Trials and Tribulations

I have been a resident athlete at the US Olympic Training Center for 7 years now. While that is nowhere near a record, it is long enough to get to know many other athletes from different sports. That’s one of the best things about the OTC, being in an environment where you are surrounded by like minded people all pursuing the same dream.

There are 8 resident sports at the OTC and numerous other that come in as “camps.” All in all, I probably have friends in 12 different Olympic sports right now. Each sport has its own way of qualifying for the Olympics. Pentathlon essentially uses solely an international system, meaning you win your slot oversees by competing against other countries. Swimming would be the diametric opposite where a swimmer could win Olympic Trials without having ever set foot outside the country or competed against internationals. Most sports fall somewhere in between pentathlon and swimming and have a relatively complicated selection process. Because of this, most of us at the OTC quest our friends in other sports to learn about their qualification system and what it will take for our friends to qualify.

While I was fortunate enough to secure a slot last summer, most Olympic selection takes place during the spring of the Olympic year. This creates a fairly strange environment around athletes as tensions rise, and suddenly teammates find themselves pitted against each other for a final Olympic slot. In every case, it seems there are great athletes who will be left off the team because there are only so many slots. As an athlete already qualified, it’s hard to balance the excitement of knowing you are going with interacting with your friends, who have worked just as hard as you, who did not make the cut. Having been in their shoes four years ago, I can tell you that it’s not fun to watch the Olympics you thought would be yours come and go without your participation.

Olympic team selection is really a mixture of emotions. I train with and am friends with our top two fencers; one made the team, the other, a returning Olympian, did not. In weightlifting, I had friends I have known and respected for years make the team, and some who did not. Triathlon, which concluded its final Olympic selection last weekend, qualified two good friends of mine, but left many more off the team. And wrestling can be described as nothing short of carnage. My new business partner, a returning Olympic Bronze Medalist, failed to make the team. More World Medalists failed to qualify than I can count, including several friends of mine.

But all elite athletes know that qualifying for the Olympics is tough, and there is a lot of excitement around watching every sport pick their Olympic Team. This week, I have two friends and fellow graduates of the Air Force Academy competing in Track and Field Olympic Trials. Both have a good chance of making the team. Needless to say, I am watching NBC every night this week to check in on them.

So Olympic Trials season is a real roller coaster for athletes, even if you have already qualified. It reminds you how great it is to win your slot on the team, but it’s also humbling to see other great athletes who you respect not make it. For every athlete celebrating after winning an Olympic berth, there are five who go home and try to find the courage to train every day for another four years on the chance they will make it next time. It’s a strange set of emotions to go through. Having now been on both sides of qualifying for the Olympics, I try to celebrate with my friends who qualified and be respectful of those who did not, knowing their sacrifices and dedication were as great as mine.

Sick Day

One of the unique things about being an athlete is that we don’t really get allotted sick days from our jobs. Your competitors rarely give you a pass at the next competition because you were sick for a few days getting ready. So most of the time, athletes just push through minor sickness and try to stay training if at all possible.

This morning, I woke up extremely nauseous and unable to eat anything. My best guess is that I picked up some sort of food poisoning yesterday because it did not feel like a flu. Swim practice was scheduled from 7-9; but I realized that if my stomach could not take on breakfast and my usually morning coffee, I probably had no business knocking out 4 miles in the pool.

Earlier this week, I had some blood work done. It showed that I was extremely worn down and my immune system was under stress. Because next week is a “recovery week,” my coaches decided to press on with normal training this week. So I probably have a depressed immune system to blame for my morning troubles. Sometimes your body just can’t fight off sickness when it is so busy trying to deal with training.

The one good thing about having to take the morning off is that it gave me a chance to catch up on my paperwork. Pentathlon is complicated and there is a ton of paperwork I have to keep up with to train. This morning I had to find a pool in Washington DC to train in next week (more on that trip in an upcoming blog). Then I had to schedule training sessions for my pool here at the OTC. I had to file a reimbursement for World Championships including converting from three different currencies into dollars (during which I discovered the hotel over billed me leading to more paperwork). There is a riding camp in California in two weeks for which I had to find flights and rental car information. And that is just the tip of the iceberg…

I am feeling a lot better this afternoon so I will at least get to knock out a swimming workout and the day will not be a total waste in the athletic sense. It’s never fun to be sidelined because you are sick, but maybe my body just had enough and needed a break. Hopefully by tomorrow I will be up for my 14-mile long run and back to 100%.

The Cost of Excellence

On Tuesday, I had a conversation with Dr. Randy Wilber, USOC sport physiologist, about my supplemental oxygen (SO2) training. For those of you who are not familiar with SO2 training, it basically involves running with an oxygen mask on to simulate sea level conditions. During a typical session Randy said I burn through about a third of a massive oxygen bottle. Each bottle costs about $150 for the US Olympic Committee to fill with the 62% oxygen compound. And that gave me the idea of this blog.

