Zen and the Art of Speedskating

I never thought I would find anything more painful than one of my coaches’ mid-summer 3 hour dryland workouts:

Until now…. I spent 3 days last weekend at every single minute of the US speedskating spring board meeting, wow… it was an amazing emotional spin-cycle of “the good, the bad, and the ugly”

It was painful to be there because of watching the clash of really smart & passionate people who have all dedicated much of their lives to this sport. There were moments of brilliance and moments of incompetence and disconnection.

Everyone REALLY cares, but due to their positions, experience, motivations, and “clue factor” ideas of what is “best” for this organization tend to differ radically.

Also I have never seen an organization who’s professional staff said as often to the membership “we need your ideas and help, come up with proposals & program ideas & sponsorship leads”-At least 3 different meetings, that was the recurring theme.

I have always argued that “US speedskating” is a misnomer, because it sounds like a singular item, like “US SPEEDSKATING” is one animal, or an individual.

It’s not, US SPEEDSKATING a beast with 1700 heads, arms, eyes, claws, teeth, scattered pockets of brain and stomping feet. And this beast frequently chews on itself, tears itself apart, and lurches about when the head tries to point it in a particular direction. It’s a beast to love, and to be deeply ambivalent about when it steps on your head.

There are several essential limbs of the beast in evidence at this meeting, and they all are pre-disposed to view this loveable & bloody creature from a different perspective depending on what appendage their life experience places them in. No group is unanimous, and there are people who have migrated between appendages (like there are 4 athlete reps on the board), but here are the essential rough groupings.

The board of directors
The 100 category 1 elite athletes
The half dozen professional salaried coaches
The paid staff at the national office in ohio
Officials (many with decades of service)
The HARDCORE club volunteers & coaches who come from all over the country
The business professionals who want to run this like a 21st century business.
Curious local skaters (I fit in this one)
Representatives: Facilities-Sponsors-USOC & Speed Skating Canada

I have struggled about how I should write about this meeting. Here is my take on the Good, the bad, and the ugly from my own impressionistic notes I wrote down as I watched the proceedings.

The Good.

• In the view of the general public, speedskating is often judged by our success at the Olympic games, to say there was interest and media coverage of US speedskating’s 10 medals is an understatement! 10 medals! what astonishing sucess!!
• There is a VITAL base of volunteers who REALLY care about what happens to this sport.
• There must have been 50 people at the meeting, all representing large numbers of members, who flew in from all over the USA. This passion will ensure a bedrock for this sport no matter what happens at the upper levels.
• There were some astonishingly good questions & concerns raised by the Elite Athletes in attendance, and what they had to say was honestly listened to. Derek Parra, Chris Witty, Catherine Rainey, K.C. Boutiette, Dan Jansen, Chris Needham, all were very active contributors in every meeting they were at. I have never seen an organization whose athletes were more directly involved.
• There are some people in positions of authority at US speedskating who are extremely competent, I was very impressed with Craig Wing, smart dude. Chris Needham & Scott Koons are going to be fantastic athlete reps as well. There are also some fearless & elouquent members of the volunteers, who were fun to watch & good to listen to.

The Bad

• In Canada, the provincial association pays the travel expenses of their top young athletes. Pretty cool!

  In the US, sometimes even the top skaters pay their own way to races. But hey, this is where Canadian tax dollars go! Essentailly taxes are the price of civilization, and I will refrain from commenting on where American civiliazation is headed!!!

• Some important political issues were obviously resolved in backroom closed-door meetings, not in front of the membership. If I were on the board, would I act differently? maybe, but maybe not, democracy can be a messy, full contact sport.
• US speedskating is cutting several regional development coaches; this is a BAD idea, as development is what this organization is all about. No money? There was practically a revolt in the membership about the elimination of these coaches. And it happened anyway. With an organization with a running budget somewhere over a million dollars, it seems silly to cut experienced human beings who don’t cost that much. Cut your altitude housing before coaching.
• US speedskating Membership has slowly declined over the last 4 years, but is has been in general decline for the past 100, so maybe that is no one’s fault but societal tectonics at work. However, with the popularity & availability of short-track clubs, it seems odd.

