Back to Training Camp: A Timeless Love

A few days ago, the National Team returned to the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista for a short training camp before the Champions Challenge Tournament in Dublin, Ireland. This post is about exhilaration of my experience returning to training camp after the let-down of the Olympic Games.

I turned the handle, pushed the door aside, and walked through. Bam. It hit me like the rolling in of a late summer storm.  A soft, clean, indistinct smell wafted into my nostrils. It was a familiar yet paralyzing scent – it was the powerful smell of nostalgia, both blurry and timeless.

With eyes that should have been wizened by age and experience, I gazed at the seemingly unchanged room - the large box-cushioned couch against the wall, the wooden tables, the antiquated brown refrigerator, the TV – though new - still hanging in the corner.

My feet dug deep into the dorm carpet. I stood still. My heart leapt. I felt like a kid again, like the kid I’d been long ago, the big eyed, fourteen-year old kid who had missed her first prom, and traded frilly dresses and first dates for hockey gear and a chance to make a junior national team. That kid - the one who’d traveled across the country for the first time equipped with little more than a hockey stick, a pair shoes, and a heart of dreams - came alive again.

I took a deep breath and savored the freshness of the smell. The soft ache of exhilaration pounded in my chest. It would not last.

Nostalgia was such a strange thing – vague yet infinitely powerful. There’d been a great passage of time since that kid walked through the portal of her dreams and into this room at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista. Many things had taken place here – teams had been named, games had been won and lost, practices played, noses broken, curses shouted, tears cried, and laughter shouted. Here in this very place, over the past few years, dreams had been cast into the shadow of reality.

The smell caught me off-guard.  I didn’t expect it - the lightness, and the excitement of a dream re-awakening itself. I walked into the unchanged room for the first day of the first training camp of the new Olympic quad, and I smiled. Timelessness overcame me. I loved the game, and I’d always love the game.