Zen and the Art of Speedskating

A new face showed up today at practice, and suddenly the goofyness level of the high 5 speedskating team increased dramatically. Nate DiPalma and I just fed off of each others energy, and were chattering and goofing through much of the workout today. We were serious when it was time to work, but making all sorts of noise the rest of the time. How well do I know Nate? Actually not that well, just a half dozen conversations over the last year, but sometimes you meet someone who truly marches to the beat of their own drummer, and you enjoy the music of said drummer quite a bit.

He was not tired in these pics, just goofing about after throwing down some good turncable technique. Nate has been training in Italy recently, as he has dual citizenship, and seems to have a really solid base to add skate fitness on top of. I think he is going to take a shot at Olympic trials in both countries. I look forward to chasing him this year, I need fast people to skate with, and it’s a bonus when they come with a good sense of humor attached.

I mentioned in an earlier previous post Salted out in Salt Lake that John Dimon is having knee surgery, he went under the knife today at 11am east coast time. He says he has gotten many calls from readers of this blog wishing him fast healing (thanks folks!). John joked with me over email that he was looking forward to anesthesia, because he really needs to catch up on his sleep!

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This past weekend, I spend some time wandering the Utah arts festival with several other speedskaters. We are really enjoying this brief rest week before the really hard training we will be facing in the next few months. Ice cream and art, rest for the body and soul.

One of the things that really struck me during festival was Project Bandaloop, they are dancers who do their thing suspended by cables off of the side of a building, in this case, the Salt Lake City Public Library. Part rock climbing & gymnastics, it was amazing stuff. I had watched them practice from inside the building several days last week. The compression in their feet as they launched themselves off of the glass of the building, and the bending of said glass was quite visible. Each one of them was not just an artist, but an tremendous athlete, you could see in their musculature the countless hours of work they put in (they must have core strength like a neutron star). Dancers are not given the kind of credit & respect as athletes that they deserve. Do speedskaters deserve credit as artists then? I think some do, some inspire as powerfully as any artists. Some skaters are artists of perfection, some are artists of pain (any 1500m specialist qualifies), short trackers are graceful in the face of extreme danger and muliple G’s, some skaters are artists of willpower & determination over weakness and shortcomings.

There are several different kinds of respect in this world:

1. The kind where you have done the activity, and have a taste for how amazingly hard it is to perform something. This is how I usually feel when I see gold medal winner Casey Fitzrandolph zip by me on the ice, giving the impression of puma-smooth grace, when I have a pretty good idea how much pressure is on his body through those turns.
2. The kind of respect where you are just slack jawed in awe, thinking “wow, I could never even contemplate doing that!”

Project Bandaloop made me feel respect flavor #2

A friend had emailed this supposed Hawaiian magic chant last week, and I was thinking of it in relation to training, preparing to race, and Project Bandaloop.

The world is what you think it is.
There are no limits.
Energy Flows where attention goes.
Now is the moment of power.
To love is to be happy with.
All power comes from within.
Effectiveness is the measure of truth.

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Here are some pictures from my swirl of an amazing weekend…

My wife Jessica is now officially Dr. Love! Go Jess! What you are witnessing is that strange medieval ceremony known as the “hooding” of advanced graduates. The fellow in red is the Dean of vet school. A graduate’s robes are really a carryover from medieval times, and although moderns currently hang the hood from the shoulders, if you ask a graduate to actually put it on like a hood, you instantly see the medieval academic monk spring forth, either that or a Sith-Jedi apprentice of emperor Palpatine from the recent star wars movie.

Ambling through the crowds with my digital camera, feeling sore and creaky from my last few days of intense workouts assigned by coach Boris (he has ratcheted the intensity up again! yeah! and-Ouch!) , here are the equations that were going through my mind…

Roughly 80 graduates from the vet school, maybe 600-700 people in the audience at this graduation ceremony.

Each graduate, when they are announced, gets a round of applause, and they get another round after the doctoral hood is placed around their shoulders.

Each person gets about 20 total claps from applauding audience members (I counted a few people and averaged).

The veterinary degree is astonishingly hard work over 4 years, so I average the hours I estimated my wife worked, got a ballpark figure for the total number of hand-claps, and divided them into each other.

