Zen and the Art of Speedskating

Quiet Morning

Almost every national team skater is in Milwaukee getting ready for the US Single Distance Champs/World Cup Qualifier, and there is a also a lull in the constant flow of international teams training here (just a handful of Quebecois) so the Salt Lake oval was very quiet today. I snapped this pic when there were skaters going by, but mostly it was empty and had that spacious feeling of a completely empty mall or supermarket.

If you like this pic, click on it, and get the 1024 X 768 version of it for your desktop.

I am racing 500m and 1000m tomorrow, and will be leaving for Milwaukee myself on Wednesday.

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Get Back Up Again

I try to post every other day, but something happened on Monday that rang my bell pretty badly, and has thrown me off for a few days.

I went headfirst into the pads at my top speed, the ice was pretty chippy, I hit the corner very tight, and at the apex my left foot broke free at exactly the wrong moment. I had about 3/4 of a second to contemplate my fate, as I superman’ed directly at the wall.

That 3/4 second went on for a loooong time. I played hockey from the womb to 18, and am pretty good at not getting hurt from cosmic impacts, you can see me twisting my body, and ducking my head at the last second, so it wasn’t a facefirst piledriver.

The pads are angled, and designed to shoot a skater up. I pronged directly under them, which is usually far worse. Everyone who saw the crash thought I was seriously hurt. Until they saw me stand up shakily and use my vast command of the vernacular at a high decibel level. There were concrete marks & dust all over my right leg & skates.

Check it out; press the play button to begin this (I usually have to press it twice, but it runs).

An important thing I know from my decade of bicycle racing is that after a crash you MUST get back on the bike right away. Even if you have to borrow a bike & clean your road rash blood off it afterwards, touch high speed & do a few fast corners before you crawl homeward. If the crash is firmly burned into the mind, fear will also embed itself there, and it can take months to get it out. Make the last memory of your crash day something other than the crash. So even though I was sore & woozed, when Boris went out for his 400m tempo, I made myself skate it with him.

After I got off the ice, I asked a few national team members, true experienced artists of high speed crashing, what they recommend as recovery from an experience like this. Kip Carpenter recommended a half-bottle of red wine, Chris Witty thought the whole bottle would suffice, and Tim Hoffman opined that port is his personal choice. I should ask my oenophile mother-in-law what wine goes well with mild head trauma.

My neck and back hurt that day, the same way they did when a stupid teenager ran a red light and totaled my Subaru a few years ago. I was noticeably vacant and woozy that evening, Jess said I told the same joke about 3 times. But after a lot of advil, ice, and a glass of chiraz while watching Monday night football, I turned out ok.

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Posted on 01 Oct 08:54 pm

Today’s Racing

Never drive faster than your guardian angel can fly!

Does paying at the pump make us lonelier people?

Quotes seen on the road on the way home from today’s race.

Here are the complete race results, from a german website, I raced the 500m and the 1000m.

I skated a 38.01 in the 500, stumbling & slipping for the first 50, and fantastic over the last 300. Still, I expect myself to be a second faster than I am right now, I am still putting the pieces together, and have not skated a “complete” race yet.

I came within .2 of my PB in the 1000m. 1:17.22 With a fast opening 600m, and a very painful last 150, that final turn felt there was an unexpected 15% grade! I threw myself into the lactic flames trying for a good time, and couldn’t move for about 10 minutes after.

I had my camera with me; here are some images from today & commentary.

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Spam Poetry

One bad effect of having a blog that ranks highly in the Google Blog search engine is that spammers have suddenly taken note of my existence. I used to get 1 or 2 pieces of “comment spam” a day, suddenly its rocketed to about 25 a day. I have installed the wonderful Wordpress blog utility “spam karma 2” to dispatch these evil little digital dust motes into oblivion. It works like a charm.

One cool thing is that I get a daily digest of removed spam to glance quickly through to make sure no legit messages have been accidentally condemned.

