Zen and the Art of Speedskating

A cool photo of one of the nicest 400m ovals there is. The Eisstadion Inzell, in Germany.

I like how the skaters are dissolving into the mist, and how the stands flow into the mountains. This is from the cool Dutch website coenwesselman.nl/, and yes, I asked him before using this picture.

Don’t speak Dutch? Just babel fish it.

Skating long track feels like a fuzzy, far off memory. A hazy, mythic place full of people who can do puma-like things at astonishing velocity.

On my 3rd cup of coffee, with a massive pile of work to do. I look across the field of laptops in front of me, at my “office” (the coffee shop down the hill from my house).

I’m surrounded by other Technomads & graduate students, people whose location really is their laptops; the mobile internet is a wonderful thing.

I am trying to remember exactly what skating fast on ice feels like, and failing. I’ve become an immobile coffee sucking plugged in helpless extension of my laptop.

I just know that I am looking forward again to that glide, that sound, the pressure of turns & the joy of slingshoting into perfect straightaways.

With that, I think my off season is over…. .

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

I took this picture of Bruce Kohen recently, in his left hand are my current pair of boots, in his right is a set of inline boots with titanium mounting blocks & extra glitter.

I’ve been calling my boots the “Darth Kroners” as I asked Bruce to make something Darth Vader would wear, and the circle in the heel is a “lucky” Norwegian Kroner I found on the ground outside the Utah oval.

Bruce says his neighbors is Missouri often call him the “local mad scientist”, and he is certainly eccentric.

But I’m eccentric in my own way as well, so I think being a true individual is a good thing. It’s not an “easy” thing to be, but it makes life more interesting.

For the carbon fiber in his boots, Bruce uses the same military grade stuff they put in the Stealth Fighter (really!), for the glitter, he ground up a 500 pound vintage disco ball (not really, but whatever he uses, it’s cool looking).

I seem to have started a series of pictures, of faces & skates… Equipment matters, but the skater who powers it matters more. It all started with this picture.

It’s the “off season”, and I thought that I might take an “off-season” as well with the blog, but good stuff keeps coming in!!! stay tuned…

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

I caught up with Tucker Fredricks during the Champions Challenge, and he took the time to give me the “inside look” of what he was thinking and experiencing during that historic race.

This is the same video I published earlier with Ryan Shimabukuro’s comments on it.

Tucker has had an incredible year, he was the 500m world cup champion, and finished 3rd at world single distance champs.

There are all sorts of fascinating tidbits in this video. For example, Tucker was probably the possibly the first person in the building to realize that Kang–Seok Lee was about to skate the world record!!!

Click here for the high-quality QuickTime, or below for the YouTube. Enjoy.

I am sitting here in my favorite coffee shop, working on numerous client & skate projects. I dislocated a small bone on the outside of my left foot stumbling off the stands during world championships (ask Keith or Irene Postma how much I howled when it happened).

In a hard skate boot, skating was only mildly uncomfortable, so I just toughed it out for the final race of the year.

But since my 10k, walking hurts a lot, and it’s just not healing well. The past few mornings have been extremely painful.

I ended last season with ankle pain that took a full month to heal. So I am thinking “poor ol me & my gimpy feet”.

However, next to me in the coffee shop, I overhear a man in aqua-blue medical scrubs speaking with a woman, obviously someone he knows from his hospital job..

They are talking about chemotherapy, radiation, and he is asking her how she is doing, how she feels this morning.

She very thin, she is wearing a University of Utah baseball cap, and I realize she has no hair under the cap.

My foot suddenly hurts a lot less, because it will heal.

The wonderful thing about health is when we USE it, APPRICIATE IT, & CHERISH IT.

I think that is why, when we see athletes & artists do extraordinary things, like the races on this video, we celebrate & recognize them.

They are examples of perfect health in motion, of the complete application of focused mind & prepared body. They are excellence & achievement that we share emotionally when we watch, and what we hope to experience in our own lives & unique personal ways, for ourselves.

These reasons, are also why Lance Armstrong’s book (and the man himself) “It’s not about the bike” is so extraordinary. He has been to both poles of experience, and tells about it.

