My (short) first triathlon season ended in September after the Crescent Moon Triathlon. My time since has been spent training, breaking, and rebuilding. The highlight of my time since then was a trip to the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California a week ago.
As a resident of the Colorado Springs OTC, I naturally found myself comparing the two. Since I was on break the week before – and our primary purpose in Chula was meetings – I didn’t have a major training week, so I might not have gotten a clear comparison, but it was still fun to try. The two training centers serve very different sports. Colorado Springs is more of an indoor, individual sport based place, while Chula is an outdoorsy more team sport place. Colorado Springs has a pool, basketball courts, boxing gyms, fencing gyms, a shooting center, and facilities for weightlifters and wrestlers. Chula has a track (with an incredible view), three BMX courses, a boat house, an archery range, soccer fields, and rugby fields. Colorado Springs houses more athletes, but Chula has a much larger complex and the majority of resident athletes live off complex. The one drawback of Chula Vista? No pool, meaning we had to commute about an hour each day to swim in a 50m, outdoor pool that was very nice change of scenery.
The week culminated in the F1 Super Sprint Triathlon, which I spectated at, as my teammate (and winner of the women’s race), Katie Hursey raced. It was my first time watching a pro race, and it was fun to watch. The race was a 375m open water swim, a 6k bike, and a 2.5k run twice through, which was entirely in a parking lot. One round consisted of 8 loops on the bike and 5 loops of the run. This made the race very spectator friendly and gave me the opportunity to learn a lot from watching others. I definitely hope to be out there racing next year!