Suddenly I am getting a lot more spam poetry to examine! What do I mean, spam poetry??? Spammers often have their computers string together constantly random, changing, auto generated sentences & misspelled words to fool spam guards. Usually it’s nonsense, but when a spammer mixes their key term in along with the random words. It becomes a kind of Dadaist poetry after a while. Here is an example, each couplet was from a separate piece of spam I received today.

personal loans Disallowing thy qu’est-il today, O Madhava,
with pursud land-cases, I will gladden the personal loans o

loans is 10-shot at the interestingness, but, since there is no
oxidizable cross-fertilisation purposeful around that electrode, it esca

loan calculator senalando has no uses except for its lessons.’
Business disposed of, he assailed aside all spherical

student loans, that her death resemblances affected with such real
sorrow, and with such a harvest-tide moose-run of lo

(can you tell I am really enjoying my rest day today, I feel 100% better! and ready to happily join in any harvest tide moose run of lo!!)

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Posted on 26 Sep 11:55 am

10 things about Salt Lake

Moving to a new place is always a little bit intimidating. It can be even more intimidating when it’s a place that has the theocratic reputation of Salt Lake City. I can’t even begin to estimate the number of polygamy jokes people told Jess and I before we moved here. In one of the earliest posts on this blog, Salt Lake Gloom, I talked about how I felt.

However, pretty much every stereotype I had has been proven wrong! Urban Salt Lake where I live (I define this as Downtown, Sugarhouse, & the Avenues) is as cool, liberal, hip, & funky as any New England college town.

Let me repeat that again, its significant…

Urban Salt Lake City is one of the most liberal places I have ever lived! (remember: I grew up in the people’s republic of Ithaca, NY).

What happened in Salt Lake is that a critical mass of artists/students/hipsters accumulated downtown, and all the LDS folks moved to the suburbs! So began this weird situation, of a kernel of hip surrounded by the “Zion Belt”.

But saying this is just spewing generalities, let me describe 10 specific things I have noticed that make this place unique, the sights, sounds, people, and the snails & quails from my own daily experience.

10. Before I met my first Mormon, I had conversations with Navajo artists, Gay pride activists, Tongans, Fire Island beach bums, robotics engineers, cute barista-marathoners, local bondage community folks, Russians & Norwegians, and of course -lots of speedskaters from the Midwest. When the missionaries finally showed up on my doorstep, they were from California & exuded mellow groove.

9. There are flags at many intersections, you pick them up, and wave them at traffic to get their attention as you cross. They are actually necessary at times, due to item #1 and I have used them.

8. The excellent Tibetan restaurant 3 blocks from our house, next door to that is an incredible fudge shop!

7. The counter-culture is sincere here, not calcified from decades of sarcasm & irony. It’s because there is really something to REBEL against. There is a higher ratio of tattoos & funky hair than anywhere I have ever lived. A symbol of the new Salt Lake is that just down the road from the massive LDS temple, is a business that specializes in Vegan Bondage wear! (the Andrew mentioned in this article about them is NOT me!!)

6. KRCL 90.9 RADIO FREE UTAH
An absolute shining star of radio, whenever I listen, I hear incredible music I have never heard before.

5. Liberal Mayor Rocky Anderson. Since things here are so fundamentally divided between extreme liberal & conservative, he does not have aim for that decisive middle electorate, since it really does not exist here. He marches in the gay pride parades and when George Bush came to speak last month, organized the counter protest!

4. Huge snails! I see them on the sidewalk every morning as I walk the dog. Salt Lake life is just not really complete until you are walking the dog, hear the crunch-squish, and have snail guts hit you in the knee!! This is not the only local fauna worth mentioning. There are skittering tribes of California Quail around. Lilly ignores the snails, but the Quail drive her ballistic.

3. Stylish women walking along with expensive umbrellas, but not because of the rain, but TO KEEP THE FIERCE SUN OFF THEM. Picture expensive black clothes, pink high heels, pink handbag, and a pink umbrella, & you are getting the idea.

2. The incredible number of cyclists/runners/multi-sport folks. The neighborhoods at the mouth of the canyons seem to be “athlete ‘hoods” where open garages expose stacked skis, snowboards, bikes, kayaks, & in-home climbing walls. In the early 90’s, I was a lone cyclist, pedaling along rainy Massachusetts roads, now I am just one of the lycra wrapped swarm pedaling up the canyons under sharp blue skies. It’s NICE!

