SMS camp, Fast and Female, and “dirty dudes”

What a week! I came back to the east coast after bopping around from one cabin to another, and jumped right into the BKL and SMS junior summer camps being held at the school. Since I caught a cold, I wasn’t able to do quite as much training and helping out with the BKL camp as I would’ve liked, but at least I could be a counselor for the SMS camp! We also had two awesome Fast and Female PowerHours. Not to be outdone, the boys had “dirty dudes” for the BKL camp and “guys with goals” for the SMS camp, which was sweet. Thank goodness there were pictures from the events.

For those of you who haven’t heard of Fast and Female, it’s an organization dedicated to empowerment through sport, and through fun activities, inspirational speeches and positive role models the goal is to keep girls from dropping out of sports and to be strong and confident. Here’s their website: www.fastandfemale.com Normally, a Fast and Female camp is a whole afternoon, but since all the campers were training hard, we wanted to have a slightly shorter but fun time so we did “PowerHours” – a super condensed event!

Our BKL group:

Thanks to a lot of help from our ambassadors Sophie, Erika, Annie, Izzy, Abby, Poppet and Lilly (our photographer), we started with an introduction and brainstorming session. The girls came up with a ton of reasons to stay in sports for life and all the good things sports can do for you – good self esteem, making friends, learning new skills, getting outdoor, getting to travel, a strong and healthy body…the list goes on and on. We also came up with negative pressures that might make girls want to drop out of sports, (not having a team, not getting the result you wanted, etc.), and talked about how to navigate these obstacles.

Then, the girls did a team treasure hunt, and took turns reading the clues.

Many of the stops had a group challenge, like getting a certain number of baskets as a group.

And at the end, they got their Fast and Female buffs and some PowerBars (thanks to PowerBar for sponsoring the event!)

 

The SMS junior camp PowerHour was similar in that we started with the same brainstorming process, but instead of a treasure hunt we talked about goals.

All the girls drew their own personal goal pyramids, and we shared one of our big goals for the year, and one of the many process goals we set in order to reach the top goal. For example, one common one was to make the Junior National team or to get a top-10 at JN’s, and process goals ranged from getting 9 hours of sleep a night to getting better at pull-ups. It was so awesome to see the girls mapping out a plan to reach their goals, and it was really fun for me to see!

We ended the hour by going into the gym and talking about how sometimes, it’s ok to fail. It’s ok to be bad at pull-ups and max out on the last one of your set – as long as you DO the set…that’s why you have teammates! Soph and I demoed how to spot someone on pull-ups to help them finish their set when they can’t do it alone, and how to slowly lower yourself down. Just one more way this is truly a team sport and not just individual training!

The boys also worked on their goal setting, led by Sverre, Matt and Erik.

We did a time trial run this morning, straight up Stratton Mountain! Boy, that run is really hard. I wanted to time trial it but since I’m riding the tail end of my cold, I didn’t want to do anything dumb and end up backtracking. So I did some really light intervals, but timed them so I was able to cheer for the juniors as they ran/skiwalked up. But my favorite training session of camp so far has to be the field strength we did today, because I’ve always seen the huge tires and logs but never got to use them. Till now.

We started with agility and hurdles (with some awesomely creative techniques used to get over them. Check out these ninja kids!)

…and we did some classic jumps working on balance…

After pushups, more jumps, core and squats we broke into relay groups and had to flip these giant tires over, and run with logs. I think I’ll probably be sore tomorrow and discover some muscles I didn’t know I had!

 

Camp wraps up tomorrow with a long distance workout, and then it’s time for a solid few weeks of training!