Zen and the Art of Speedskating

Posted on 19 Jan 04:06 pm

New Header & a Question

The new picture on the header of the blog, of my skates cutting through the water, is thanks to the previously mentioned Shadowcatcher LTD photos from the Jack Shea Sprint classic.

I think they have a ton of photos, far more than they posted. If you were one of the skaters at that meet, give them a ring, they might have the ultimate photo of you.

Here is a serious question: When I meet folks who read this blog, I often ask “what do you like the best about this blog? What would you like to see more of?” Usually the answer I get goes something like “I like the variety & unpredictable blend of stuff, keep doing what you are doing”.

The 600-700 unique visitors every day, from all over the world, makes me think this site hit some nerve. “ZATAOSS” (as a friend of mine calls this site) started out a very personal thing, I just wanted to keep my friends & family up to date with what I was doing, and capture my experience leading up to Olympic trials so I could look back on it in 20 years & have a good laugh.

But now it’s something else, a continually evolving thing. Maybe it’s a side effect of the sad fact that the total number of decent speedskating sites written in English is maybe a dozen. A sad number for a beautiful sport that deserves far better.

So for my small part to do better, and be the change, I have just been posting whatever seems fun. Right now video is fun, so I have been playing around with that (it’s worth mentioning a HUGE thanks to the folks who contributed to the tip jar! YOU made it possible!!).

If folks have opinions/ideas, I’d love to hear them. As I sadly scale back my own full-time devotion to skating, due to the hairy-clawed beast of financial necessity, this site will by necessity change, but how it will change remains to be seen.

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

Words from Jim Shea

During the awards for the Jack Shea sprint Classic, Jim Shea, son of double gold medalist Jack Shea, and father of Olympic skeleton gold medalist Jimmy Shea (here’s his cool website) said a few words. Jim Shea himself was an Olympian in 1964 in XC skiing and Nordic combined.

I was taking pictures at first, but his brief speech was so good I switched to video mode and recorded the last 1/3rd of what he said, The audio turned out too quiet for anything other than a transcription, so here it is:

I remember when speedskating was king, they were speedskating before they even had alpine skis.

Speedskating is an old, old sport, both Judy and I have had the opportunity to go to the Olympics and World Championships, and speedskaters are nice people, they really are.

I hope you all continue to have fun speedskating, because it does not matter whether you are speedskating or skiing, or playing hockey, the important thing is to have fun.

Yaknow, we all have our ups and our downs, but if you can walk away from your venue with a smile and you feel good, then that is the important thing,

Continue! & good luck to all of you! and Godspeed.

-Jim Shea

I found his clear and honest words refreshing today, as I have had a hard time finding a good feel for the ice since I got back from the east coast and started rebuilding my fitness base.

In fact, I have felt clumsy, slow, out of sorts, and basically like a big waste of human protoplasm. It happens, it’s part of sports, and in the grander scale of human experience, pretty small potatoes.

Yet stomping out of the oval, grumbling to & at myself, these words and the decades of the Shea family sports experience informing them, helped me to smile, and come back better, and more determined, tomorrow.

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

Posted on 11 Jan 10:19 am

Singing in the Rain, Part II

I am really glad people liked the video my brother and I put together. I somehow can’t stop humming “Singing in the Rain”, even though I am back in Salt Lake and it’s pouring snow.

It’s worth the few minutes it takes on YouTube to watch the original Gene Kelly version. Or if you really must have all your action on ice, check out Kurt Browning’s figure skating remake of it!

It’s awesome to see both of these artist/athletes at the top of their game… Here is a YouTube hint my brother showed me, when you are starting a video, click on the box in the lowest right hand corner of the box to get the full screen view!

I am not exaggerating when I say how wet, foggy & sloppy it was for the first day of the Jack Shea, the video was almost entirely shot during the 15 minutes the sun peeked out. I just was emailed probably the best picture I have ever seen of me skating and it shows the conditions quite well. The wake rushing off my left foot looks like a torpedo near miss.

Thanks Mike and Lori for this shot! They are photographers who run Shadowcatcher LTD, and have images of many of the athletes racing. They are available for hire for speedskating meet photography on the east coast. They are good folks and I wish them luck.

Mike raced speedskates on the lake Placid track in 1966-67 when it was just a high school running track, and has recently returned to the sport. Here is Mike in the mid-60’s, and then this past weekend.

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

Results from Day 3

Here is the Pettit ice center at sunrise this past Wednesday morning. Very pretty. Click on it for a bigger version (these are true colors too, no photoshopping).

However fast times often require different weather conditions (low air pressure). This morning it was pouring rain & inside it was quite fast. Over 90% of the skaters racing today skated at least 1 Pettit Center PB. Unfortunately I was not one of them.

Here are the results.

Women’s 500m

Image to the right is Chris Witty, at her first major competiton in quite some time. She’s Back!!!

