It's my last day in Colorado Springs & we thought we'd do something fun that we hadn't done yet. We had originally wanted to go hiking, but it was kind of rainy when we left the house so we decided to take a tour of the U.S. Olympic Training Center. This is one of three campuses for U.S. Olympic training. This campus focuses on indoor sports such as swimming, mens gymnastics, wrestling, basketball, weightlifting, etc... and only has a couple outdoor sports training including triathlon and skeet shooting. This is also the training sight for all Paralympics. The tour started out with a video and proceeded throughout the campus. It was pretty cool to watch some of the athletes training and just walking around.
USA! USA! USA!
Out front of the training center.
"She's 12 ft. tall & her boobs are ALMOST as big as yours" -Joel
The Olympic Torches
This map shows where the Olympics have been held in the US and how many medal holding athletes have been from each state.
Illinois has the third highest number of athletes to medal in the Olympics at 120, beat out by New York and California.
Joel & Sara training for the Olympics in the Hall of Fame.
Something happened to Joel...
This is the training room for several sports including volleyball, trampoline, and mens gymnastics. Only the men gymnasts train here, while the women gymnasts train several locations and meet together only at certain times. The boxing gym was right above this and out the wood doors you see in the back is another gymnast gym. The tv screens you see is for playback of the athlete training so the trainer can have an instant video playback instead of just trying to explain what they want. Also, volleyball and trampoline train in the middle because the ceiling rises a few feet. The trampolinists can get as high as the flag you see hanging on the wall. Lastly, they have certain events here and this gym alone has bleachers enough to seat 3,000 people.
Then we headed to the shooting range.
The shooting range is the largest in the Western hemisphere and the third largest in the world. This is one of them, but there's another one or so in the building. There were a few guys in there training. It's pretty amazing how consistently accurate these people can shoot.
One of the weight lifting rooms.
This is a place any of the athletes, no matter the sport, can come and work with trainers to just tone and strengthen certain areas.
We got to stand and watch the wrestlers train for a while. Some of them had really REALLY tight shorts on.
Aquatic Center. We got to watch them training as well. Cool fact: the pool bottom is shaped like a V so that the middle of the pool is the "deep end" and that way it stops the waves from letting the swimmers in the center have the advantage.
We wanted our picture taken in front of this, but there weren't people around. Then this athlete walked out of one of the buildings and I asked him to take our picture. He was really nice. We started laughing afterwards though because pretty sure he's probably more used to having people ask to take his picture instead of the other way around.
Our day ended in the some Chick-fil-a. Happy happy.
Tomorrow Sara, Lydia, and I head to Denver to see our friend Jessica for a couple days! Can't wait!
