Falls Creek is well on the way to international recognition after a fantastic opening season of the newly formed National Altitude Training Centre. The rest of the world is now discovering what the Australian athletic community has known for years – that training at Falls Creek can and does produce world class results.
Attendees this year included devotees and legends; juniors and masters; runners, rowers, triathletes and cyclists; athletes from all over Australia, from Korea, Austria, America, England, Ireland… Some came to train, some came to coach, and some came just for the atmosphere, but all will remember this season as one blessed with beautiful weather and camaraderie, and will hopefully be back next year for more of the same.
A large group of junior rowers and their coaches and support staff from Brisbane Grammar got the ball rolling in November. Their ten day block of hard training took full advantage of the deserted lake and the superb mountain biking and running trails intersecting the hills around Falls Creek. After adjusting their outboard motors to work properly at an altitude of just on one-mile, the coaches put the rowers through some solid dawn workouts on Rocky Valley Dam, between other sessions, often training up to six hours a day. Not surprisingly, the boys were very quiet in the evenings!
A group of Head Coach of the NATC Nic Bideau’s runners also put in an early-season training block in November. Benita Johnson was here, with Collis Birmingham. Guenther Weidlinger came over from Austria to train in Falls Creek in the build-up to the Great Australian Run, as did Bobby Curtis, from Louisville, Kentucky. Bobby proclaimed that Falls Creek is “The best place in the world to trainâ€, and should be happy with his sixth place finish in the GAR in one of the strongest fields ever assembled in this country. Collis put in a great run to finish third, with Guenther home in fifth place. Benita also ran fifth.
In mid-December the NATC was thrilled to greet Jan Rehula, bronze medalist in the Sydney Olympic triathlon and coach of the Korean National triathlon team. He brought the team out to experience Falls Creek for the first time, and has vowed to be back after thoroughly enjoying his time here. The sight of the Koreans roaring down the hill to Mt Beauty on their bikes or swimming across Rocky Valley Dam became a familiar one over their five week visit.
Boxing Day saw the arrival of the masses and Falls Creek became the athletic hub of Australia; a veritable summit of aerobic activity. Many were old hands at the game, and even more were discovering why they will one day be the same.
Our Program Director Steve Moneghetti reveled, as always, in the presence of like-minded people. Everyone knows Mona and, it seems, Mona knows everybody. The mid-afternoon hot chocolate sessions at Milch Café were popular enough to make finding a seat a form of cross training, with Mona hosting the (unofficial) Board of Australian Running. People like Chris Wardlaw, Marty Dent, Kate Smythe, Lisa Dick, Scott Westcott, Collis Birmingham (on his second trip for the summer) and Youcef Abdi jostled for the recliners in front of the fireplace.
Their efforts were often foiled by fast moving youngsters, with the usual strong contingent from Tim O’Shaughnessy’s AIS junior squad, and a who’s who of young guns (Chloe Tighe, Lara Tamsett, Ryan Gregson, Jeff Riseley…) displaying admirable balance in traversing the sea of furniture and extended legs while toting steaming mugs.
The new and exclusive Elite Gym proved a popular venue for the weight training and core-strength workouts favored by many athletes these days, with up to twenty at a time putting in the hard yards with the medicine balls and punching bag, while later in the day that vital piece of cross-training equipment, the table-tennis table, took a hammering. If you ever wanted to stir up Collis Birmingham (and why would you want to do that?), mention his appalling track record at table tennis, after being whooped by Garry Henry with regularity bordering on the monotonous.
Triathletes from Jonathan Hall’s VIS squad put in timely blocks at the NATC in December and January before producing the goods at various meets. At the Australian Youth Olympic Festival, Holly Aitken (Individual and Team Gold), Jamie Huggett (Team Silver), and Meg Russell (Team Silver) all excelled themselves. Jamie and Holly followed that up with a win each at the World Championship Selection Trials, and will represent Australia at the ITU Triathlon World Championships on the Gold Coast in September, 2009.