Today, I decided to sketch out the true cost of a week’s worth of training to get ready for the Olympics in pentathlon. There are a lot of little things and a few big things that go into my preparation.

Back to the SO2 training, I run on SO2 twice a week breathing in around $100 worth of expensive air. During my workouts, I am monitored by two PhDs (Randy Wilber and Alan Arata) whose combined time for the two sessions is worth around $400. Given how quickly I have to rotate my shoes, each time I run I burn though about $5 worth of shoes. Multiply that by 6 runs a week and we get $30 per week of damage to my shoes per week. During a typical run, I consume around $5 worth of sports nutrition (generously supplied by Shaklee), and my long run burns closer to $15 worth of product. So my weekly sports nutrition costs for running total about $40. This means just running training is costing about $570 per week this summer.

In fencing, I break a $180 blade about every month of routine use, or you could say about $45 per week for fencing equipment. I get three fencing lessons per week from one of the top US fencing coaches at a value of about $30 per lesson or $90 per week. That brings my fencing total to around $135 per week.

In swimming, I am coached by Dr. Genadijus Sokolovas whose coaching value is worth about $100 per week. Pool time is worth about the same, so let’s say swimming costs about $200 a week right now.

I am not riding every week, but if you averaged the cost of my Olympic prep riding over the next 7 weeks, it would be about $100 per week.

Shooting takes the cake for being by far the cheapest sport I do. I shoot about $10 worth of pellets per week.

And just when you thought we were done, we have to add in the cost of keeping me healthy. Each week, I get three hours of massage totaling $180 worth of massage. I see an Active Release therapist twice a week and his rate is $80 per visit or $160 per week. So my recovery costs about $240 per week.

Adding it all up, that is $1,255 per week between now and the Olympics. Given that I have a six day per week training cycle, that equates to about $209 per day.

So most of you probably now wonder where this money comes from. Like most Olympic athletes, I rely on support from others. Many of the above professionals donate their time, others are employed by the Olympic Committee. Because I am an Air Force Reservist, the Air Force helps by purchasing some equipment for me and paying for my travel to competitions. Sponsors help by donating their products as well. But what is leftover is up to me to fund.

A lot of resources go into preparing our Olympic Team to compete in Beijing this summer. At the risk of being too corny, just think of it this way: Cost of training for the Olympics: $200 per day, being ready to compete against the best athletes in the world: priceless. There are just some things money can’t buy…

Monday Morning

Like most people, I find Mondays a bit intimidating. As I was walking into the pool this morning at 6:45, I found myself trying to avoid thinking of my upcoming week. My training schedule is already set, and I know the next six weeks will be some of the hardest and longest training weeks in my career. So what does my schedule look like?

I am writing this blog at 1:30 Monday afternoon. Already this morning, I swam 4 miles, fenced the 2004 Olympic champion, ran 9 miles on hills, had an interview with a Denver magazine, and tried to sort out some problems with travel arrangements to the Olympics. Fortunately, I have a two hour break before getting in for my second swim of the day, to be shortly followed by a calisthenics session. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are all pretty much the same and I find it hard just to make it through the day on Wednesdays and Fridays.

This week, I have 57 miles of running and 24 miles of swimming broken up into 8 swims and 6 runs. On top of that, I am fencing with the Russian Olympic Pentathlon Team 3 times, doing 3 calisthenics sessions, and working on strengthening my shoulder for shooting. I also have 3 hours of massage (not the nice health spa massage, but more on that in a subsequent blog), 2 doctor appointments, a meeting with my agent, a VIP tour of the Olympic Training Center for some sponsors, and several other administrative meetings.

The next six weeks are going to be long and tough. What is keeping me going is the realization that the Olympics are just around the corner and I only have a short time to complete my training before we leave. It truly is amazing what you can tolerate when there is a goal and a reward right in front of you. So I’ll make it though these next six weeks if only because every morning when I wake up sore and tired, I am thinking about my Olympic competition on August 21st.

The Couch

As an athlete, I train hard. Actually, I train very hard. So most people are surprised when they discover that I spend many hours a day on my living room couch watching TV, responding to emails, or surfing the internet. I am not alone in my apparent “couch potato” status. If you were to tour athlete rooms at the Olympic Training Center, you would find athletes lounging around any time they are not training. So why are the world’s greatest athletes spending so much time doing nothing?

When an athlete trains, they are actually tearing apart their body. During a workout, muscles are torn apart, energy is depleted, and the body is put through substantial trauma. But the human body is an incredible machine and responds by rebuilding and regenerating stronger than before. It is this constant process of tearing down and rebuilding that makes an athlete’s body strong and capable of doing amazing things.

So the process of going to practice is actually damaging to the body but the process of recovering after a workout is where you improve. After practice, when you rest and recover, your muscles rebuild and your body stores energy at higher levels than before the workout. This is fairly counter intuitive for most people as they assume you get stronger during the workout. Elite athletes are well familiar with this phenomenon and therefore take extreme care to recover as hard as they train.