1. Stupid Drivers! here is a comparison:

Boston drivers are bad, but that is mostly because they are driving along asphalt covered cow paths designed in 1612.
Washington drivers are scary, cause they are all excellent drivers and drive like it’s a NASCAR race to get to work.
NYC is its own brand of terror, because most cars are driven by professionals who confidently squeeze through tiny openings in traffic.
Florida can be a scary place to drive, but most of them were once excellent drivers, so I have more compassion.

But I have seen sheer stupidity in Salt Lake unmatched in the annals of human autmotage. There is lots of “create your own lane” antics, and late at night, you hear the high-pitched scream of young men/future organ donors drag-racing each other through the suburbs on motorcycles.

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All thumbs

I get into my down start position, and begin my long steady exhale waiting for the gun to go off. I use the down start. A down start differs significantly from the traditional skating start.

In this picture here from a race last January in Milwaukee, you can see me using the down start, and my ol’ Lake Placid buddy Donald Stewart using the more traditional speedskating start position. One of the tricks to the down start is to put a lot of your weight on the hand resting on the ice. When the gun goes off, you remove your hand, and your body falls forward, so gravity becomes an additional force you can add to the power your legs generate driving off the line. Also in practice, both feet push, even though skaters concentrate on that front leg. The only thing original about my own usage of the down start is I rest my left hand on my left knee, it helps me avoid false starts, as when I am really amped up & nervous I have a hard time keeping that left hand still.

Many top skaters use the traditional start, as they have spent a lifetime perfecting that technique. Yet the down start is being used more and more, even though most coaches are wary of it. With my clean slate, I practiced a lot & became moderately proficient at both, and found I was more consistent with the down start.

So anyway, there I was, about to start the first real race of the season, waiting for the gun to go off, focused, relaxed, and with all my weight on my right hand, my thumb suddenly pops out of joint!!!

I have done the down start for years, and never had this happen, I crumpled to the ice in quite an inglorious false start. And then quickly try to re-focus myself to go to the line again. (the thumb went right back in, it’s fine, just hurts).

After awkwardly setting myself back on the line, palm flat on the ice, I was extremely rushed & not set in my technique, and stumbled my way to a 38.44 500m. I was pretty pissed, as I did not execute what I train my heart out to do. The thumb was certainly a distraction, but I should be faster. Isn’t that what metric skater always say? Its just frustrating after my training tests tell me I should be around 37, to skate that much slower, the training load has been very high recently, and because of it, Boris advised me not to race this weekend, but I am stubborn.

Mentioning my story of my dislocating thumb to the pioneer of the down start, KC Boutiette, he laughed and said “yeah, that happened to me in Berlin once, and they fired the gun anyway!”

By the way, Casey Fitzrandolph skated a 34.9 in his 500m race! Wow! It was completely astonishing to watch, and he is the first man in the world to skate sub 35 this year! I have never seen a first outer skated like Casey threw down in his race, even with all the talent on the US sprint squad, Casey just skates different,.

For skaters like Casey, they will face their moment of truth in Torino, not really at Olympic trials, so it’s worth mentioning when normal folks qualify for trials, as they are our “games”. My friend Kirk Fogdall raced a 1500m. He was nervous, tense, got cold before the start in his spraypaint thin skinsuit, stumbled twice in the first 100m, but still cranked out scary fast laps & dove head first into the searing last lap of pain like his son goes for a hug. He skated a 2:00:4 and qualified!! Go Kirk! He claims that now that he has accomplished his main goal, he is just gonna rest from now till trials in December. His 1500m PB is now faster than mine by about a second, I think we are going to have to have a grudge match 1500 sometime, with something significant as the bet, waddya think Kirk? I don’t know who will win, but I am pretty sure that I will be ahead with one lap to go, puking on myself from the effort & suffering rigor mortis from lactic acid poisoning, if Kirk can skate around the puke, he just might pass me!!!

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Posted on 04 Sep 09:46 pm

Throw yourself like a Border Collie

Engaging in some serious coach-ordered rest, I went to see the Soldier Hollow Classic Sheepdog Championship with Jessica. I found it such a refreshing mental breeze to watch these dogs rocket about, especially in light of the continuing agonies of New Orleans.

