2016 January Volume Camp Official Thread
Hey Kids! Coach P here in much-warmer-than-where-I-was-yesterday-morning Clermont, Florida. I am on site for our second annual January Volume Camp, a 3.5 day excursion into early season volume building and fun. We have a solid EN contingent here, roughly 50% returning and 50% new...including the one and only Mariah Bridges.
Campers include Robin Rodriguez, Brian Lehnen, Scott Giljum, Rachel Hawe, Kori Martini, Jed Vanichnakorn, David Rose, James Ebert, Franz Hinojosa, Paul Hough, Giselle & Jeff Carson.
Thursday was check in and camp meet-and-greet at the local gastropub. Coach Rich will be proud that my streak for ordering fruity beers has continued, with a nice goblet of Goose Island Sophie with my dinner. 
There was no room for dessert, but thank goodness because Mariah gave us all an incredible schwag bag upon our return to the hotel, including goodies from Rev3, Normatec, TriSwim, and Nuun. Not to mention the obligatory EN Camp Shirt and Bottles!
You can stay tuned to this forum thread as I will be updating it daily with our adventures. For now it's time to rest up before the hard work truly begins!!!!
To learn more about the January Volume Camp, you can read the official camp page here: www.endurancenation.us/jvc
Comments
"This one time at band camp...."
Wow, one year at a West Coast Camp and you are living in the gutter. To think we once hot-tubbed together...sigh. You were so young and innocent in those days....for everyone else, it's your Day One Recap!!!!
Swim Tips from Coach Patrick @ the National Training Center!
We started off the day with a 7 AM swim at the national training center here in Clermont. It was awesome to see the pool the set up as 50 m long for swimming, so we were all guaranteed to work out regardless of our fitness levels!
The goal here was to put in some good swimming with short personal opportunities to talk about swim technique and form. The workout we had was set for 4000 m, which is much longer than anybody has been swimming for quite some time. Even though it was lightly raining, it was actually warmer on the deck than it was here last year. For those of you who haven't been here, facility is incredible and the pool is off the charts for an outdoor pool. I was able to jump in the water with my iPhone and get some good video both above and below the surface of the water.
We will use this video for our meeting tonight so I can give both the group and individual's specific swim feedback.
Given how wet the morning was, we decided that heading out for our long bike would be very counterproductive. Instead we decided to go for our run first which started off very inauspiciously as you can see in this picture.
Despite the rough start, but actually turn very nice by the end of the run we got in the solid 5 1/2 miles.
Then it was time for a short lunch break before the afternoon ride.
By the time it started the ride, the sun was out and everybody had a huge smile on their face. The most important thing about camp is being able to send pictures of yourself in warm weather clothes to your disgusted training partners.
We opted for the 50 mile ride over Sugarloaf Mountain. Over the course we covered more than 3000 feet of gain as well as climbed Sugarloaf Mountain from either direction.
We weren't worried about the elevation, but the wind was another matter altogether. It was gusting up to 30 miles an hour which meant we were either going to really really really slowly or really really really fast. But it's hard to complain when you're riding outside in January.
Here's some of the data from today!
<img alt="JVC Day One Ride" src="http://www.endurancenation.us/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Screen-Shot-2016-01-15-at-9.00.15-PM-1024x846.png" style="height: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto;" width="500px" /></a></p>
Clermont Bicycles for taking care of us with on course support. They took care of several problems today as well as provided us with timely nutrition stops… Actually carrying things around from our sponsors like Nuun, as well as other important stuff like Coke and Peanut M&Ms, etc.Many thanks to
Everyone played super Duper nice on the bike, and had lots of fun and jokes in between the climbing and suffering. Hard to believe I'm talking about Florida and climbing in the same sentence, but you have to come here to Clermont to see it for yourself. To learn more about next year's camp -- registration opens on 1/19/16 -- check out the official camp page here: www.endurancenation.us/jvc
Now it's time to rest up for Day Two's epic ride!!!!
Very jealous...........!
You guys are looking great!
An yes, that CAMP swag does look questionable....
SS
We awoke this morning feeling pretty good about the fact that yesterday we couldn’t ride a century due to the weather. Get a nice balance of swim, bike, and run… But today was all about the bike. Before we could begin, several of the campers decided to get in the short run.
This is part of how we treat inside Endurance Nation, maximizing training time but also ensuring quality of all of your sessions. It’s no secret that most of us were going to be exhausted by the time we finish the 120-mile ride today. With that in mind, a group set out at 7:15 on the rolling 3.2 mile loop around the National Training Center.
With that done, we were able to fuel up and get ready for today’s ride. The ride we had on tap for today was a new one for 2016. We were going to spend the vast majority of our time on the exquisite Van Fleet Trail.
It’s flat, it’s fast. It’s protected from the sun. It’s protected from the wind. And it’s not that crowded. It’s so straight, you can see stuff in the path for miles.
But we didn’t just see “stuff.” We saw snakes. We saw turtles. Even saw an alligator… Even if that wasn’t exactly on the path. But we didn’t see was a lot of cars, which was awesome. Or a lot of hills… Which was even MORE awesome.
