TrainingPeaks at the Olympic BMX Camp
21 January 2008WOW, is what I have to say about the newest USA Cycling training grounds in Chula Vista, California.
The Beijing ‘replica’ track is absolutely amazing. First of all, it’s made for ‘GIANT HUMANS’. It’s not made for BMXers on 20” bikes! It’s just huge! Whomever thought up this idea for making these huge jumps, Massive 33’ tall starting camp and berms the size of 2 tractor trailers should be questioned for sanity! You can’t even imagine how big this track is.
It’s so big that when I flew out of San Diego on the way home, we flew over the Olympic Training Center and from over 20,000 in the plane, the number one standout landmark was not the running track, no, it wasn’t the lake for the rowers, and it wasn’t even the facilities themselves, it was the BMX track! SEEN from 20,000+ feet in a commercial airliner!!!!!! These athletes are coming down the start ramp(power ‘wheeling’ down most of it actually!) at over 35mph and hitting jumps that span over 33’ in length from peak to peak. We are talking Motocross huge jumps here people.
Mike King, program director for the BMX program has been running on fumes now for 3 months trying to get the track built, training camps started and athletes in the program, not to mention fielding phone calls from Nike, Budweiser, and other HUGE, HUGE companies all wanting to get in on the action. This past week, we had our first ‘BMX’ camp with the Olympic hopefuls and it was a circus. The entire day Wednesday was basically ‘taken over’ by a 40 person crew from Nike. Tractor trailers, 30” screen MAC LCD’s in ‘booths’ around the track, generators, catered lunches, make-up, and women steaming the wrinkles out of the clothes were all part of the event. And this was just a photo shoot! It wasn’t even a commercial or anything. Talk about nuts.
Mike Day of Red Bull racing hitting the 2nd set of doubles. From peak to peak they are 36 feet, and from bottom to top they are 10 feet tall.
Finally on Thursday, we got almost all of the reporters out of there(except for like (3) AP reporters) so we could get down to some testing. Air compressors were switched on, SRM’s were zero-offset and charged, and the gate was raised for ‘random starts’. I have the pleasure of being one of the coaches working with the team and it is a blast. I started racing BMX when I was 11, and to be back at my ‘roots’ is something incredible. James Herrera, Greg Romero (the two other coaches on the high performance coaching team) and I were all just standing at the top of the start ramp(did I mention it was 33 feet tall? ) and just laughing because it was all so cool. Here we are at a DREAM playground for BMXer’s with all the greatest high performance tools at our disposal to make these athletes the fastest in the world. We have custom built SRM power meters, WKO+ software, High definition-slow-mo cameras, Dartfish software, the exact same gate and timing system that will be used in Beijing, and a telemetrie speed trap system to be placed wherever on the track we want it to be placed! Did I say that the track was HUGE? The track is HUGE! Did I mention that the US is the ONLY country in the world with a ‘replica’ track? Yup, that’s right, besides the actual track in Beijing(and we hear that the starting ramp has been torn down), this is the only track in the world that’s an exact replica of Beijing. The same guy, Tom Ritzthaler, that built the Beijing track has built this one, and anyone or any country can do it, but I don’t think anyone else will, it’s just a massive, HUGE(did I say HUGE yet?) undertaking.
Arielle Martin-Verhaaren of Formula racing contemplating the huge air she’s about to get hitting the doubles!
O.k, back to the testing…. All the athletes have SRM’s on their bikes and all of them have Log-in’s to www.trainingpeaks.com and each one has a copy of the WKO+ software. I spent some of Tuesday, some of Wednesday getting all of their software installed and teaching them how to download to WKO+ and upload to TrainingPeaks. I taught them how to make a ‘zero-offset’ on the computer and how to setup their athlete home page charts. I empathsized the importance of this data and how critical it was to making them even faster. If I can help to make them a hundredth of a second faster than that could be the difference between a Gold and a Silver medal and it’s worthwhile. After all the testing, gate starts, speed trap collection, and jumping over the HUGE jumps, we met back in the BMX meeting room for a de-briefing, downloading of the power meter data, uploading to their trainingpeaks.com accounts and a discussion on what it all meant. It was truly an exciting time and at the next camp(which is top-secret and I can’t talk about it, or I’d have to kill ya..) we’ll be testing all kinds of things from gearing to shoes, to aero gear to see what can make our athletes faster and create a sweep of the podium!!! Bottomline? TrainingPeaks WKO+ and online accounts are at the heart of our USA Cycling BMX team and that is going to make a difference.
A Gold, Silver and Bronze difference….
Hunter
P.S. Did I mention that Jenny Finch, the USA’s greatest softball pitcher ever was on campus at the same time? Yowza!
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