  Speedskating will never be a “major sport”. But it should be larger & better known than it is

The Ugly

• US speedskating has pissed off its sponsors royally. In the direct words of a budget committee member, they are facing “The Perfect Storm” in the next few months, here are the elements of said storm:
• US speedskating “got in the door” with Qwest as a potential sponsor because the idea of Shani Davis wearing a Qwest logo was incredibly attractive to this company that claims diversity as a core value. Shani never wore a Qwest logo, in fact, there was a picture of Shani on the front page of USA today with Qwest logo painted over by DSB (you could just barely see Qwest). The CEO of Qwest was PISSED, and not only is canceling their sponsorship, they are about to sue to get their money back from last year!! That would be crippling organization-wide if they do.
• ADT is furious as well, mostly due to the Olympic media firestorms. Why no one in authority in US speedskating did not step in to calm the waters is beyond me. It could have been a one or two day media story, not almost two weeks.
• Losing these two sponsors adds up to MILLIONS of dollars.
• The USOC demands that US speedskating has a new athlete agreement (the source of much of this friction) in hand, or they will not approve their 1.1 million of funding per year. So there MUST be some kind of a peace treaty, and right now the athletes who have outside sponsors seem still quite pissed off. (in the spirit of disclosure, I do work for one of them, so I can’t take too public a position on this).
• Essentially, every major source of funding in jeapordy, not good. It takes some real talent to piss off EVERYONE all at once!
• There was far too much, from people who should have been be better prepared: “we need ideas & proposals from the membership, we need help& proposals from the membership, since we don’t have a firm suggestion of direction” At several different meetings, this was a recurring theme.

Bonus Ugly: Yesterday the executive director of US speedskating resigned! why after the meeting? and not before? during? so there could be discussion/member input about what to do next, & who might replace her? or maybe so that people could simply say either “thank you” or “go away” depending on their feelings about her. Odd timing… very odd… Again, we were in her shoes, would we have handled it differently?

It’s unfair of me to point out issues, and not offer constructive solutions, or take the “walk a mile in other moccasains” thoughtful approach. My own small ideas, will come in another post (and maybe something about my own small innefective contribution to the meeting itself).

(right now I need to get to work, I am back in cube-land, I have a contract IT job at a cool company, and I am late for work)

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Filed under: from home

Thanks for those who have written and called. Although this blog is about speedskating, there are moments when life comes up and smacks you with things far more important. My friend is doing much better, and is out of the hospital.

It has been a hard week; here are my 2 small ways of dealing:

#1 attempting to follow my grandmother’s mastery in the art of creating perfect grilled cheese sandwiches:

#2 Riding my mountain bike up into the Wasatch Mountains. Climbing switchback singletrack for an hour and a half straight in your tiniest gear will knock the existential blues out of anyone. If that fails, the white knuckled warp speed descent does pretty a good job too.

It was a 70 degree day, and I got high enough into the mountains to be into the snowpack.

On a mountain bike, one can quickly get waaaaay up into the hills, and feel truly small and alone. I had no company but the music of my hammering heart, squish of mud underneath the tires, and my bike bucking and diving through the trails.

But that seemed to be just the company & perspective I needed.

(p.s. one of the most well know blogs on the internet is also written by a Salt Lake resident, Dooce is astonishingly funny, well written, and thoughtful. On the same day I ruminate about grilled cheese as a depression cure, check out what she wrote, it seems that food is the friday theme in Salt Lake, also her stress cure is far more advanced in complexity & themeatic content than mine.)

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Filed under: from home

Recently, I made a post called “Speedskating on Enceladus” that was my entry to a contest hosted over at the wonderful blog Last Girl on Earth

Go figure, my eccentric vision of interplanetary sports fun WON!!! (this has been a pretty good year for me, when it comes to winning).

The contest was called “Giving good Lei” and was originally started at the Hawaii based blog Bitchitude.

The rules of the contest stipulate that I need to host the next contest (there is one every month) and the blogger who wins the one held here, then gets to host the next one…

However the readership of this blog is pretty unique in that there are not too many bloggers within it (in the regular commenters, I count under a half-dozen). It seems to be mostly members of the worldwide skate tribe, some friends & family, and a collection of good folks who somehow enjoy the writing/pictures that I post. In many ways its not surprising that the skate crowd has limited “crossover” with the obsessive tech crowd.

To enter the contest, you need to have a blog… because if you win you get to host the next contest. So I am going to contact the second place finisher, The dog’s breakfast, and see if she is interested in hosting it over there… She has a more typical blog-possesing audience, and would get more entries.

