surrounded by australian (olympic) giants.

Today we woke up at the ungodly hour of 5 am in order to eat some breakfast before catching our train to Canberra. After finishing the quietest breakfast our group has ever experienced, we headed to Central Station on a coach bus and boarded our passenger car. Fortunately, we had the entire car to ourselves so I was able to sprawl over two seats and sleep most of the five hours to Canberra. I woke up a little before we got there and was able to see a small group of kangaroos chilling on nearby train tracks!  When we got off the train, I immediately felt the cold and knew that from now on we would be experiencing real winter weather. In Canberra, we are staying at the Australian Institute of Sport, which is about a 15 min drive from the train station. On the drive there, our bus driver decided to tell us some history about Canberra. Originally, there was a slight dispute between Melbourne and Sydney over where the capital city of Australia would be. So in 1908, it was decided to build a whole new city, which was finally established in 1913 and named Canberra. The name Canberra was chosen because it was believed to derive from an Aboriginal word meaning “meeting place.” As it turns out, recent evidence now shows that Canberra actually means “a woman’s cleavage.” Oh classic, Australia.

Upon arriving at the AIS, we had lunch in the dining hall. Even though everyone has warned us that there is not much to do in Canberra and that we will be bored out of our minds, I think we are all looking forward to have our food provided and not having to pay about $30 per meal per day. For being cooked in bulk, the food is actually pretty good and there are lots of vegan options for me (including tofu!). Walking around the dining hall also makes me feel extremely short because I am pretty sure everyone there is taller than 6 ft (or 2 meters). For those of you that may not know, the AIS is Australia’s main Olympic Training Center (yes, that means that I will be living with Australian Olympic athletes for the next week). After their poor performance in the 1976 Olympics (only received 5 medals total), the government wanted to revamp their entire sports training program and established the AIS in 1981. Currently, there are about 25 different sports in about 35 different programs. At the peak training times (normally before the Olympics), there are up to 200 scholarship athletes living on campus. Now, since the Olympics have just wrapped up less than a year ago, it is their slowest time and they have about 120-140 scholarship athletes, but they can have up to 700 scholarship athletes spread out among their other training facilities. Athletes as young as 15 and disabled athletes participating in the Paralympics can stay here, but it is required for all scholarship athletes to either study or to have a job. Not all teams that train here are Olympic sports—such as netball, cricket, softball, footy, and squash—but they all tend to be the most elite level of that sport or an elite development program to play at the elite level (which sometimes means leaving the country). Since Canberra is landlocked, a lot of other sports, including water sports, have training facilities elsewhere. One aspect that I really thought to be interesting was the AIS’ focus on sports science and sports medicine. A major part of their campus is dedicated to research to improve athletic performance; whether that be in the clothing or technology that they use or in new training techniques.

After lunch, we went on a tour of the AIS. Our guide was a netball player named Lauren. She is 20 years old and has been playing netball for 12 years. Lauren first took us to Sportex, a large room on the second floor of the visitors’ center. They called it an active classroom because it was a mini museum about AIS athletes participating in the Olympics and other elite competition, with interactive exhibits. For example,  you could try your hand at wheelchair basketball, rock climbing, simulated skeleton racing, alpine skiing, snowboarding, soccer, cycling, cricket, and footy or you could measure your balance, standing long jump, reaction time or arm wrestling strength. From there, Lauren gave us a tour of the rest of the facilities including basketball, netball, volleyball, soccer, gymnastics, swimming, and strength and conditioning.

When the tour was finished, it was time for me to do some exploring of my own so I went on a nice long run off campus. I found a bike trail and just followed it until it ended and I then turned into a residential area. I have discovered that one of my favorite things about visiting new places is looking at the architecture of their buildings and their houses. Homes in Canberra have a more modern and contemporary appearance than the ones we had seen in Lennox Head. They also tended to be multiple stories, as opposed to only one as most in Lennox Head were. Once the sun set, I decided it would be a good time to turn around so that I wouldn’t be running in the dark. I surprisingly was able to find my way back even after all of the turns that I took—quite the achievement for me since I cannot use the GPS on my phone here! After a large dinner (have to take advantage of free food while I can), I went straight to bed to try to catch up on all of my missed sleep from Sydney (and from the looks of it, it will not be too difficult to do here especially since we all finally have our own rooms).