Zen and the Art of Speedskating

I found treasure not where I thought
-Peace of mind can’t be bought-
Still I believe

Just hang on – Suffer well –
Sometimes it’s hard – its hard to tell

Depeche Mode –from their latest album “playing the angel”

At practice today I took a few pictures of John Loquai doing a 3 lap fast tempo through sunlight spattering across one of the turns (every lap under 30 seconds! Wowsa!).

Later this same evening, Jessica bought a just released Depeche Mode album, these lyrics were playing, and I thought of John.

John originally was a hockey player, but had to give up that sport after SIX CONCUSSIONS!

Certainly John has “found treasure not where he thought” because after a year and a half of switching to speedskates, he earned category 1 status at Olympic trials (basically, one notch from national team, and that earns him the right to wear the USA). As my buddy Kirk says “John gets faster ever time he touches the ice.” Its true, he has even improved since trials.

However now the real work begins over the next 4 years. John has the raw talent, the feel for the ice, the internal drive to train hard, all the pieces are there. But now the specter of money suddenly raises its ugly head. How to eat? Pay rent? Have a life? This sport demands total commitment to reach the top level, and no guarantees of anything but memories. It’s a very hard choice to make.

He is looking for sponsors, some way to not starve while training full time. I can totally empathize. This is a hard spot to be, to be so close to the full national team ride, but still one step away.

If there are any good corporate sponsors out there, jazzed up about the Olympics, and looking for a dark horse with talent and a good story, John might be your guy. It’s a hard, but rewarding path he sees in front of him. Suffer well John, I wish you luck.

10 Comments »
Filed under: from home

The Olympics had their opening ceremony yesterday! And Chris Witty was selected by all the other Olympic team captains! to carry in the flag, leading the US team!

It says something about the success of US speedskaters that she is the third speedskater in a row selected for this honor. It also says something about the kind of challenges & internal pain Chris has overcome in her life, and the respect other athletes have for her. I don’t need to go into that here; the media will do that well enough. Here is what she had to say herself when they announced her selection.

What I can say about the half-dozen conversations that I have had with Chris is this: she is very humble about her accomplishments. She realizes that she has led an unusual life as a professional athlete; she appreciates it, and has stayed a normal person even though she has a gold medal & the 1000m world record attached to her name. She talks about how she sees Eric Heiden handle his own dollop of reknown, and how she admires his approach.

She is also quite funny in a thoughtful way; here is an example; she told me about her two dogs, both are rescue dogs, both are Husky-Heeler breed mixes. She said that her dogs can’t seem to decide if they are independent and aloof huskies, or people-centric blue heelers, and they vacillate between both behaviors in a schizophrenic way.

Here is Kip Carpenter & Chris Witty in the stands during the opening ceremony. Kip is such a goofball, he actually is the person who sent me these pictures! So I suppose its ok to post it!

hmmmm…. Its strange to have watched the Olympics over and over, and now I know many of these people…. wow….

As for me, on this beautiful day in Salt Lake, as the Olympics begin, I felt a door of my life close, I missed watching the opening ceremony, since I was at a job interview.

Somehow that is mythically appropriate. The Olympics start, and the gravitational pull of the working world grounds many of us who were soaring along, defying gravity, chasing skate dreams.

It was a good interview, and I think my chances at working there are excellent. But halfway through, as I was comfortably bantering back and forth with the interviewer about web/tech stuff, I suddenly felt a door close in my life, a door signifying the transition from being someone who put my athletic dreams ahead of everything, towards another set of priorities, another arranging of rewards.

And it was emotionally jarring to feel that door slam shut, another skater told me she also felt that door close while driving to a job interview. I have another interview on Monday.

Airplane pilots talk in reverent tones about flying, motorcyclists about the wind & open road, horseback riders about the surge of a huge animal responding to your commands. I understand, I really do understand. I could no more stop skating than I could stop looking at the mountains, the sunset, from living life with every sense wide open. My skates are practically my feet. But what goals? how much sacrifice, how much financial pain? How much more can I really justify now that Olympic trials are over?

And nothing is really written in stone, I think over time, if I prove my ability, this job could offer me the flexibility I need to continue competing at a high level. I will have almost a month off at the end of the season, and then only once a day training for several months afterwards, so we shall see.

There is training, Training and TRAINING. I have been TRAINING for the last 2 years.

I am so happy for the whole US national speedskating team… I have seen every one of them suffer physically during hard on ice workouts, and then emotionally through the normal season ups & downs, and Olympic trials. These smiles you see, this is part of the reward! keep flying my friends, keep flying.

4 Comments »
Filed under: from home

But the dawn is breakin’, it’s early morn
The taxi’s waitin’, he’s blowin’ his horn
Already I’m so lonesome I could die

So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you’ll wait for me
Hold me like you’ll never let me go

‘Cause I’m leaving on a jet plane
I don’t know when I’ll be back again
Oh, babe, I hate to go

Leaving on a Jet Plane is one of those songs that can just cut right to the bone, even if you don’t like folk music. My parents listened to a lot of Peter, Paul & Mary when I was growing up, so this particular tune is practically engraved into my DNA.

Thinking of this song hit me hard today. I am packing for US Masters National Championships in Minnesota. I must admit to being in quite the funk about leaving home & Jessica so soon after getting back. Yet I know myself well enough to know that once I am at the races, I will be happy & full of funktionslust.

* Funktionslust is an old German term that means delight in your abilities & delight in doing what you do best. Most athletes (& artists too) seem to be funktionslust addicts.

I trained very hard for US Masters Nationals in the past, peaking specifically for that weekend; I had imagined being able to call myself National Champion at something. However my imagination smacked up against the reality of tough pack-style competition, in my previous 2 trips to this race, I ran headlong into the previously mentioned Brian Boudreau.

