Keeping Up with Simon

By Adam van Koeverden

iRun correspondent (and Spring 2009 cover boy) Adam van Koeverden was looking to break from his usual training routine. So the Olympic champion kayaker joined a group of world-class triathletes, including none other than Simon Whitfield, for a training camp in Hawaii. There, on his 27th birthday, van Koeverden found himself gasping for breath on a muddy, hilly run alongside a relaxed and comfortable Whitfield.

In other words, it was exactly what he was looking for.

We weren’t off our bikes for more than a minute, following our 65k hill ride from Paia through the west Maui mountains to Kahakuloa, before Simon Whitfield glanced over at me with his nonchalant grin. I knew it was coming. “You runnin’ buddy?”

“Damn skippy, I’m running,” I thought. I came here to train, shed these lazy post-Olympic pounds and see how the best triathletes in the world do it. Lace up!

Ten minutes in and my legs are solid iron, but I’m keeping pace with the man himself, so I’ll try and ignore that for the time being. It’s an “easy” run, the finale for the day, so big daddy Whitfield is chatty and upbeat. I’m hoping that my one-word answers to his questions that would otherwise start a great conversation aren’t being misconstrued as anything but compensatory.

My heart rate monitor duly informs me that my pulse has been north of 140 for well over three hours this afternoon. It was undoubtedly much higher throughout my 4k swim this morning, especially taking into consideration that the session consisted almost entirely of 50m sprints, and that I’m hydro-dynamically akin to a ’57 Chevy and have about the same familiarity with being immersed fully into the water. Simon’s questions keep coming, and my answers remain brief and to the point.

Simon: “So you’re liking the training then, eh?”

Me: “Totally dude (gasp).”

Simon: “Wicked ride today, huh? Those switchbacks around Kahakuloa are incredible.”

Me: “Uh huh (casual gasp, try not to make it obvious you’re crackin’ your threshold right now, Adam).”

The longest sentence I managed to spit out, as far as I can recall was, “Hey, how do you feel about turning?” That was met with a similarly concise response from Simon: “One last hill, this trail turns back.”

It rained the last two days, monsoon style, so the sugarcane fields where we’ve done all of our running during this camp are soft and muddy, and the clay is sticking to our shoes like we’re pig farmers. We come up over the last hill, and as I catch a glimpse of Haleakala, Maui’s 10,000-foot peak with a perfect Hawaiian rainbow completing the perfectly-wrapped package, the hours of accumulated fatigue drain from my legs, the slight wince of anguish disappears from my face and my gait perks up. I gather myself for a quick one-liner to Simon: “Man, we’re so lucky.” His reply comes quick, as if he was already thinking it, “Best job in the world.”

I wholeheartedly agree. Being an athlete, training and racing full-time, is an incredibly fortunate, rewarding and enjoyable lifestyle. Training – whether it’s running, biking, paddling, cross-country skiing or lifting weights – isn’t just my job and my favourite pastime, it’s also a decidedly wicked way to spend my birthday, and today just happens to be my 27th.

When my alarm cracked an hour before dawn at 5:30 this morning I decided my gift to myself was as much training as I could get in before dark. Only problem is, we’ve got 10 minutes of running left before we’re home, and it will only be 4:30. Two hours of sunlight will remain and I’ve already plugged away at all three sports which constitute a triathlon. 

After we kick off our shoes at the door I grab my phone and call up my local friend, Lauren Spalding-Bartlett, the princess of Maui and arguably the best female outrigger paddler in the world.

“Hey bru, birfday boy! You wanna paddle dis afternoon?”
“Of course I do, you have time?”

“Shoots bru, I’ll meet you in half an hour!”

Shoots is Mauian for “all good” and “bru” is bro, so I pack my paddle up and head to the harbour, stoked on my four-sport birthday.

Swim, bike, run. It’s not my usual bag of tricks, but they’re all sports I enjoy. I ran track and cross-country in high school and a little bit with my university squad at McMaster, but I’m a far cry from a runner’s build after 13 years of training for short kayak races.

