A Day in the Life
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By Caitlin Cahow
Special to Page 2
Editor's note: Caitlin Cahow plays defense on the U.S.
women's national ice hockey team. A Harvard graduate, she won a
bronze medal in the 2006 Olympics and scored two goals as the U.S.
defeated Canada 4-1 to win the 2009 women's world championships in
April. We asked her to tell us about a typical offseason day.
While the rest of the world rejoices the warm weather brought
about by summer, we hockey players find ourselves at a loss. The
Stanley Cup playoffs now a recent memory, we shuttle in and out of
ice rinks in short sleeves and flip-flops. As if it weren't enough
that we are the pastiest folks on the beach, hockey conditioning is
about as fickle as bootlegged cable. Total atrophy begins about 45
minutes after the final buzzer, so the offseason becomes a mad dash
of training fervor, which is fine since, realistically, we don't
have that much else going on. Unlike Danica Patrick, I am not being
flooded with modeling invites. Something about 30 pounds of
androgynous equipment and a face mask seems to turn off
advertisers.
In any event, the challenge is that we are left mostly to our own
devices in the summer, a dangerous prospect for 25 über-Type-A
women. What comes to pass is one of the marvels of modern sport.
Summer training takes on the man (or, in this case, woman) versus
automation paradigm, like a training montage from "Rocky IV." The
U.S. women's national hockey team trains together for two periods
over the summer, the first during a Colorado fitness evaluation
camp. Here, we spend most of our time in the lab at the Olympic
training center, plugged into machines that tell us more than we
could ever want to know about our physiology. Doctors in white
coats look on stoically, like Drago's team of Soviet biophysicists.
Performance is tracked to the micrometer. We are weighed, pinched,
prodded and poked like USDA Prime beef, though no steroids or
hormones here, folks.
The numbers crunched, the tests resolved, we head home to wallow
in anonymity through creative though generally unorthodox training
methods to boost our game. This would be the Rocky Balboa segment
of our training. Here is an average day, with an '80s soundtrack to
go along:
Click here to access complete article via the
ESPN.com Web site.
