The last two days have been slightly calmer. After a good night's rest, we drove down to the racecourse and rigged up our newly molded Lucerne boat. (For those of you who don't know, our original boat at the Final Olympic Qualification Regatta was knocked down from the rack by a crazy gust of wind. It literally broke in half so we had to borrow another boat from the very generous Australian team in order to race. Our original Lucerne boat was taken back to the factory in Germany and remolded like a Phoenix, to this one we have now.) After a quick paddle around the racecourse, everything except a few loose bolts here and there, the boat was good to go and we were ready to begin our final stage of preparation before the games.

The training we will be doing for the next couple of days will not be much different than the training we have done over the past year. The training usually goes is that we have 3-4 week periods of training with pretty much identical workouts where the only thing that changes is the volume of work and the intensity. We peak with both volume and intensity at the end of the cycle, have a few days off and start at it again. We have just been through one of those 4 week periods while training at Princeton and now all that is left is the finishing touches. As the racing approaches, we taper off on the intensity and volume and get ready to race.

One thing that has stood out over the last couple of days is the small number of countries that are currently training at the racecourse with us. The main reason is that most of our competitors are European and stay home for as long as possible since they don't have to worry about things like jet-lag or new equipment. I think this extra time will benefit us though, not only to get over the jet-lag and adjusted to the new equipment but also because it will give us an opportunity to get acquainted with the racecourse and its surroundings with-out any of the distractions or the 250 meters of filled grandstands.

The satellite Olympic Village in which we are staying is about a 40 minute bus ride from the racecourse and is very scenic. The campus is surrounded by trees and full of green areas. I've even noticed that the roofs of most of the buildings are covered in grass, for better insulation maybe? Perhaps an architect can correct me but I do know that many of the new Princeton University buildings have that same feature in order to reduce the urban heat island effect. These London games are expected to revolutionize the Olympic experience in two ways; the first is with the proliferation of social media as a major source of information (hey! We’re doing that!), the second is that the London games are going to be the “greenest” games in history. Other than the ample supply of compostable and recyclable products and trash cans to throw them in, many of the recently built sites are not permanent at all and so there will be a very low impact on the country after the games are done.

Other than the color green, the final thing that has stood out is the heavy security. Upon entering any Olympic site, all vehicles are thoroughly checked by armed guards, bomb sniffing dogs and more armed guards. Everyone who enters also has to go through a screening very much like the one at airports. Luckily, they have the same security at the racecourse as they do at the village and we only travel from between those two so we don't have to be screened through the metal detectors every time we come in.

-Robin

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