It has been an amazing five days. One of the best camps ever.
For once, I didn't want it to end.
I wanted to stay there and sleep on the hard floor, eat my food from my container with my Group 4 + Eight Princesses, wash my own plates, climb the steps from grandstand to the dorms, wait for the shower, to eat after lights out with Celeste, to just talk and gay with everyone I could find.
For starters, the camp had the feel to it. While it was a training camp, it was so magical. The atmosphere was good right from the start, when we did 2.4 the first thing in the morning.
I could hardly sleep the night before because of the time trial. The target was simple: sub 12. But every time I took it, the improvement in number of seconds started to drop, when it got harder to shave off the seconds. The previous improvement was a 13s improvement, and if I were to improve by 13s again, my timing would be exactly 12, and not the 11+ I wanted.
I didn't know how I ran. I had a bad start, like how I always do when I run. The A and B Div girls started together, and I was at the back, but the first round was fast. Usually my timing for the first round would be 1:50, but this time, it was 1:30+. The shock and surprise gave the burst and energy to keep it going, and the constant encouragement did wonders whenever I felt like dying out. My lungs were already burning out after the first round, which was both good and bad. The bad meaning my stamina wasn't up to it, the good was that whenever my lungs burnt during time trials, I improve a lot.
I tried to keep every round under 2 minutes, and after the fifth round, I was under 10, and I just told myself, it's now or never, finish it like it's your last. I'm glad I got under 12 minutes by quite a bit, more than what I expected :) but I really hope I can maintain for the next TT.
Then we watched Without Limits, about Steve Prefontaine. His story is one that I'll remember, that he kept on running, kept on lasting throughout the pain. I really hope I'm strong enough to not just last, but give back to the people, to the seniors, the juniors, the team.
We had 200 pushups, the only proper punishment we ever had for being late in these 5 days. I think we might have scared away all the people from our side of the canteen...
In the afternoon was 10km Time Trial. For the first 4km, I was trying to catch the C1 guys, Ronnie and Timothy. It took much longer than usual to catch to them, the gap between us widening and closing every now and then. But them being the target really helped improve my timing.
Yingo had set the target for me to be sub 70min, my PB being around 72. I had to go under 7 minutes per km, and as every lap went by, the timings were all quite fine until I capsized at the 9km mark as I was turning. While I had tracked the time in which I capped, the disappointment is still there. Of course it took more than 36s to get on the pontoon and empty the boat, since the timing with capsize was 1:10:35, but I really wanted to properly see my timing of sub 70. Give and take a couple of seconds, it was around 67 minutes. It's a five minute improvement, compared to the other 30s improvements during training. And the next target for me is sub 65.
So that's it for day one.
Unless you count Celeste poking me in the middle of the night and asking me to turn over and not remembering it in the morning.
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