Watching a sheepdog championship live, wow! Its so HARD what they ask these dogs to do! Me on my mountain bike with Jessica yelling directions, we would do far worse! The crucial difference between the owners & the dog though, is that the owners are competing, the dog is in the moment of work & accomplishing what they were bred to do, they are dogs being dogs 100% fulfilled. I wish I were more like a dog sometimes, unaware of winning and losing, just aware of being a DOG!!! Aware of just velocity and the pleasure of the chase & the job.

These pictures are of Bess, a 10 year old female Border Collie from Colorado, with her well-trained human Tony Stewart. Bess has some top level dog medals in her paws and was 3rd of 145 dogs (!!) at nationals last year and 2nd in this event last year of the 50 dogs entered. In my best race at nationals last year I finished 12th of 28!! Ha! The herding dog world is far more competitive than the human speedskating world, Bess & Tony probably train more hours than I do too. This was not a 100% successful run for this duo, although they qualified for the final round, and you can see it in Tony’s expression in the final picture. But look how Bess trots! Ahhhh! To be a dog fulfilled!

The following poem is by Miguel De Unamuno, (translated by Robert Bly) I am not sure why this moved me after seeing Border Collies tearing around so happy & focused, but somehow, it truly fit the mood of the day…

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
Sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
That brushes your heel as it turns going by,
The man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
Which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
But to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
Is the work, start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like a seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

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http://mgno.com/

There is a fellow who has a wireless internet connection, laptop, and a power generator, he seems to be sitting on top of a building in downtown new Orleans… he also has 5 other people him.. he is safe, quite well armed, & there are police snipers in the building…

Screw any major news outlet, this is the one to watch, he is FURIOUS at what is going on.. He is ex-military via gulf war #1 & quite tech-wise, he has a web cam trained on the streets below, but I can’t seem to connect…

here is the link:

http://mgno.com/

Worth reading, but depressing…

This blog will return to its normally scheduled musings soon…..

I am just stunned this is happening in a major American city… There are several large scale philosophical angles observers deduce from the current anarchy in New Orleans

ALL Human beings, by nature, are just one major disaster from being active & bloody fingernailed participants in a Mad Max movie.
Human beings, by nature, are basically good, disasters just let the nasty 2% of a population to suddenly rule the roost.
If you are hungry, & are armed (with a gun or just anger), everyone becomes a “looter”.
America has created every aspect of every behavior exhibited here, good and bad, looters & relief workers, with a giant blend of policies & cultural mishmash. Our country shines in beauty and scabs, when citizen & national guardsmen exchange gunfire, our fingers are on both triggers.

I am not sure what to think… but I know that in my life, I have never been without food & water for days & days & days & days in a desperate crowd in stifling, fetid conditions…. therefore I pronounce myself unqualified to pass judgment… just over-qualified to be depressed about it…

(even the fellow at http://mgno.com/ is safe, watching from above, though his parents are unaccounted for)…

I really don’t feel like training today… even the soothing, anesthesia of soft-pop rock songs on the radio are making me angry…

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Posted on 01 Sep 10:25 am

Rain & Floods & Jeremy update

I wrote about my friend Jeremy, Musician/High School friend/resident of America’s favorite underwater city, in my previous post. When I write about someone I know in this public place, I usually email them & let them know out of courtesy. After all, this is the Internet, and I respect other people’s desire for privacy. This blog gets 100+ readers a day from all over the world, so even though I started it for freinds/family to follow my progress towards Olympic trials, it’s not really private at all, I don’t mind, but others might.

Also, in the case of Jeremy, I emailed him out of worry. He has a 5 year old daughter & wife, so it’s not just a case of him being able to swim for it like Roy Scheider at the end of the movie Jaws, his guitars lashed together like pontoons. Jeremy is ok, he just wrote me back privately & also commented on the previous post. Like 80% of New Orleans residents, he got the hell out of town before Katrina came ashore. But his home & fellow ACS‘er Greg Schatz’s homes are almost certainly flooded, & his hometown of the last 13 years is going to be uninhabitable for a long time, it’s quickly turning into “a toxic swamp”. He’s going to have to relocate for a year or two. Put yourself in his shoes for a moment, really.

