USA Cycling West Coast Development Camp Day 1 7/5/2010

I decided several months ago that I should go to this development camp, since I'm pretty much a rookie cyclist. The camp is mostly for Juniors, but it's also a U23 development camp. Check-in ended at 2pm, then we met and talked about the agenda for the week, did introductions, talked about our goals, and introduced the GC points competition for the week. I decided that my main goal for the camp was to improve my bike-handling skills, since I'm not super comfortable on the bike. Our staff consists of Larry Nolan, Debbie Nolan, Steven Mielich, and Laurel Green. There are 32 campers, of which only 2 (including me) are female.

After that, we went for a short ride to preview the 5-minute field test course. Then, to the cafeteria for dinner. After dinner, Laurel gave us a talk on nutrition and food. She talked about how the human digestive process works, from chewing down to the large intestines. One cool thing that I learned was that there is a reason that people (mothers :-) ) always tell you to chew your food well - not only is it for the more obvious reason that you don't want to choke on your food, but also important is the enzyme in saliva that starts to break down carbohydrates. Therefore if you chew your food properly (for rather a long time really), then the energy from the carbs will be available more quickly due to faster digestion. Fats and proteins still take about 3-4 hours to be processed, which is why they're not great race food. The other cool thing we did involved a bunch of different foods, like Doritos, Lays, a PowerBar, a Rockstar energy drink, and some Lara bars. For each food, we looked at each ingredient and tried to classify it as either "food" or "not food". We tried to decide whether we would eat it by itself or not. For instance, the first ingredient in Doritos was "whole corn", which is a food, but many of the later ingredients (there were over 20) were not food. Lays, on the other hand, had all of three ingredients, two of which were food.

Anyways, after talking about food for a couple of hours, it was time for bed. It was a fairly exciting first day, I had a lot of fun.