Although I am sure this creative bunch could come up with LOTS of unique entries, when we get the next contest organized/started, I will direct you over there.

It’s a beautiful day here in Salt Lake City. It might get up to 70+ degrees, although I should be relaxing and not training, I can hear the bike calling me. So I am resisting the two-wheeled attraction and taking the dog for a long walk.

Here is the view down one of the steep streets that make up the avenues where I live. Although the view doesn’t really strike my Manhattan-born wife too much, and the dog is more interested in what her nose is telling her, every time I walk Lilly I look over this and simply marvel….

Today one can see all the way down the valley to its end around 30 miles distant. The beginnings of the Wasatch range are on the left.

Here are some unique factoids lying within this photo:

When Salt Lake was first designed, the mormon city planners mandated that the main streets be large enough so that a 4 horse team & carriage could make a U-turn. You can see one of these massive 4 lane thoroughfares, 700 east, pointing right down the valley.

If you had magic vision that could see 1,000 times more detail in each pixel, and could see through those mountains on the left, you would see skiers in T-shirts whooping it up in the spring conditions at the resorts.

Also if your magic vision could detect the level of Mormonism in the roughly 1.2 million people you are looking over right now, with Mormons showing up as red, and infidels like myself as blue; what you would see is screaming blue all around you, and extending for about two miles from where your are standing. There would be a thin line of spotty blue along the base of the mountains (the skiers & outdoorsy types living at the mouths of the canyons) then pretty much 80% red for the rest of this field of vision, with the west valley areas to the right just off the picture to the right, glowing radioactively red!!

If your glasses also detected language & ethnicity, the 19% of the city’s population that identifies themselves as Hispanic, would be in a band separating the red & blue areas, and off to the right on the other side of the interstate. There also would be pockets of Native Americans, Tongans, and lots of Samoans visible (those 3 groups add up to 3% of Salt Lake’s population.)

If your magic glasses could also detect relative levels of obesity, according to recent studies, it would pretty much also exactly follow the blue-red divide. The avenues zip code where this picture is taken from, is the skinniest in Utah, whereas the more religious a zip code gets, on average, the chubbier.

Personally, I am currently winning my battle vs off season weight gain! It must be the zip code I live in ; )

More statistics & history can be found on Wikipedia’s Salt Lake City pages.

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Filed under: from home

I just did something I said that I would never do.

I bought a bathroom scale.

You have to understand a little background here & why this is important.

For several years of my youth, I dated a woman who had suffered terribly from anorexia. She came close to killing herself, and ended up in a hospital. Although she was very healthy in the two+ years we spent together, her eloquence in describing what she went through, and continued to wrestle with, gave me a lot of insight into how weight affects not just how society treats us as men & women, but even worse, how we sometimes treat ourselves.

In the years I was with her, I also personally changed from a 205 pound hockey player (who worked in an ice cream shop) to a lean & mean 170 pound bike racer. I noticed that people treated me differently after that, especially the opposite sex. That was nice, but I found it profoundly unsettling, after all, my soul did not change, it was just the body.

Since that 170lb Andrew of 1990, I have added close to 20 pounds of muscle, and that is normal, since I am older, and I do a power-based sport that has me in the gym quite a bit. However as an athlete, I do need to understand what I weigh as a matter of health. So once every month or two at the gym or at a friend’s house, I would check. However to avoid that self-esteem crapola that goes along with it, I swore I would never have a scale in my own house.

Fast forward to about this time last year, my break in training after last season ended was about six weeks long, and in that time I gained a lot of weight, really fast. It took me about six months of astonishingly hard training to lose six weeks worth of careless eating and couch surfing.

Not this year dammit! Especially if life tosses me back into cubicle-land, and I am not working out 5+ hours a day, I need to be careful. So about an hour ago I stepped onto my new purchase with trepidation.

And I am pretty happy with what I see, anytime its under 190, that is good. I do weigh a lot for a guy who is only 5’ 10”, but it’s healthy weight, that is if you qualify a butt as ginormous as mine is “healthy”.

But here is my simple public declaration, now that I have this horrid thing in the corner.