I want to reprint a part of his excellent comment on my previous post here. As I said before, disasters are hard to understand in simple numbers, storm surge stats, wind MPH, and vague pronouncements by the president looking down from Air Force One. Stuff like that does not reveal the lives impacted. When I wrote my previous post, I had just been sitting in front of my laptop screen, and following Internet links to satellite images. I live on a mountainside in the middle of a desert; it’s a little hard to imagine New Orleans right now, despite my own experience of having a knee-deep/front row seat to a water based natural disaster I wrote in abstract metaphor, later that day, I went to the Utah Olympic Oval’s weight room for my 2nd workout, and then I watched scenes of devastation & saw interviews with sobbing, distraught people, all of my metaphor seemed hollow & like tweedy professorial self-absorption.

These are Jeremy’s words, his take on what’s happening:

the other day I called one of these friends and left her a message, just to say hi because I hadn’t seen her in a while. She returned my call a day or two later, to say hi because we hadn’t seen each other in a while. We commiserated about how slow it is for musicians in New Orleans in August, and she gave me some suggestions about a place to get a gig. And she told me she loved me and hoped to see me soon.

A few days after that, I was calling her from Baton Rouge. “You’re staying? Why?” She and her husband, another street musician, as well as other dear old friends from the streets had decided to stick it out and weather the storm. “What if it floods the house?” Then they could go upstairs, she said. “What if the wind tears the roof off?” They could go downstairs, she said, apparently unaware of the fallibility of her plan. Well, now I have had no word of them. Have they reached a shelter? Did they get rescued? I have no idea, and I may not know for weeks, or months. They may still be sitting on their island, happily drinking the time away, until the booze runs out. Or they may have decided to go down with the ship they so dearly loved, and upon whose mercies they have always relied.
-Jeremy Lyons

I think that in moments like this, the Blogosphere is a great way for those of us so far away, to grasp what is going on & to move a few steps beyond what comes in over the TV & radio. Also socially open source software, like wikipedia’s developing Katrina page, are astonishing resources.

But nothing replaces the words of those who are most directly impacted. Thanks Jeremy.

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The oven is off

The oven has finally turned off, the 100 degree days seem firmly behind Salt Lake City now, and the western climate is entering that period of the year that resembles my favorite time of autumn in the northeast; sunny, warm, dry days, and nights with a tiny chill hinting of what is yet to come. In another month or two, and the sweaters will come out of the closet, the half-dozen deciduous trees in salt lake will turn a color or two, and it won’t seem so ridiculous anymore to be speedskating.

I enjoy the fact that the mountain west doesn’t get the week long chilly fall drizzles of New England; here it’s replaced by ferocious displays of atmospheric indigestion/Zeusian rages, providing the same rain in one hour that the sodden sky over Massachusetts dribbles upon you over a whole week. I like Massachusetts a lot, but I am happy to be here now.

My brother is back in Ithaca, (after his recent on stage encounter with a giant stuffed catfish) and I will be back in Ithaca for a wedding and a brief vacation as well in two weeks. Super intense training also demands occasional periods of super intense rest so the body can heal. I talk a lot about rest/work ratios, but that is the KEY to getting better.

Until the mandated rest begins in a few days, my focus on tiny moments of technical precision continues, despite fatigue, here is some evidence;

Presently I am working hard on driving my knees forward hard at top speed, its starting to work, as you can see here. Depending on the speed, sometimes you drive side to side, sometimes you drive forward, maintaining absolute top speed is a weakness of mine, and driving my knees aggressively seems to help, although my hands are still describing too big an arc sideways, especially when I am on my left skate.

The coaching brain trust talks about “restoring normal hormone level function”, as I am not the only one here who is exhausted. Psychologically I find myself also like a first grader, watching the clock and waiting for each day’s school lessons to be over. I LOVE to work hard & skate, I really do. It completes me in a fundamental psychological way, & I truly enjoy the company of the other questing pupils in this twisted schoolhouse (as evidenced below) it’s almost harder for me to rest than to work, but if flying across the country, going out to dinner with friends, and not thinking about skating for a few days will make me faster the day it counts to be fast (December 27th, 500m Olympic trials), dammit I will do it!

p.s. as tired as I am, I still went REALLY fast in practice tonight, dang, I never thought I could do that many laps that fast without dragging my tongue on the ice from exhaustion. The speed felt easy tonight, This training program is hard, but its opening up new horizons of strength, hmmmm, maybe these factors are linked!! Ha!

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