By Steve Sodaro

As I came down from the Bay Area Track Club’s first ever team altitude camp in North Star, Lake Tahoe, I certainly had a lot to reflect on—I realize that I accomplished my three major goals of attending.

Goal number one: to have fun and get to know everyone involved with team. I got to live with almost all of the BATC members and got to run and relax with Phil Wharton, Brooke Wells, and Crosby Freeman, too.

Goal number two: get some great runs and workouts in with my fellow teammates. Training with marathoners made it very easy to get in my mileage, and in only singles! Twelve mile morning runs became the norm…

Goal number three was the part I was most looking forward to: I wanted to really see what the life of a professional athlete was like on a day-to-day basis. And I wanted to incorporate some of the points into my own life in order to improve myself and my running.

The main thing that stood out to me up at 7,000 feet was the nutrition. After living with talented runners for almost three weeks I definitely noticed what they were putting into their bodies, and more importantly, what they were not. The dinners each night were incredible! As I have no flare in the kitchen I the offered to do the dishes and pay my share of the meals if others would cook. As house-appointed head chef, Magdalena Lewy-Boulet, took me up on my offer and I watched her cook each night. By the end I realized I was the one who was making cooking difficult for myself. The food we ate at camp was fresh and simply required adding bits of this or that. She combined things that I would never have thought to put together. It all worked and tasted great!

Prior to camp, I was definitely pretty misinformed on proper running nutrition. When I started running I would eat a meatball sandwich from Togo’s before every cross-country race. I mean, no one told me it was bad for me. Before altitude camp I assumed that because we were doing so many miles it really did not matter what we put into our bodies. After seeing what more experienced athletes were doing I realized I was running to eat instead of eating to run.

As it has only been less than a week since I returned to the rich air of sea level, I haven’t quite changed the way that I eat completely. But I can say that I am much more conscious about what I am putting into my body and how it will affect me in terms of fuel for my run and how I will recover after a workout. The way I see it, if I learned just one thing from camp that will turn me into a better athlete then I am moving in the right direction. Happy running and happy eating!