Zen and the Art of Speedskating

I skated my first 10k during Olympic trials in 1998, I was only 16. The race was really hard, and after I was done, the head referee, Ernie Crutchman, came over to me and said “congratulations, you’re a man now”.
-National team member Ron Macky

There are many different experiences one can claim as “the litmus test for manhood” and from my own perspective, skating 10,000 meters is not in the top five, even though Ron’s story made me bust a gut laughing.

The best way I can describe what the 25 laps of an ice speedskating 10k feels like to a non-skater is imagine going for a jog where you climb 100 flights of stairs, and every other flight (the 50 corners you skate) you have to bound up 2-3 steps at a time. This accurately simulates the aerobic & muscular fun involved. Even at the world cup level, they only race the 10,000 a few times a year since it’s so hard.

I will never forget my own 10k experience on a windy day in Lake Placid; through the pain-glazed lens of memory I recall being exhausted, broiling with lactic acid, looking up to the lapboard, and seeing 17 laps to go!!

Yesterday 5 people at the Utah Oval raced a 10k. For some of them it was their first time, others have skated them before. My hat is off to each one of them, especially Keith, who blasted 19 seconds off his former personal best set on crazy fast ice at Olympic trials! To improve by that much is a ton of hard work. Each one of these images is at the end of each of their pain.

I tried to do my part to be encouraging, I went to a party supply store, bought a pile of cheap plastic horns, and distributed it to our whole training group. It was pleasantly loud & goofy during these long races.

In my own racing, I am happy to report that I busted through the 37 second barrier for the 2nd time ever! 36.99!! Whooo! (I skated a 3k, too but the less said about that, the better).

Interesting pair of images grabbed from the video of my 500, one is from 50 meters into the race, and the other from 450 meters in.

Body & knee angles are THE SAME. I find it much harder to sit low in the last 100m than accelerating in the first 100, so this makes me happy.

Sure, a 36.99 is only .01 faster than a 37, but I’m happy anyway, as I have been burned by .01 before.

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Last week Salt Lake had many days of absolutely beautiful fall weather. I took this picture of a jet contrail looking up through the brilliant fall yellow of a tree on my lawn,

Just a wonderful day, warm enough for shorts and soaking up the warm sun & blue sky.

12 hours later it was snowing, sleeting, and generally miserable. From flip-flops to parkas in one day, a true climatologic whiplash.

There are many odd things about Utah, one of them is that when the seasons turn, it’s not a gradual temperature shift, it’s like some celestial switch is thrown, the jet stream blusters down from Canada, and the weather changes violently.

Speaking of yellow, in Bruce’s workshop my feet have changed color again! The inner lining is in place, the yellow is aerospace/military grade Kevlar on top of that, and the eventual tongues of the boots laid into place.

I once stayed up all night, and watched a master welder turn a pile of titanium tubes into a bicycle I still ride that bike all the time.

Beginnings have always fascinated me, especially when the beginning looks so different than the final result. Many of us know skates, and can speak at length about the relative merits of this brand vs. that brand; but how many can picture the embryology of skates? Cool stuff, thanks Bruce….

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Happy Halloween! On this day of overwhelmingly safe & sanitized spookyness, I find these pictures Bruce Kohen emailed me to be genuinely unsettling.

These are perfect replicas of my feet in the SS Boots workshop. He is about to start building a custom carbon fiber speedskating boot around these casts.

It’s unsettling to see a perfect replica of one of your body parts in someone else’s oven. I have lived with these feet my whole life, from my hammer-toes to my huge arch, and these casts are.…. absolutely… perfectly…. me….

Strangely enough, according to custom boot makers, one of the hardest parts of construction & why experience matters so much, is they have to “file” down a good percentage of these casts & remove lots of the “fleshy” part of the foot, as the boot really supports your bones, & not the flesh…

I REALLY don’t want to see pictures of that!!

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Here is an image from a recent practice; Japanese Skater & Torino Olympic veteran Eriko Seo leading American Nate Defranco during an endless lap workout. Eriko has wonderful technique, and I really appreciate it even more in the slow-mo video I grabbed these images from. Like many elite skaters, she truly sinks down into each push, whereas many intermediates start low, but step up into each push. Sinking into a push is difficult, but creates more pressure into the ice. Except for Erben Wennemars, you tend to
see this more in distance skaters than sprinters.

Now one might guess from this picture that Eriko is on the shorter side. She actually is average height for a Japanese woman, but the visual impression is skewed by the fact that Nate is 6’5” and about 235lbs (that’s two meters and 106kg for you metric folks).

Interestingly enough these two illustrate the truth about ice long track speedskating that there is no ideal body type. Larger athletes are usually stronger, but being larger also creates increased frictional forces on the ice, and a bigger frontal area creates more wind resistance. Studies say these factors EXACTLY cancel out the increased power a larger individual will have, and if you look at a broad cross section of gold medalists from the past several Olympics, you have quite a selection of sizes & body shapes.

Many think this is not true in short track, people say at the elite level being shorter & lighter is an advantage because of the G-forces they face in every turn. Also being smaller means you can pass through smaller gaps. There are exceptions to this of course, tall & very lean can work too, but in general short trackers are on the short side.

In another note I am sending an international hello to the folks at http://www.israel-rollers.net. My web gnomes tell me many visitors have followed a link from within that site to this one. Despite a wonderful month I once spent in Jerusalem, I have no command of Hebrew. So I could not figure out where the link was, even in the English version.

Utah and Colorado feel much like many parts of Israel in terms of the climate & topography. No only did my time in Israel change me profoundly, but it also personalized many of the world events going on. Every death or injury could be someone I met or know. It makes me thankful to live in the complicated shade of the Pax Americana.

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Here is a wonderful idea of the modern age: a pulloff near the airport, where you can sit in your car waiting for your cellphone to ring, watching a billboard with live updated flight info.

The sunset was a nice bonus.

I was there to pick up my wife from her long trip back east. As we were driving home, she mentioned that she had seen several huge wildfires from the plane, one throwing a massive plume of smoke far into the stratosphere.

Then she said; “I think I saw something burning in the mountains over Salt Lake.” Sure enough, as we pulled out of the airport we saw a massive circle of flames throbbing in the face of the Wasatch.

I took this picture from near our house, this burning line is probably about a mile long. Here is the local news report. A skater who lives in that neighborhood saw an army of firefighters, hoses at the ready, waiting to unleash a point blank shot of H2O fury. But the wind driven fire marched up the hill, not down towards town.

There was still smoke rising the next morning.

Like volcanos and nuclear blasts, wildfires add particulate matter into the atmosphere, and make spectacular sunsets. The next day after the blaze, this was the evening sky above the Utah Olympic oval (I did not touch these colors with photoshop at all).

I took this picture during a meet & greet for the new executive director of US speedskating, Robert Crowley was in town for a slew of meetings. Catherine Rainey (I think it was her) had a great idea of a bar-b-q where the athletes training at the oval could all meet & hobnob with him. Free food attracts athletes like congressmen to wealthy donors, so it was a fun gathering. Mr. Crowley is the blue button down shirt, he is talking with Catherine, Derek Parra, Chad Hedrick (with his back to the camera), Chris Needham, and Patrick Meek (looking right at the lens).

I spoke briefly with him, and he seems like a really nice guy. Most importantly he has a very clear understanding of the wildfires that threaten the house of US Speedskating, and he spoke frankly about them. I think he took the job knowing what was burning in the hills.

I just hope the winds don’t change, or if they do, he has firefighters on hand with enough water (read: money) to make a difference.

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