• If I ever complain about weight related issues here, you are all allowed to tell me to go jump in a lake (the lake of get-a-clue).
• When I travel, I usually lose weight, despite sometimes eating HUGE meals for breakfast-lunch-dinner. Why? Well, the only reason I can come up with is that it’s hard to snack when traveling, and you generally don’t eat very late in the evening. That must be part of the difference.
• I will never try to eat less, in fact, if it’s healthy & protein-based, bring it on! I could never give up steak & coffee, and I don’t think I need to.
• For the next few months, I am going to think a lot more about timing of food. The answer to eating right is different, diet wise, for each person, this might be my silver bullet.
• I only truly deserve the glorious nectar of the gods (I refer to, of course, espresso shots in a extra-thick chocolate milkshake) if I have gone for a REALLY long bike ride earlier in the day.

Now there is some motivation to get out and train! I think I might be riding the bike a lot this summer. Masters Track Cycling Nationals are in Colorado springs this coming year, in early August. I could fit that into my training. Hmmmmm…..

One of my brother’s favorite blogs is Fat Cyclist, (that and the very weird stuff on my cat, somewhere between the two, the truth about my brother exists). Fat Cyclist is really funny, and although I don’t read him regularly, maybe I should add it to my regular reads.

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Filed under: from home

“For me it was the perfect race…. I was happy before this medal, but to be able to come here and finish it like this is pretty spectacular… Emotion, so much emotion and passion, everything was running through my body. It was crazy.”

-Apollo Anton Ohno, reflecting on his gold medal 500m race.

I love this quote, Apollo talked in several interviews about “skating the perfect race” the internal focus it requires, and how hard he trained to make this happen. This guy could live however he wants, and supposedly lives a Spartan lifestyle at the US Olympic training center in Colorado Springs.

I came as close as I ever have so far to my own “perfect race” this past Saturday. All season long I have had the goal to skate a sub 37 second 500m, to see a 36 next to my name on the scoreboard, and I am almost out of time to do it. Busting the 37 barrier is a “line in the sand” that I need to cross. Warming up for this past Saturday’s races, I felt tremendous possibility in my legs, I could tell, technically and physically, that this could be the day.

I was paired with “start-line-rocket” Parker Vance, and he inspired me to blast off the line like a freak, to my fastest start ever (10.30), I hit the first turn well, made a tiny mistake exiting the turn, and then skated the finest last 250 meters I have ever done, every step was as perfect as I am capable of. I even include evidence here of both knees coming together as I drive that last 100. Bringing the knees together properly has always has been an element of technique that has always crippled my top end speed.

Every synapse was screaming, I could feel the pressure I was getting into the ice, I KNEW that this was the moment, that it could be right now!!!

Maybe I think too much, but today it was good fuel in the fire. I jabbed my blade at the finish line as I crossed, reaching for every possible hundreth, on fire!!

I pulled up out of my skating position, looked at the clock, and see

37.00

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The howl that escaped my body was full of the joy of a personal best, joy of almost a perfect race, blended with frustration, with feeling every millimeter of distance from 36.99 to 37.00

I always believed that athletes need to focus & try as hard as they can every rep, every step in training, because that is where you earn tiny amounts of speed like this. Where did I fail? What is this supposed to teach me?

How far is .01? at my lap time of 26.70 (that is 33.5 mph/53.9kph average speed for 400m) using the socal speed calculator, that is 14.9 meters a second, so I missed that 36 by 14.9 centimeters.

Such a tiny distance to have so much of my self-esteem poured into.

14.9 centimeters… .01 of a second… How far is that? 1/3 of a blade length, half the width of the ibook I write this on. My hand, wrist to fingertip is even 19 cm.

John Loquai said to me afterwards, that after seeing my race, now he understands exactly how much .01 of a second can mean. I am swirling about in a mix of happy and sad, almost the perfect race, the best I can do, but it’s not enough.

p.s. John himself skated an amazing race worth mentioning, a 1500m paired with Ron “glidemaster” Macky. (life experience on speedskates? Macky=17 years, Loquai=1.5). There was lots of friendly betting & trash talking going on, lots of speculation on who would win. Ron & John train together all the time, and knew it would be very close. Boris & I got into the fun too, Boris picked Ron, I picked John. The actual event was fun to watch, with John’s opening 300m a bit faster, and he then increased his lead a tiny bit every lap, skating a 1:50.99 (with a last lap of 29.87!) to Ron’s 1:52.25 -these guys are true artists of pain!).

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Filed under: RACE DAY, from home