Lake Placid, NY

Sorry it took me a bit to post, my time at the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center was quite busy. We flew into Burlington, VT and drove down to Lake Placid, New York. It should've only taken us 2 hours, but since it was storming out and night time (and I was driving), we took a couple of wrong turns and it ended up taking closer to 3 hours. We arrived at the Training Center some where around midnight.

We started off with a breakfast meeting on Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. and ended with dinner last night. It was a full day yesterday, but we got a lot accomplished. After dinner last night, we caught the tail end of some practice "slides" by the National skeleton team. This track is used by bobsled, skeleton, and luge. The picture is of a skeleton athlete on a start.

Bobsled is the big sled where 2 or 4 person teams sit in it to go down the run. Skeleton is a single-person sled where the athlete takes a running start then jumps on the sled to go down the track on his/her stomach head first. Luge is a one or two person sled where the athlete(s) takes off running then jumps on the sled to go down the track on their back, feet first.

The turns are pretty tight and the athletes sustain forces up to 4 g (acceleration due to gravity). This track is pretty cool to see lit up at night. From a distance it looks like a huge lighted snack on the hill! It's the track that was used for the 1980 Winter Olympics held in Lake Placid (Lake Placid also hosted the 1932 Winter Olympics). Most modern tracks are between 1200-1300 meters, but I'm not sure exactly how long this one is.

Sorry I don't have better pictures from Lake Placid. I had to catch a shuttle for the 2 hour ride to the Albany airport where I rented a car. I drove 3 hours down to Ithaka where I'm visiting my friend Bridie for the next few days who is attending Cornell University. It's still raining pretty steady here, but hopefully I'll have more, and better, pictures to post after a full day in Ithaca.