Having the bike right on the flat course actually made it possible for the group to stay together a pretty consistently across the day. Folks broke up into smaller “factions,” but they were still able to stay together and there was good transition between the groups. It was an opportunity to be able to work as hard as they wanted because there was no traffic, and zero turns.
As a coach, it was great to be able to watch all of our athletes riding to see them consistently across the day. People look very different at the start of the ride than they do at the end and this is a great chance for us to see their full spectrum of form and fitness. There was a good deal of learning and suffering. The temperatures got well above 75° and many of us show the effects of the sun already.
120 Miles Means Time to Refuel!
The long ride day is is also a day to break into the extra food. We have all the exercise nutrition you need, but your first 120 miler of the year requires a little bit more. All I know is by the time I try to get the peanut M&Ms, they were almost gone.
There was quality writing going on the whole time for sure, but it got even harder by the time we read the turn to go home. Coming off the path left us with still another 24 miles to go until we got home. Thankfully the wind was in a friendly mood and we didn’t have complete resistance on the way home.
I have never been happier to see hotel as I was seeing hours today. That was only superseded by the fact that we had incredible Cuban food for dinner tonight… Nothing says recovery like quality calories. Then it was time for another camp presentation before heading off to bed and resting up for day three. This week we spoke about the value of inserting a camp in to your season and how to go about making sure that you’re using volume to its maximum effect.
Plan for the day was a swim followed by a bike ride. Due to inclement weather on Friday (Day One), we moved the long the long ride back to today. So what was meant to be a lighter day was going to be one of the stronger ones…and we all knew it.
We kicked off the morning with a trip to the National Training Center for another great outdoor swim session. Given the need to also ride long, we decided to keep the swim to just an hour. The pool is still set for 50 meters long course which made for some fantastic video time and an opportunity to focus on the mechanics of our swim stroke. Plus it's a lot easier to count how far you've gone in a 50-meter pool. :-) I personally got in 2800 LCM.
Personally, I needed the time in the swim just to loosen up after yesterday's epic ride. While I'm certainly lacking the fitness to swim well for long periods of time, it's always good to work on your technique when you're not 100%.
With the swim behind us, we had just enough time to head over to Starbucks for some caffeine before heading out for the long ride. First thing that I noticed stepping out of the car was just how much the wind was blowing. A quick check on the phone to the local weather showed that winds were steady at 25 miles per hour, with gusts up to 35 miles per hour. Clearly not a day for the faint of heart...or the aero of wheel!
We started together with solid ambitions, but it was pretty clear by the time we hit the first SAG point at the 20-mile mark that not everyone was going to make the full ride. We decided to break up into smaller groups based on ability and fitness levels to get in the appropriate type of riding. My group opted to go for just about 73 miles, but the vast majority of it turned out to be into some flavor of headwind. Truly character building -- especially coming after yesterday's 120 mile. It also didn't help that it was overcast and cold today, approximately 15° cooler than yesterday.
The upside of the Day Three ride is it everybody knows everyone else by now. Not only with the personalities, how they handle different terrain and conditions. The result is a much smoother riding experience, and it's also just more fun. The only thing that was clearly not fun was how my body felt: I am still convinced that someone replaced my bicycle seat with a rock!
There were no complaints when we opted to shorten the ride down to 73 miles from the original plan what of 100 miles. The wind was just too strong -- we couldn't relax much and it was taking a ton of time and energy to keeps us on track.
The folks who came back earlier able to get in another run making for their second day of swim, bike and run -- total monsters! Now it's time to pack up the bikes and recover with one last great meal before preparing for the fourth and final long run of the day on the renown clay trails of Clermont.
The fourth and final day is my favorite day of training camp. This is our chance to go down on the Clay trails that surround Clermont. But this one is an almost exclusively reserved for the runners and Farmington over the course of this morning, I only saw three cars!
The weather was in the cooler this morning, but that only makes for better running conditions. When we started off it was about 42° which is the temperature I can run at all day.
After a brief warm-up, the group was off. Given how different everyone's running speed is from there so I can speed, there were no expectations about staying together all day. Instead The focus is on running well and running at your own speed. Smaller groups and actually happened out there on the road but in many ways the trails are just a great place to run and enjoy the quiet and the scenery.
One of the more surprising elements about running out on the Clay Road is just how bowling the terrain is. Similar to the bike, there are very few places that are entirely flat. As a result, it's an easy place to kind of fall into your own and do just as much -- or as little -- work as you want to.
When the run was over, it was time to cool down and do some light stretching while everyone else finished up. This is a chance for a few final jokes and laughs before we hopped in the cars to go get ready to leave. The last day of camp is always a bittersweet one but the memories are good enough to sustain me for the next 362 days!
If you're interested in joining us for the 2017 edition of the January Volume Camp, please visit the official camp page online here: www.endurancenation.us/jvc and make your refundable deposit to hold the slot. If you attend the camp this year, stay tuned to your email for a special offer as we'd love to have you back!
Monday Run Videos:
- Jeff here.
- Patrick here.
- Paul & Giselle here.
- Rob, Scott, Franz here: here.
- Rachel here: here.
Sunday Swim Videos: