got in the pictures for scale– I’m 5’8″. You can see answers by hovering your cursor over each photo thumbnail. Bonus points if you can find the two Olympic gold medalists!

Click on each photo to see an enlarged version.

And the Gold Medalists are…Freestyle skier Hannah Kearney (bottom left, in navy/white stripes) who took gold in Vancouver in 2010, and Biathlete Algis Shalna, (top right, white shirt) who won in Sarajevo in 1984.

An unintended consequence of taking all of these pictures was that I met lots of athletes who live at the OTC full-time. Now I can greet them in the hallways and I already did one lifting session with the bobsledders…not using the same weights.