Erin Densham is also in great form. Her second place at the Cross Country Selection Trials made a no-brainer of her selection to represent her country in Jordan in late March, 2009. She also won the Gatorade Triathlon (round 5) held in Elwood recently. Jono Hall is a great believer in the benefits of altitude training, and, with evidence like this to back it up, will continue to win arguments on this subject.
The Inaugural NATC New Years Eve Triathlon was held at Milch café. It’s possible that Jono had his eye on this prize as well, until he was informed that the three disciplines at stake were sports trivia, netball hoop-shooting, and table tennis, with a Grand Final match of Twister between the two top teams (does that make it a quadrathlon?). Teams of two combined to test their skills at these obscure activities, and some undiscovered talent came to the surface (I said some, not lots of) during the ‘heated’ competition. In fact, competition was so lame you might have thought you were attending some ‘introduction to sports’ carnival, if not for the instantly recognizable faces of the participants. I still suspect some were not even trying, but were only in it for the laughs.
At the risk of getting myself into big trouble, and after leaving a message for our under-worked lawyers, I can tell you this…
Ian ‘Skippy’ Hatfield won’t be paying for his ticket next year. We will be paying Ian to come along, even though he did rather well by taking out (with his lovely wife Christine) the triathlon, and the two Burton snowboard jackets first prize. No, it was the celebratory headstand that Ian pulled for the entertainment of the people, in the middle of the restaurant floor, that sealed his new status as Life Of The Party. Good on you Skippy!
Chris Wardlaw hit the dance floor later in the evening, with a dozen other naturally exuberant folk, to an album of old Bob Dylan tunes. Here comes the story of the hurricane, indeed!
The team from Adidas mysteriously disappeared for the night, while a group of ring-ins of exactly the same number appeared in a startling array of costumes. Elvis is, apparently, alive and well in Falls Creek, and seems to have cut down on the hamburgers and grown a dodgy moustache. This rowdy bunch treated the triathletes to a spontaneous and raucous conga-line parade through the table tennis arena, while blowing enthusiastically on those whistle type things that unravel like a chameleons tongue, and thoroughly disrupted the proceedings. Nicely done folks! I must ask Jane Miles and Kate Smythe if they know how to get in touch with this mob, so we can get Ian involved in next years conga line.
After the judges had crunched the numbers, it turned out that the Twister Grand Final pitted Youcef Abdi and his team mate Melissa Petzke against Ian and Christine Hatfield. Youcef and Mel went out conservatively, letting team Hatfield lead through the early stages. Some cynical observers seemed to think Youcef was saving himself for some slightly more important event, and that his heart was not really in it. In fact, when he announced “I’m not moving, I’m comfortable†upon hearing a ‘right hand, blue dot’ call, he gave these suspicions some credence, though it was a ‘left foot, yellow dot’ call that did him in.
I can’t safely say much more. The lawyers are still out fishing, and I need to get this to press…
A few days later the all time attendance record for a Falls Creek pack run was set at an amazing one hundred and sixty runners, an increase of more than forty, and solid confirmation that this was the place to be.
In January, we had the Malvern Harriers in town for a long weekend, as Jan and the Koreans moved on and the bulk of the athletes reluctantly headed back to the real world. Collis, Andrew Baddeley and Dave Campbell are here at the moment, in late February, and Craig Mottram is nursing his way back from Achilles trouble with some mountain biking, road cycling, and gentle running on his old stomping ground. Buster recently stunned a group of cyclists from Albury by riding the thirty-one kilometers (almost entirely uphill) between Mt Beauty and Falls Creek in seventy one minutes.
The cycling fraternity is champing at the bit to get out on Bogong High Plains Road after road sealing works are completed. All going to plan, the full thirty eight kilometer stretch should be ready before winter, 2009, and the NATC is already fielding enquiries about next summer.
Falls Creek currently has, for me, that Sunday afternoon feel, like the weekend is over but some great memories have been made. As new and old friends disperse to various corners of the country and globe, I’m looking forward to next summer, to seeing these friends achieve bigger and better things, and to helping in any way we at the NATC can.
Greg Simpson
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