Each graduate recieved roughly 1.3 claps per hour of work (and this is not counting intense pre-vet undergraduate work, or the loads of work most do after undergraduate before even applying, 3 years of it in my wife’s case.).

I then extrapolated to the Olympics, when an Olympic athlete steps to the line, their bodies & souls are tattoed by a whole lifetime of training, astonishing hours of effort & focus, pain & determination. How many TV sets & individuals in the stands watch their efforts? what is the dividable equation for that? How many TV sets tune in to witness a lifetime of work explosively culminated in one expression of speed and perfection?

Of course Olympic speedskaters don’t do this for the TV, and my wife did not work as hard as she did for that brief applause. Things like this are too hard to pursue for some brief thunderstorm of appreciation. You do this because you really really have to do it, because there would be some part of you empty if it was not filled by the effort, because effort when combined with passion for your work, becomes love and satisfaction with your life.

Jessica’s mom gave me a poke in the ribs, and said, “be patient, your time will come soon”. I know… Olympic trials are 30 weeks away, but its not 30 weeks or even 210 days, its really 9 training cycles of hard work/rest and improve, plus a taper of drastically reduced training to get really fast.

But today is not that day, and my smile won’t be as good looking… today is Jessica’s day, today is all about DR. LOVE!!!!!

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A number of years ago, the Boy Scouts of America added a new category between cub scouts and full-on boy scouts. They called it Webelos. It just so happened that the first scout to complete the full Webelos program was an Ithaca resident with the initials of C.M. (I asked him what name he wanted me to use, he was ambivalent, so I think his initials suffice).

So anyway, the national newspapers picked up this story, of the first scout to ever complete Webelos status. C.M. received a tremendous number of letters from all over the country, including some containing money! and others telling him what an inspiration he is. This made a huge impression on the young man (and later exceptional athlete, as he rowed for crew super power Cornell University!), and I believe C.M. now holds it as a life value, that when someone does something that inspires you, you let them know, even if they are complete strangers.

C.M. also happens to own a 24 foot U-haul truck. On April 20th of last year, he read the article the Ithaca journal wrote about me, & he thought, “hey, I could help this guy move!” so he contacted me with a wonderful letter, and offered the use of his time and truck, free of charge to me, to move! Needless to say, this will save Jessica and I multiple thousands of dollars, as we would have had to rent a truck that size to move the 2,200 miles to salt lake city from ithaca. Financial worries scare me more than falling flat on my face during Olympic trials. So this is a tremendous help!

I had breakfast with this C.M. this morning, and his father, completely delightful people. We talked of many things. What I did not say to him there, and I will here, is that I have learned a very tangible lesson from C.M., as well as from the great local business like The Rink and Courtside, and my national level sponsors, Dimon Sports, Athlete Octane, and Powercranks. The message/lesson is kindness when you can help, and if you reach out, you can create a cycle of good, that will extend beyond your immediate effort, and create waves of good like the wake following a motorboat.

My years of being able to compete as an elite athlete are limited by time and my age (34) I have probably only 2 more seasons of being really able to run with the top skaters in the U.S. However, I will have decades after that, to be in a position to help others who inspire me, and to apply some of the amazing life lessons I am earning vias this path (and I will very likely coach someday). I do not know if I will ever be able to repay CM for his time, truck, and personal kindness, except for passing it onward, and maybe that is as it should be.

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I have been emailing back and forth with 2 time national ice marathon womens champ Carla Langenthal, about the coaches/silly putty idea I discussed in my previous post, Carla is coached by Olympian & overall nice guy Dave Tamburino. Here is what she emailed me (reprinted here with permission)

Carla says:

I have an image for you. Flamingos are pink because
of what they eat, right? So I am the same THING no matter what a coach tells me to do but get my “color” (performance) from the program I’m given. hahaha

(I thought of this image because): I like low walk workouts, so Dave
keeps saying things like “Carla’s eating this up” and “Carla eats this for
breakfast” and last year Mark Jeter said “you’re chewing this up and
spitting it out” so I was thinking about things that eat things and then
show some result.

And we’re supposed to have one foot on the ice at a time!

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