1. Elli Ochowicz 39.50
2. Christine Witty 40.00
3. Jessica Smith 40.57
4. Lana Gehring 41.11
5. Maria Lamb 41.14
6. Rebekah Bradford 41.39
7. Becky Lang 41.95
8. Catherine Raney 41.98
9. Mia Manganello 42.03
10. Anna Ringsred 42.19
11. Ashlee Barnett 42.37
12. Leah Lambert 43.44
13. Netanya Mintz 43.74
14. April Medley 44.29
15. Anne Bruckner 45.38

Men’s 500m

1. Tucker Fredricks 35.48
2. Kip Carpenter 35.74
3. Shani Davis 36.31
4. Christopher Needham 36.53
5. Donald Stewart 36.60
6. Michael Blumel 36.85
7. James (Clay) Cholewinski 36.96
8. Tyler Goff 36.99
9. Anthony Lobello, Jr. 37.06
10. Matthew Shanahan 37.40
11. Andrew Love 37.51
12. Brent Aussprung. 37.65
13. Matthew Plummer 37.80
14. Nathaniel DeFranco 38.38
15. Mitchell Whitmore 38.43
16. Ronald Macky 38.46
17. Matthew Hickson 38.57
18. Michael Stein-Stewart 38.66
19. Joseph Parrella 38.73
20. Daniel Frederick 38.76
21. Matthew Hotchkiss 38.83
22. Miles Ringsred 39.03
23. Daniel Beck 39.23
24. Alex Ochowicz 39.58

Women’s 1000m

1. Elli Ochowicz 1:19.01
2. Christine Witty 1:19.86
3. Catherine Raney 1:20.10
4. Maria Lamb 1:21.12
5. Mia Manganello 1:21.54
6. Jessica Smith 1:21.74
7. Lana Gehring 1:22.33
8. Rebekah Bradford 1:22.64
8. Anna Ringsred 1:22.64
10. Ashlee Barnett 1:23.65
11. Becky Lang 1:23.97
12. Leah Lambert 1:25.16
13. Netanya Mintz 1:25.70
14. April Medley 1:28.18
15. Anne Bruckner 1:29.75

Men’s 1000m

this image is Shani & Kip, first 200m, then 825m into an incredible 1000m

1. Shani Davis 1:09.76
2. Kip Carpenter 1:10.29
3. Christopher Needham 1:11.35
4. Tucker Fredricks 1:12.07
5. Michael Blumel 1:12.36
6. Donald Stewart 1:12.75
7. Matthew Plummer 1:13.01
8. James (Clay) Cholewinski 1:13.19
9. Tyler Goff 1:13.47
10. Charles Leveille 1:13.69
11. Ronald Macky 1:13.99
12. Anthony Lobello, Jr. 1:14.00
13. Brent Aussprung. 1:14.15
14. Michael Stein-Stewart 1:14.27
15. Mitchell Whitmore 1:15.18
16. Matthew Shanahan 1:15.21
17. Nathaniel DeFranco 1:15.27
18. Liam Ortega 1:15.36
19. Daniel Frederick 1:15.49
20. Daniel Beck 1:16.26
21. Andrew Love 1:16.32
22. Miles Ringsred 1:16.79
23. Alex Ochowicz 1:17.45
24. Joseph Parrella 1:17.84
25. Matthew Hickson 1:18.37

Thanks go out to Ray Medley, I gave him my camera, and he shot the images you see here.

On a personal note, I am truly unhappy with both of my times. I am finding it hard to hit my normal top speed with this different bend & rocker. I’m just not dialed in, and racing with athletes of this caliber, you need perfection in everything. I don’t want to blame my blades, because skates don’t skate themselves, but crap!!!!!!!!

Surveying the 1000m times, fellow 35 year old Danny Frederick said “Wow, these kids are fast.” I agree.

Also worth noting in the results is Anthony Lobello, this Tornio Short Track Olympian, (and inline junior world champ) has been training on the long track for just a few weeks! Whoa!

p.s. welcome to all the Dutch speedskating fans from http://www.schaatsforum.nl
188 of you have visited this site in the last, ummm, about 16 hours!!!

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

Posted on 10 Dec 03:19 pm

Storytellers & Rest

Ohnozone.net and Peter’s inline racing webpage are both producing FANTASTIC coverage of the recent short track world cups in Canada. I love how both of these sites give the overwhelming impression that athletes are PEOPLE, who try incredibly hard, but who are human and crash, get DQ-ed, etc. Sometimes losing, failure, and challenges make success all the sweeter (even simple success vs yourself, the measure that matters the most when you look in the mirror).

Check out this video by Jordan Malone, that he made & posted on Youtube, and look at it with the fact in mind that he just won his first world cup individual medal this weekend!

