Elitetrack: Sport Training & Conditioning

This
morning I went to the athlete’s village ("willage" is how the Finns say
it). It was about 15 minute bus ride from downtown here, with the main
bus station just around the corner. The village is in Espoo, just
outside of Helsinki at a university. Turena met me at the gate and I
was ‘credentialed in’.



It’s a smaller university campus, set on
a lake surrounded by some wood. A fence and guards surround the
facility with several police boats in the water. There is a track right
in the middle, weight room facilities, and a union type building with dining
facilities. When I got there this morning, I was amazed at watching the
Africans doing their runs on the path along the lake, just easily
running at what seemed like such a fast pace. In the union building,
there were computers for internet access, with most athletes checking
IAAF and hometown newspapers to see the coverage. Nobody had ELITETRACK.com
or LETSRUN.com pulled up.



The U.S. athletes stay in a small Radisson
hotel on campus. Spain and Japan are there also. There are also
dormitories all around, which I guess aren’t as nice. It is like a
dormitory, the rooms small. What an operation though, there is a U.S.
room where athletes sign up for massages with two massage people who are there
all day and a chiropractor who is there at specific times; a hospitality sweet with
snacks; a ‘operations’ room which the coaches and managers operate out
of and a uniform room stacked with endless amounts of Nike U.S. gear.
Start lists and good luck signs adorn the walls of the U.S. floor.
Athletes have to sign out when they leave the village in case a drug
test comes up (three of the women marathoners have had blood drug tests
already). It is a college atmosphere with athletes hanging around in
the lobbies, congratulations being passed around to the medal winners.
Turena said during the high jump you could hear people up and down the
hall cheering with each make of Chaunte Howard’s in the high jump last
night.



When I was there, the Spanish athletes were in the lobby taking in a soccer game on television. Being the U.S. Coach is a
job that would be a nice honor, but a ton of work
especially if you were the head coach. Four hours of sleep, fires to put out, meetings,
and being at the track. They’ve been here for several weeks and the Head
Women’s Coach Sandy Fowler, will return from Helsinki and turn around to meet the start
of school when she returns to U of Alabama.



I went and sat at
the practice track for about 45 minutes just watching different
athletes go through their routines, trying to pick out who did what
events. The U.S. women had their first 4 x 100 practice. Race walkers,
travel in threes, with several countries doing workouts in the walks,
but always in threes. Walter Davis was going through a morning shake
out. Coach Shaver from LSU was there and was putting a Jamaican athlete
through a light workout.



We headed back to my hotel which is not
far from the marathon course and three of the U.S. women went and did a
light workout on part of the course. Tonight I’ll take in the meet
again, with the highlight being the 400 hurdles. Eurosport’s five hours
of the morning session just ended, I see that Upshaw and Madison
qualified for the LJ final, with Madison being one of two auto qualifiers. Oh and
now they are re-showing the results from last night.



More tonight after the meet.