Last week the weather here in Victoria, BC was all over the place. We had some sun, some cloud, some wind, some rain, some hail, and an unusual amount of snow. OK, it was only like half a foot and it only lasted for half the day but snow in Victoria is rare, snow in Victoria at the end of April is ridiculous! This is the time of the year that the rest of Canada is supposed to be jealous of us because of all the sun and warmth we get ... well not this year. The rest of the country is laughing at us, we are the ones waiting for the weather to warm up and get more Victoria-like. In the past there have been times when we have gone open water swimming in April, but unfortunately not this year. It just means more meters spent swimming at the "House of BAMF" (Crystal Pool) as coach Joel likes to refer to our local watering pit.
Lately we have been trying out some different strategies that may be used by the athletes going to Beijing to help keep them cool pre-race and during the race itself. Beijing's weather in August is notoriously known to be very hot and extremely humid - so that is what we are preparing for. These strategies are obviously important because the better you are able to maintain a normal core temperature during a race, the greater chance for success, simply because your body's core will be working in optimal conditions. When your core temperature starts to get too high then your body will start to shut down and slow up, this of course will lead to a bad result. In the past we have only prepared for hot weather races by trying to get our bodies to adapt to extreme temperatures by doing workouts in our secret tent, basically getting our core temperatures up to a certain degree and maintaing it for a period of time. This in theory is supposed to work because come race day, when our core temperatures start to rise in competition, our bodies are more adept to cooling itself. It may sound simple but getting around to doing it is very arduous because of how hard it is on the body. Everyday we have to be in that hellish environment after a hard day of training for more punishment. On average I will have lost up to 9 pounds (over 4kg) of sweat during the session and replacing that day-to-day can be pretty difficult. Of course we will likely be doing some training in our secret tent pre-Beijing but luckily Wendy Pethick, a physiologist working with us from PacificSport has thought of some very easy and practical way to keeping the body's core temperature lower during the race. Trying these new methods out that none of us have done before is pretty exciting. Most seem really simple and some of them silly, but I can guarantee that there will be some showing up to the start line in Beijing with no cooling plan at all and we will be one step ahead of them even before the gun goes off. You may be asking what some of these strategies are, well if I told you then I would have to kill you. As might be expected, they are all TOP SECRET!
Heat and humidity will not be the only thing that the athletes in Beijing will have to worry about when it comes to the weather. The issue of pollution in Beijing has been bombarded with negative attention from the media. This is a very serious concern for some with big name athletes publicly withdrawing from the Olympics because of "long-term health concerns". This is something that we have not overlooked and all the athletes eligible for Beijing in Canada have gone through a vigorous breathing test to see if we are susceptible to asthma during competition in the high pollution conditions of Beijing. I did this test last week thinking that just sitting there breathing into a tube would be a piece of cake but wow, I was wrong. I came out of it feeling like I just finished a hard interval workout. Wendy mentioned to me that some athletes that she tested (across a variety of sports) were not able to complete the test because of the high demands it asks of you. My results came back negative for exercise induced asthma. But honestly, if they came back positive I really do not think that it would make that big of a deal. It may be wishful thinking but I do think that the pollution levels in Beijing will dramatically decrease by the time the Olympic Games start and it will be a non-issue. Even if it doesn't, all the athletes in triathlon are racing in the same conditions, on the same day, at the same time (well the Women will be one day and the Men will be the next). We all did the test event last year in a cloud of smog and the race still went on and a winner was crowned. There were some athletes (mostly the USA) that showed up to the race last year with face masks on which is an interesting strategy. They checked-in with them on, set their transition area up with them on, and even warmed up on the bike and run with them on. There was even one athlete (Jarrod Shoemaker) that was wearing his mask after the race. Some people may see this as a little overkill, but I bet he was wearing that to hide his perma-smile that he had from just securing a spot on the USA Olympic team!
The heat, humidity, and pollution are all most likely going to be big issues in Beijing but it cannot be something to obsess over and get in the way of what is most important in preparation, which is training. We know of a high contender country that is doing three training camps close together in three different countries in order to prepare for the Beijing conditions. All that travel and being in different countries adjusting gets in the way of that simple, most important aspect ... training. It is very easy to overdo it and show up to the start line exhausted, it has happened to us before. But I like our plan, the plan that coach Joel came up with and what our squad highly believes in, it is the Keep It Simple Stupid plan.