I have met Jordan once, during North American short track champs in march of 2006. He came across as a humble and hardworking guy, and his video (and what happened to him one month before Olympic trials & how he has persevered) has moved me.

Reading Ohnozone, it makes me wonder if this website could be a true news website? There is a need for it on the long track-side of the sport. However, I am still actively competing & training, and that sucks most of the energy out of me.

So I think the best I can do, for now, is to continue being a storyteller who relates snippets of skate culture & training info when I see it.

Like this particular example of training super-hard and then resting to achieve a top performance vs yourself:

One of my training buddies, Clay Cholewinski, has worked really hard all year. Recently he developed an evil blister on his ankle, missed a week of ice time as it healed, then over thanksgiving he missed some more time.

He came back to the ice really rested; & after a week of dialing his technique back in, he has been ABSOLUTELY FLYING & skating PB after PB. On the first day of the America’s cup, he beat me by .01 in the 500m (and by multiple seconds in the 1000). On day 2, we were paired together for the 500, and had one of the most fun races I have done in a long time. I was quicker for the first 75 meters, and from then on I could hear his clap blades steadily getting closer & closer as we roared around the track.

Here are the two of us in the final corner.

I like the reflection of him in the ice, and how level his shoulders and hips are compared to my tipped ones. Another thing you can see is how close I am to the blocks, my shadow literally hanging over them. That’s tricky to do at top speed, but it makes the distance one skates shorter, and times faster.

Thanks to Don Nelson for the photos (& my new blog masthead is a selection from this excellent image he took of me crawling through the final corner of a 1000m, ouch!)

The reason I bring up rest is that US national championships are now 2 weeks away. Through the training year, objectives change. Summer is often 5+ hours a day. Now the goal is to do very little, on and off the ice in under an hour.

Rest is sometimes the hardest lesson for motivated athletes to learn, and structured rest is often the biggest change made when people go from self-trained to professionally coached. Maybe I should look into developing a week long debilitating blister! Just kidding… Clay peaked early because of his, and it will be interesting to see how long he can hold his peak.

It’s somehow karmically odd that sprinters need more rest than endurance athletes. 3-5 weeks is the usual for sprinters to peak, vs 2-ish for most folks like triathletes or allaround speedskaters.

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

Winter in half the USA

It was 8 degrees in Salt Lake this morning; Brrrrr! Both my dog Lilly and local sledding hill were loving it.

However the east coast is unseasonably warm right now. THE LAKE PLACID OVAL OPENING IS ON HOLD! I will be updating the Dimon Sports website with the latest as news comes in.

Check out this fascinating USA weather map -try the mouseovers just below the national map, you can see temperatures sloshing about, the east coast looks very warm. My parents in Vermont say it is “almost scary warm”.

XC & Downhill Skiers, Speedskaters waiting for outdoor ice, and other winter enthusiasts are not happy in this age of global warming.

I must admit that out of some flavor of “guilty liberal duty”, I went to see the Al Gore film, An Inconvenient Truth. I am glad I went. It shows absolutely terrifying scientific projections that have nothing to do with any political philosophy; Global warming is really a moral/survival issue. Yeeeeoww! Go see it, just go, really….

Of course does this have anything to do with speedskating in an era of indoor rinks? I would argue yes, it does.

Speedskating (and skating in general) started on lakes, rivers, canals & ponds. If natural ice slowly dwindles, then the roots of this sport are weaker (and much of lowland China, Manhattan, San Francisco, Florida, and Holland will be under FEET of water, that’s mildly important too).

Even from my own small sample of one, I took my first “clap blade” enabled steps on a pond in December of 2001, and a few months later took this picture during a 100k speedskating race.

It was this weekend I met my longtime friend Carla, who is wearing her infamous “blue mittens of doom” in this photo. Many skaters have felt these fleecey paws skimming their nose as they try to draft her.

So yeah, no natural ice, my life is different & I might never have met a close friend. They even had to cancel ice Marathon Nationals last year. It got too warm, the track was a foot deep in slush.

How many speedskaters from Michigan got their start in the sport, or met longtime friends on the Lake Petoskey natural ice track? Speedskaters in Butte rely on cold weather, and anywhere people shovel a track out from snow covered ice, you need sustained cold.

The list goes on & on, and increases unimaginably when you add the joy that is pond hockey to this consideration (there even is a huge pond hockey national champs, cool…)

Spring, summer, & fall sports have their seasons, however we could see the slow disappearance of many winter sports in our lifetimes. Sad…

For the first time I will try importing an amazing video I saw YouTube (if it screws up your browser/computer, let me know, here is a direct link to it on youtube).

I have spoken to several people who have related awestruck stories about skating canals winding through cities or the countryside in Holland. It’s on my “list of stuff to do before I die”. This is an amazing video of exactly what I imagine it to be like.

