The Road to Athens - Lee Fawcett
SubscribeLee Fawcett 29 March 2001
Lee Fawcett, a member of Great Britain’s wheelchair basketball team, joins our regular Road to Athens series. Each week an athlete hoping to make an impression on the next Olympic or Paralympic Games in Athens in 2004 gives us an insight into their training and preparation.
AT THE end of February I travelled to Lilleshall for the second Great Britain training camp of the year. Held over three days, the camp marked an increase in the level and intensity of our training.
On one of the days we got up at 5.45am, pushed approximately two miles uphill in the snow, trained for an hour in the gym - and then had breakfast! We then trained from 10am–12.15pm, had lunch, and trained again from 2.15-5.30pm. On the night we took over two hundred shots.
With my club season coming to an end and international requirements beginning to increase it’s sometimes hard to adjust - my training has to fit in around my life because I have a three-year-old who I take to nursery every morning.
Normally I fit in two hours on court in the morning or I will go to the gym, and vice versa in the afternoon. I have club sessions two evenings a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On these days I do some road work and recently I have also been using Tanni Grey-Thompson’s treadmill which is brilliant. At weekends we have club games - my team, Teesside Lions, have a good chance of finishing 2nd in Division 1 – next season I hope to be playing in the Premier Division.
EARLY IN March I travelled to Alsager with my Lions and Great Britain team mate Terry Bywater for fitness testing. Vicky Tolfrey - our team manager and sports science officer - supervises the testing.
The test is performed on wheelchair rollers and there are three stages: interval pushing for three minutes, increasing the power each time we do five of them; the VO2 test where you push for ten minutes, increasing the power every two minutes, with the last minute going flat out; finally the speed endurance test where we do ten ten-second sprints with thirty seconds rest between each one - the power output is recorded.
I feel I performed quite well in the test, but not as well as I wanted. With my training now on the increase I’m confident there’ll be an improvement next time.