Turning 27 is sort of poignant to me. I started kayaking when I was 13 and a half, and that’s when I figure I became an athlete, so I’ve been doing it now for over half of my life. I often go into schools and talk about the importance of active and healthy living, and about the little choices we make and what a proound effect they can have on the rest of your life. The best choice I ever made was to find a sport I loved and to train as absolutely hard as I could towards a once-unrealistic goal.

Before I started training for kayak races I enjoyed sports, and I went outside. But not every day, and not like it was my job. By 13 I was ready for change, to do something seriously, set some goals and see how far I could push myself. It was a good day when my mom first brought me down to the Burloak Canoe Club.

Honestly, I wasn’t very good at sports and I wanted to be able to say I was the best at something in my whole school. Perfect choice since I was the only kayaker at my school, the best by default. My first few strokes provided little reason to believe I’d be doing it virtually every day for decades to come. It was just something new, a challenge, a new experience.

I suppose this camp with Simon isn’t much different. After Beijing I needed some sort of a departure from my usual training routine. Simon and I did a few speaking engagements together in the fall. I expressed my interest in switching it up a little this year training-wise, and he quickly extended an invitation to his first tune-up camp here in Maui. Just three weeks to get the juices flowing again, get some of the tougher kilometres out of the way early, and someplace warm. Sounded like a plan, so I was on board right away. 

Swimming is where I’m the farthest behind the group, but conveniently it’s all done in a short pool, so I don’t have to keep pace to feel like I’m part of the squad and working hard. Typically the group shoots for about 5k in volume, with lots of long intervals. I swim between 2.5 and 4k in the same amount of time, sticking to sprints with slightly longer rest, keeping in mind that my events are between two and four minutes in length, and an Olympic triathlon takes over an hour and forty minutes to complete.

Different sports entirely, but both require a big aerobic base to bank on for a big season of training, travel and racing. So, this program suits my needs perfectly, as long as I skip a long run or a 100k ride in favour of hitting the gym every now and then.

It’s a little less than four years before the London games of 2012, but I’ve got so much racing to do before then, that competition is hardly on my radar screen. Right now, my focus is finding new and innovative ways to show up to the startline of my races better prepared than ever to produce my absolute best effort.

This three-week camp has been just what I was looking for, a fresh start to another quadrennial, and some damn hard work with a great group of athletes. We’re off for our last run of the camp, 60 minutes of increasing tempo, through the sugarcane fields. Following that, we fly back to Canada late tonight.

I’m tying my shoes on the porch when Simon calls out from inside: “Last session, you all set?”

“Yeah man. Last one, fast one!” My last attempt at wit, since my ability to speak coherently is soon to be in short demand as all available physiological faculties will be focused on keeping pace with these endurophiles.

It’s been an awesome camp, a killer way to kick off the 2009-12 quad, and just more evidence that life is good, but running makes it better.

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Reciprocal Inspiration

Throughout our training camp, I’m continually reminded of something I’ve heard referred to as “reciprocal inspiration.” When I was 18, I tried out for my first Olympic team and failed. Watching those Sydney games from my mom’s basement was tough, kind of like not getting an invitation to my best friend’s birthday party. But I so vividly recall screaming my brains out at my TV when this skinny kid from Kingston made us all aware of what Team Canada was in Australia to do: win medals. When Simon chased down that last guy in the final 400m and tore that finish line down and jumped up and down in elation and glory, I was inspired, but maybe not in the traditional sense. I simply asked myself, “If he can do that, then why the hell can’t I?” The simple answer was that I could, I just needed to be inspired. Thanks Simon, it’s been working.

Eight years after that day in Australia, and a few days before a similar day in Beijing, Simon watched as our incredible Men’s Eights led start to finish, and triumphed. When Adam Kreek, our 6-foot-5 hulking mass of an oarsman from London, Ontario belted out O Canada, Simon was so inspired that he wrote “Sing like Kreek” on his racing bike’s handlebars and set the final 400m of the Olympic men’s triathlon on fire again, providing Canada with arguably the most exciting finish of the Games and a shiny silver medal to add to our team’s 18-medal haul from China. I highly doubt the possibility of any coincidence that on that same day that I watched Simon’s silver medal performance, I went out for my 500m semi-final and comfortably broke the world record.

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