So that is why most of our Olympic Team, myself included, will be spending their summer on the couch, playing xbox, or reading a book!

Finals

Finals at World’s is probably the hardest event in pentathlon. At the Olympics, only two athletes per country can compete, but here countries can enter four. For nations like Russia, Czech Republic, and Hungary, this means having 3-4 athletes who can win a competition in the final.

Finals are run in the classic order of a pentathlon (shooting, fencing, swimming, riding, running) and you don’t carry anything forward from semifinals. It is always hard to get up 36 hours after a tough semifinal and start over again, but everyone is in the same boat. You push through the soreness and fight as hard as you can for every point.

My weakest two events are shooting and fencing. The good thing about that is that I get them out of the way first thing in the competition. Yesterday, I started out with a 173 shoot, one point less than my semifinal score. While this put me in 35th place after one event, it was good enough that I knew I could have a good day. In fencing, I had an extremely rough start. I went 0-5 on my first 5 bouts, a terrible start to any day. But fortunately there were 30 more bouts after that and I fought my way back into the middle of the pack by the end of fencing. My final tally was just under 50% victories… not too bad for the hardest fencing pool of my career and coming into this competition without any significant focus on my fencing training. After two events, I was in 32nd place; but my scores were keeping me competitive with my strong disciplines up next.

We should have swum next, but the temporary competition pool erected for us leaked overnight and had to be drained, fixed, and refilled. So riding was moved ahead of swimming. My horse was pretty good and I knocked down only one rail and had some time penalties. After riding, I moved into 27th place, but started closing the gap toward the top athletes.

With the pool filled, we moved on to swimming. I dropped a full second from my semifinal time and swam a best this year of 2:00.2. Given that I did not rest for this competition, I was extremely happy with that time. The good showing in swimming moved me up to 20th after 4 events.

Running at the end of a final can be extremely psychologically tough. Because I have not trained much speed this year (my running has mostly consisted of long moderate runs to build base fitness), I had no idea how my legs and lungs would handle a 9 minute all out race. For the first 2 kilometers, I stuck with some of the guys who started close to me and were good runners. With one lap to go, I realized I had enough in my legs to make a surge and I began to accelerate. To my surprise, my speed was unmatched and I passed 8 people moving all the way into 12th place.

This was a great end to a great season for me. My goal at the start of the year was top 10 at Worlds, but a 12th place here while training through the competition is more than enough to make me happy. Going into the Olympics, I know where I have room for improvement, and I feel very confident with my training now. In two and a half months, I’ll take another crack at the World’s best athletes and see how things go!

The Wives Club

Written by Cami Bremer

One of Eli’s best pentathlon buddies watched his longtime girlfriend and British teammate Katie Livingston run into the bronze medal position yesterday. I overheard him later talking about how nervous he was while watching the ride (which can sometimes really shake the rankings up). “Welcome to the club,” I thought. The wives club, that is.

It is common knowledge among the US pentathletes that I never quite get to see the full event—that is because I’m turning away or closing my eyes during the first half of Eli’s ride. Eli’s actually a wonderful rider, but it is more nerve wracking than anything to watch your husband ride into a ring on a horse he doesn’t know and just hope that he drew the lucky one…It seems that today he did draw a good one. And as an added bonus, the first round rider (the one in 4th place and the one who will ride Eli’s horse before him) is a very good rider. Sometimes having a bad rider on your good horse is just as bad as drawing a bad horse.

I remember my mom telling me that she was more worn out after swim meets than I was, and I didn’t quite understand. That is, until a married a world-class pentathlete. While Eli is shooting, fencing, swimming, riding and running, my heart is beating harder and faster than his!

Due to overnight shifting ground under the temporary pool, they switched the order of the riding and swimming today. Surprisingly, that does calm the wife’s nerves. Perhaps I’m not as idealistic as I think in that I just want him to ‘survive’ the ride. No, I want him to do well—HE wants to do well and there’s nothing more frustrating than putting together a great competition and then drawing a bad horse. You see, Eli’s strongest sports are swimming and running, both sports of which you are in COMPLETE CONTROL (unlike fencing and riding). So at least this way he will know what he has to do in the swim and run to reach his goal. So, as I compose this email during the break before Eli’s ride, yes, my nerves like this order much better!

And I have to admit that it’s much easier to be watching in person than waiting for results at home. There are a lot of intricacies and dramatic stories that just don’t come across in the results. For example, one looking at yesterday’s women’s results may wonder why Georgina Harland, 2004 Olympic Bronze Medalist and FANTASTIC RUNNER, ran so slowly. But what they couldn’t see from the results was her charge from the 30s into the low teens during the first 2000 meters. And they certainly couldn’t see her when she reentered the stadium clearly hobbling on a badly injured leg. And it’s furthermore unlikely that anyone except for those there saw her teammates hoist her onto the medal podium when their team was awarded the Team silver. THAT is enough to bring tears to any spectator’s eyes. But especially for those whose emotions are uncontrollable by the end of the day—those in the Wives’ Club!