Here are Brian and I in the 2002-2003 season Masters Nationals, in Butte, Montana, about 220 meters into the 500m. I used to skate “between” my skates, & never bring my knees together to properly drive into each stroke. Dave Tamburrino calls this “riding the horse”. It hurts my eyes to see this picture now.

And here are Brian & I last weekend, 3 years later, about 50 meters into the 500m. I am a completely different animal now than I was then. Now I am much more “over” each push, and even though there are still flaws in what I see here (the elbows should be bent more when 50 meters into a race, my skate is not pointing directly down the ice) it makes me happy to see that 3 seasons of busting my tail have had some effect.

Derek Parra has an interesting comment in his book “Reflections in the Ice” about being thankful to your competition. Basically he says that tough competition inspires you to train harder & become better, and you should be thankful that they are there. I am thankful to Brian in that through competing with him, and preparing as hard as I can to be competitive at his level, it has made me better.

Ugh, I am blogging instead of packing. After the intensity of this last month, it’s hard to get excited. I am even training through this race so I can reach other goals later in the season.

I have received several emails recently from people who say that this blog inspires them. It’s wonderful to hear and never fails to simply astonish me. I never know quite how to react when I find that my own madness is somehow contagious.

Such an odd thing, inspiration, funktionslust (as this cool poem describes) or pursuing anything with 100% of yourself. Maybe I will inspire someone to work hard and kick my butt! Maybe I will meet them this weekend at the races, one never knows…

2 Comments »
Filed under: from home

Pack style racing! Love it or hate it, it’s a whole different expression of the sport than metric time trials. Pack racing is intense, exciting, mano-a-mano (or womao-a-womano) and combines strategy with the unique skill to change speeds quickly, as frequently the races are quite tactical until an intense acceleration to the finish.

Times don’t really matter as much as finishing first. There are pack style records, I have a few of them, but they are VERY difficult to achieve when you have a whole bunch of people sitting in your draft just waiting to slingshot past you in sight of the finish!

Here are some pictures I took at today’s North American pack style meet. North Americans is a joint US-Canada meet, and has a lot of the top younger skaters going head to head with each other. Notice that many of the skaters look like they have yellow socks on, that actually is Kevlar or neoprene protection for their ankles/achilles in case they get kicked by someone else. If you look closely you can also see the bump from soccer shinguards under several skinsuits as well.

These are all fairly young skaters. Quite prominent in these shots is the red and blue of the Quebec speedskating association. Montreal alone has more skaters in its club system than the USA has skaters (about 2,000). Their selection races are intense, and the skaters they send to meets like this are usually terrific, in both short and long track. There are also a lot of blue and black uniforms in these pics, that’s Alberta.

For a long time, pack style speedskating was the only kind of speedskating in North America. Today for Masters skaters in the US, pack-style is the only competition we skate with our “peers”. I did outdoor inline racing for years, and I like packstyle, even though it’s hard to switch mental gears after so much metric-centric training.

If it weren’t for the fact that North American Pack Championships was in Salt Lake this weekend, I would have been couch surfing for sure, as I am emotionally blah & jet lagged after my European trip. But I would have been kicking myself if I had skipped it.

Also these races were my last chance to renew a very intense and friendly rivalry with Brian Boudreau. Brian has won US master’s 30-39 Packstyle Nationals the last 4 years in a row, (twice with me simmering in second place). We are very closely matched, with most of our races being decided by less than .2 of a second, but Brian has been consistently that .2 better at pack than I am, tactically, technically, and physically.

Today’s races were the usual Andrew & Brian deathmatch, with him crushing me in the 1500, and me barely squeaking out a 1000m win by .17. However the refs threw in a bit of speedskating politics, and disqualified Brian in the 1500m because he was wearing a US national team skinsuit in a championship race. He has never been on the national team, & the rules say you can’t wear the USA in top races unless you have earned it. I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about how different minor sports approach the thorny issues surrounding sponsorship & money.

Suffice it to say, Brian did break a rule, but it was sad that the rigid enforcing of this rule took away his excellent racing in the 1500m. This is such a small sport, why not just let us race & give Brian a warning instead of a DQ? You could not even see the USA through his racing bib number! Would a few strategically applied pieces of Duct tape be okay?

I understand the issues, and there are very complicated, emotional, & nuanced arguments for both sides. But I find it somewhat strange that US speedskating is currently threatening legal action against some top skaters who are not wearing the official US speedskating sponsors, but when an excellent skater who has poured many years of his life into this sport, and was given a suit EXACTLY like this one to wear at Olympic trials a few weeks ago, wears those logos, ooooooh! Baaaaad!

I shouldn’t even wade into this argument, as it’s an EXTREMELY emotional one right now in the upper echelons of skating, and it does not impact me at all. I think I will just leave this with the idea that most professional cycling teams are flattered when someone wears one of their jerseys.

Tomorrow will be my last chance to race Brian packstyle until the 2011 season, as he is not going to US Masters champs in Minnesota next weekend, and next season, he will be racing with the 40-49 category! Watch out guys, the Boudreau express is a hard one to follow!

1 Comment »
Filed under: sweat, from home

Jessica wanted to put together a website of her own, for family in Italy and the US, detailing her own journeys in Europe.

So I threw together a quick and simple template, and then she populated it with her words and pictures. The first page is pictures of her family, but the following pages on Italy, Lugano, and Davos, have some nice travel & alpine photos, including Jessica dipping a snickers bar into nutella while lounging at the top of a mountain!

This is her second website, she made another one in 2004, about a trip she took to Mexico to spay/neuter dogs. These sites have nothing to do with speedskating, zen, or me at all, although I do appear in a few pictures.

5 Comments »
Filed under: from home