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Filed under: RACE DAY, Audio/Video, from the coffee shop

I left a comment on Andrew Hegarty’s blog recently, my comment was about writing.

And it was the clearest thing I have written in this past week. I’m still 20% sick, and sleeping as soundly as Dixie cup in a windstorm… yuck, being sick has sucked the creativity right out of me.

I did shoot some video of the Wasatch speedskating club short track races, & they came out great. Short track is wonderful fun to watch & I have tons of respect for that physics defying sport.

Here is Anthony & Matt, traveling warp 9. The thought that their entire bodyweight, multiplied by several G-forces, rests on only an inch of blade hooked into the ice is pretty cool.

I am working on matching some video selections to a good song that says “short track.” any suggestions from the assembled folks would be appreciated.

Also I did shoot this image of the moon over the edge of my house. I have never seen a ring this huge around the moon. Motion of the camera blurred the crystal clarity a bit, the sky was a jet black circle piercing the fog, and the moon looked like Sauron’s relentless eye searching across Middle Earth, or… ummm, Salt Lake.…

Maybe this counts for creativity….. Click on the moon for a desktop-friendly version.

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

My morning coffee usually creates encouraging vibes, however check out what the napkin I picked up with my coffee on the way to Sunday’s races said:

The napkin was correct, it was brutally cold & windy too, so cold that blades felt “sticky” on the ice. You can see results from this meet at http://www.midwayspeedskating.org (here is the direct link to the .pdf file of the results)

Nationals age-class championships are a wild ride. Packstyle has a completely different & gut-wrenching immediacy compared to the stopwatch driven purity of a metric meet.

Tactics, close racing, and split second decisions combine to make racing intense, fun, and like a short track meet but with less chance of serious injury (just kidding).

Many of the categories, including the one I raced in, were undecided until the final meters of the final race (and the masters 40-49 was a dead-heat photo finish, no one knew who was national champ until they called out Matt Trimble’s name at the medal ceremony an hour after the race).

I’ve done some really intense competitions over the past two months, and I came into this meet about 50% sick, ho-hum emotionally, and with Mr. Stopwatch telling me I am not skating up to par. However I knew most of the “usual suspects” who were registered in the 30-39 age group, I went to the start line of my first race thinking I should win the meet handily.

I was in for a big serving of Hubris Pie, as inliner Mike Anderson beat me convincingly in the 1500m. I had a real battle on my hands after that. It became a VERY intense meet. Luckily Mike “played chess” in the final deciding 3k, instead of using his tremendous fitness & simply trying to rip my legs off by going hard from the gun (usually the best tactics for dealing with a strong sprinter).

I am very lucky to have won my 2nd US masters 30-39 National Championship.

Here are the pictures of the age group Champions, ages 6 to 70+ (I’m the one in the ugly furry hat, with my mouth open because I am joking about the wall of digital cameras facing us.)

I am not a superstitious person, but I sometimes take fortune cookies seriously just because it’s fun. Pacing the hallways and getting myself psyched up for that crucial 3k, I found this half torn, crumpled fortune on the ground. It was not a statement, it was a question:

It made me stop and think of all the things that have “richness” in my life; my wife, family, friends, health, luck, & whatever irrational part of my soul drives me to do something so crazy and rewarding as repeatedly skating around in a frozen circle.

I thought of the “rich” experience that a meet like this is, no matter the outcome.

The good folks that I chatted with, and even the strength of my competition, made me focus to be the best I am, win or lose. Sure, winning is great, but I had amazing experiences the first 2 times I raced masters nationals & lost to Brian Boudreau. Losing made me a better skater in the end too, as I came back more determined & prepared each time.

Just before the 3k, in anticipation of the pain we both would be facing as we raced, Steve Miller joked with me by saying “just go to your special place”. My immediate response was “but I am already there, with all of my special friends”.

Skaters… Skating… Ha! What a wonderful, challenging, rewarding, rich, heartbreaking, breathtaking sport…

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Filed under: RACE DAY, from the coffee shop