Friday, August 08, 2008

Let the Games Begin



I caught a bit of the opening ceremonies this morning on CBC before heading off to swimming. What a display. I read that the cost of the opening and closing ceremonies topped $100 million!

I was lucky enough to see the Canadians march in, the order was determined by a sequence based on the number of strokes it takes to write their names in Chinese. Greece, birthplace of the Olympics, was an exception, given its traditional place at the start, while the 639-member Chinese team lined up last.

Not all of the Canadian athletes are over in Beijing yet. Some are at training camps in Asia, while others like the triathlon team are still prepping in Canada. There is a opening ceremonies party tonight at Fort St Cycles here in Victoria to celebrate the team members who are in town (Simon, Colin and Lauren). We'll be watching a taped version of the opening ceremonies from this morning, and having some chinese food!

Training has been going pretty well this week. I've joined in with Colin and Lauren to do heat training with them up at the MET trailer at Pac Sport. The trailer is pretty awesome. Wendy (CSC Pacific physiologist) is able to monitor the temperature/humidity in the trailer, and we basically ride in there for 90 min. Wendy is able to monitor our internal temperatures, as well as determine our sweat rates afterwards. I've done 3 sessions this week so far, and manage to sweat out about 3L in each 90 min session. Colin sweats out 4.5 L

36 C and 72% humidity. That gives a humidex of 54 C


Wendy reading Colin's internal temperature






2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello there

I was curious on the physiology of elite athlete's If you don't mind I was woundering what kind of stats you had
Height weight vo2max
resting and max heart rate
thank you and good luck on the rest of your season
cheers
sam

Daniel Wells said...

Hi Sam,

I don't have all of the stats that you are looking for, but I am 6'0 and weight 160 lbs. No clue on the Vo2Max, or the resting HR.

I'd estimate that my Max HR is around 200 or so.

The stuff we were doing in the MET there was basically just monitoring the internal body temp, to prevent overheating (which can lead to heat stroke, etc)