First Day, First Practice

Yesterday afternoon everyone got in to Colorado Springs from their flights. There were a lot of delays and one group got stranded in Atlanta for about 5-6 hours. The day you fly in is always the worse. Everything is so rushed. You get in then you go eat next you have a meeting and then the Wal-mart run. Then you have to be in your room at 10 and lights out at 11. Right off the bat things are different this year. Our meeting went well although it was a bit longer then expected. One thing that I can't be more happier about is the practice times. This year we practice 9-12 and 4-7. These times are much better then last year's 8-11 and 1-4. We have more of a break in between and 1-4 sucks because it's so hot and the track is slicker. That was my first thing that stood out. Next was something that was never mentioned last year: the idea of tapering for the world championships. We have three weeks and the idea is two train hard but the last week we will begin to taper ourselves in order to peak at the world championships.
Onto today's practice. The first practice is always strange. You have new people and you have your experienced group and although we get a schedule you still don't know how it's going to go. The first day you also just get a lot of skating done of the track. The goal is to get a bunch of laps in so you get use to skating on the track again and to get use to the altitude. We started off with our usual low, middle, high line pace. It was a fast drill and at the end everyone was pretty much still in it which is huge. Especially because the last 5 laps got a lot faster. Everything we do is with a stopwatch so they can regulate our paces.
In all I think everyone is feeling the 'altitude burning' in their chest if I can call it that but I think we had a really good first practice. We have another tonight and every Sunday we are here we have off.