16 August 2008  |  Misc

Jeju Island- MTB Training Camp

The past few days here on Jeju Island in South Korea have been most excellent. There are plenty of low-trafficked roads and enough miles of climbing and flats to keep us all busy. I definitely feel like I am acclimatizing to the temperature and humidity and am happy to report that riding in the heat is not a problem for me at all anymore. I will likely still be taking precautions in the race (having ice available in the feed zone), but overall I am feeling great. We are only a short ride from the beach and the water has been fantastic! There are even a few waves which make for some pretty fun body surfing (good upper-body and core workout….).

It was Adam’s birthday the other night, and we had dinner at a traditional Korean restaurant. There were plenty of new foods for us all to try- especially since our waiter spoke no english and we ended up ordering things and not really knowing what we were going to get. We ended up with lots of fish and shellfish- both raw and cooked, seaweed soup and plenty of different pickles. I’ve tried to keep my tasting new things to a minimum since it’s the week before the Olympics, but we were in a nice restaurant so I figured it wouldn’t really be a problem. All of the sushi was very fresh and tasty- with the exception of the abalone which had a kind of crunchy-cartilagey consistency that was a little strange. Of course there was the “who’s going to eat the fish eyeball” series of dares- I had to do it, and Waldek had to do it after I did. Yes, we are like a couple of 10-year-olds.

We have one more day here before Mary, Marc, Waldek and I head over to Beijing. The Olympics is less than a week away- pretty hard to believe.