There is a sound, and a freedom to the easy speed of good natural ice. I can feel it here. Also find out what a “wak” and “klunen” is. Hey Ernie in the Netherlands, thanks for this video!!!!!!!

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

Posted on 29 Nov 04:51 pm

Gratitude Journal

A close friend of mine from college has a conventional blog, and in addition, she has her gratitude journal, a simple concept I really like, and it fits into what I am feeling right now.

The kindness of the many good folks who have contributed to my tip jar has lifted my spirits in a way that leaves me at a loss for words…

The generosity of the skate tribe (and others) is deeply moving. I will be able to pay my bandwidth bill! as well as site hosting for the year and a used ibook battery on ebay!

You all are powering this blog, literally, to continue on. There are many names now in my own inner “Gratitude Journal”.

I will work my heart out to return your kindness.

In other news:

Lisa Floshank-Windham has started a central informational web page for folks interested in the marathon national championships. I really like this event, and skated it in 2002. I trained like an allarounder-marathoner for my first 3 years on ice. I still suck at marathons, but they are wonderful fun.
The Lake Placid outdoor oval is scheduled to open this weekend. I will be checking out this webcam hoping to see beautiful ice on Saturday.
The US national all-around team has returned from Europe & 3 world cup races. I have a couple of interviews with them coming up.

Picture of the day, on the left, the final turn from an awkward 500m I skated on November 11th, check out the HORRIBLE back curve, left leg is pushing backwards too… This image is painful to look at.

On the right, practice today, traveling at a similar velocity, I’ve been working obsessively on rounding the back & relaxing my shoulders…

It’s the little things, over and over, drilled into the head & legs & back & soul until the body knows no other way to do it than the right way. That is the only way to play this game of “cool” perfection.

Of course skating technique will always be far from perfect, the right shin is too straight up and down & a zillion other little things.. sigh, I guess I will just have to work on it for a lifetime.

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

Important! Video Tip Jar

I always enjoy posting quality video & images of this sport we all love so much, like the recent Derek Parra Slideboard video.

In about a week, it’s been watched almost a THOUSAND times. From the Hyper wheels message board, to mentions on Japanese inline websites, to Speedskate Sweden, folks are pouring in to watch.

Awesome!!

However, this video (and others, like the Andy Newell XC skiing video, that over 600+ XC skiers watched) blew my yearly bandwidth allocation to pieces in a matter of days…. My site actually went down for an afternoon because of it.

I had no alternative; I had to immediately shell out $254.44 to pay for more juice/bandwidth just to get the site running again. I already pay around $100 a year for hosting and the hipcast video service I sometimes use, and that is ok, I’ll do that out of love for the sport.

But this last one hurt, especially as my iBook laptop battery also died a few days ago, ($120 to replace) and I fear my laptop itself is running like a car missing a few sparkplugs (I do drive my “car” really hard!)

Sure, I could use YouTube for free video, I watch a lot of speedskating stuff on YouTube, and most of it is frustrating to watch, as high quality video is VERY IMPORTANT for watching skating, and I want to do more of it.

Derek informally said that he would be interested in doing some more video like what I just published. That would be great! Yet I simply cannot afford the bandwidth to do his talents justice.

So like any musician playing in a public place, I am putting out a tip jar, (clicking on it sends you to paypal), to help pay for the bandwidth. It’s super-easy to use…

Musicians play because they love to play, not for the tips; I do this website because I fundamentally love this intersection in my life between writing, skating and the good folks I am blessed to know through this sport.

So folks, if enough of you can spare a dollar or two, I will do my best to reciprocate with more exceptional video & skating vibe/culture/news.

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Filed under: Audio/Video, from the coffee shop

Posted on 17 Nov 05:53 pm

Parra Slideboard Video

US speedskating has just hired Olympic Gold/Silver medalist & world record holder Derek Parra to be an Inline-to-ice transition coach. He will be fantastic as a coach, as he is quite gifted in his understanding of skating mechanics.

Yesterday, he was at the Oval working on slideboard technique with North Carolina based inliner Amber Yrbor. They had already been working hard on the slideboard for over an hour when I walked over, camera in hand.

You have two options on how to view this, click here to view a 49 MB QUICKTIME FILE

It’s worth viewing if you have a fast connection… Derek has tremendous physical skills from his lifetime of hard work, so he can demonstrate exactly the technique he wants to develop in skaters he is coaching. This video shows some smoooooth slideboarding.

Option 2 is youtube. Click the play button to get it running.

If you watch all 8 1/2 minutes of this video, at the end Derek talks about what skaters he technically emulated when he was competing, and why.

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Filed under: Audio/Video, from the coffee shop

Turkey or Feet?

The kevlar-shrouded molds of my feet are now bagged up like thanksgiving turkey, with mysterious pipes connected to them, and the whole contraption is being baked in an oven…

Even my usually active imagination is failing to find descriptives for this weird scene.