Last week I went to a High Performance Coaching Clinic (for volleyball, of course) at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. The main speaker was Nikolai Karpol (the "Howling Bear"), who coached the Russian women's national team to a number of Olympic medals. We also heard from both the US men's and women's national team coaches, as well as other college coaches. I learned a lot! I also completed my CAP II training. In the above picture I am posing with Huan Huan and Jing Jing in the OTC gift shop. They are 2 of the mascots for the 2008 Beijing Olympics!
The view from the OTC gift shop to the athlete's center. we staying in the dorms with the athletes--in fact, I was on the floor with the women's volleyball team--and ate in the cafeteria with them.
After the clinic I spent some time with the Hoke family, who used to live in Iowa and now live in Colorado. We decided to go snowboarding. I haven't even really skied, and the thought of snowboarding really scared me, but I decided I would do it anyway. Above is before we started, when I was still confidant and healthy and warm.
Here we are at the end of the day. We only went down once--it was a log route, and some of us (that would be me) were really lousy and slow. A few times I figured out what I was doing and did well for a few minutes, but then I would fall and have to figure it all out again. I think I fell a few hundred times was very sore for a number of days, but I have decided it was fun, and I would like to do it again.
Above: Colleen, Heath, Tori, and Layne drink coffee and celebrate a successful day on the slopes.On the way home we saw the sun setting on the mountains and thought it was a beautiful backdrop, so we stopped and took some pictures. When we got back to their house, we played a snowboarding game on the Playstation, and I discovered that I am waaaaaaay better at video game snowboarding than I am in real life!
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