Zen and the Art of Speedskating

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never tasted victory or defeat.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

As with a lot of quotes, this sounds nice, but living your errors, shortcomings, defeats, and daring failures in an arena in front of friends & family never feels too good. Especially when you screw up going really fast & mash yourself into a wall.

I was absolutely on a PB pace in Saturday’s 500m race, and in the final turn I twisted my shoulders out of line, lost control, and went down.

Hitting the pads this time hurt about as much as getting smacked in the face by my brother while pillow fighting. Now David can hit really hard, but it was not 1/10th of the crash I had on Monday, maybe I have just fine-tuned my “crash technique”. as I was certainly on a mid 26 second lap/35mph speed.

But as the theme of my earlier post on crashing, I got back up again, refocused, and 45 minutes later skated a personal best in the 1000m, 1:15.34. A huge improvement, almost 1.6 seconds! Results are visible here.

This pic is from the last 100, very painful meters.

My 2nd lap fade was only 2.6 seconds, and for me, that is a VAST improvement from my usual pathetic 4+. The wheel of pain of this summer’s dryland workouts is finally showing results in race performance. Thanks Boris!!

Getting off the ice, I also discovered I had skated that 1000m with my right blade that slipped about 2 cm off its normal track, the crash loosened the bolt, and then my start in the 1000m then knocked the blade out of line. I thought the corners felt funny, but I attributed that to mental maladjustment, and not equipment.

When I went to unlace the right skate, I also got carbon fiber splinters in my fingers from a big old crush mark in the toe of my right skate! Nothing a liberal application of nail polish won’t temporarily fix, but it was a big can of “whoa” to open at the end of an emotional whiplash of a day.

I am lucky to have a new pair of boots coming, my old beloved Van Hornes have been pretty much beaten to pieces.

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Filed under: Quotes, sweat

In the new Harry Potter novel, there is a potion called “Felix Felicitas”. It is basically liquid luck; and it imbues the drinker of the potion with feelings of warmth, confidence and limitless possibility, and then reality warps so that everything perfectly goes the way the drinker of this magic juice hopes. In the wizarding world, Felix Felicitas is a banned substance for athletic competition!

I have had the most incredible run of luck in the last 24 hours, I feel like someone spiked my Gatorade with Felix Felicitas. It’s been amazing -here is the list:

1. Google just debuted a new blog-searching tool, so I went there, and typed in “speedskating” to see what comes up. WOW! This blog is the #1 and #3 search result! In the WORLD!! (this changes by the hour! & if you type “speed skating” you get different results)

2. A nice check arrived in the mail for me from one of my web design clients. For more than I expected!! (I need it badly too!)

3. The 2nd place finisher in last years Russian Sprint Championships, Sergei Kornilov, has joined our team. Sergei finally got over his jet lag, & his technical skill & explosive speed is EXACTLY what I need to follow. He is scary fast, and excels at things I am bad at, especially exiting corners at top speed. During one of our sprints today, I am sure I hit a higher velocity than ever before. It had to be a high 25-second lap, absolutely wonderfully scary fast.

4. One of my sponsors from last year, Jay and the good folks at Athlete Octane, contacted me. We spoke on the phone for quite a while, and they want to sponsor me again this year! Athlete Octane is great stuff; it minimizes the damage you suffer during workouts, and creates a physiological climate for improved recovery. It’s also extremely convenient and quite tasty (and for a daily workout supplement, that matters!). Unlike most of the stuff sold at GNC, its completely legal too. I passed the drug test I took last year at US single distance championships, and I am a regular Octane user. (I wasn’t worried about passing, I compete clean, but it’s still a relief!). I mentioned one of my other sponsors, Powercranks, in my previous post. Both of these folks, independently, talked to me within 48 hours of each other & both still like me! What are the chances of that?

the good luck keeps flowing!

5. When I stepped onto the ice for my warmup, just as I was getting up to speed, Jeremy Wotherspoon, skates by, also warming up. I slotted into his draft with no extra effort, and cruised behind the winningest world cup skater ever, for some relaxed, precicse laps.

6. Several of the top US guys, fellows with medals in their pocket, said very nice things about my skating to Boris today.

7. A great old friend from high school emailed me out of the blue. Trevor Exeter is a tremendously talented musician, and has played his cello all around the world! And I am very glad he was not killed by that cement truck in London, (it turned his bicycle into “road tape”).!

8. Warming up for my final workout, I find this Norwegian Kroner on the ground! There are many Norwegians training in utah right now, but how random & lucky is that!

9. Modifying the bend in your skates usually takes lots of careful attention, time, and frequent swearing. I went to modify the bend in my right blade, and Voila! Perfectly changed in about 30 seconds! It handles more predictably at top speed now .

Felix Felicitas is of course, a fictional construct, so maybe there is another truth here, about this run of luck, I would like to believe the following quote:

“The harder I practice, the luckier I get,”

-Gary Player
who hit 18 holes in one during his PGA career.

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Filed under: sweat, from the coffee shop

Liberally compressing a whole weeks worth of conversations between coach Boris and I into a paragraph, roughly the following exchange occurred:

Andrew: I am going faster and faster doing our workouts/drills, and am getting close to my all time fastest lap (27.01), can I please go all out just once! and try to go really fast!

Boris: No, you are not technically ready yet.

Andrew: Pllleeeeeeze!!!

Boris: No, Why are you so intent on going fast right now? Its coming together well, You will go really fast this year!

Andrew: I have done every step of every workout you have assigned since march (exception: august 21st). I been suffering like a sled dog, I want to go faster than I ever have before, not for physical reasons, but for psychological ones, to feel that all this sacrifice is really getting me somewhere. I know intellectually and even physically that I am improving, but I want the stopwatch to tell me as well.

Boris: There is this old Russian saying, “If something is prohibited, but very desirable, it is probably a good idea to do it”. Ok, you may try.

Result: Even though I am extremely tired at the end of this training cycle, and skated rushed and sloppy when I turned on the turbos, I pounded out a 26.41 for a flying 400m!!! (33.9mph/54.5kph average speed-figured out here-, and thanks to Dimon Sports for the fast suit) The whole rink heard me howl when I saw the time, Kirk Fogdall, skating behind me, also did an all time best, a 29.2 with both hands on his back!

How much has a whole year of soul-crushing hard work earned me?? So far, its .6 of a second improvement from my fastest lap last year.

Boris is heading to Russia for business and to meet with one of his speedskating yodas. He did some taping of the team to show yoda, and recorded my 26.41, click on the picture to the right to see/download it, its only 1.3mb. When I look at this, I see my usual technical flaws, they are all evident in the video: in the straights my left knee follows an inefficient arc compared to the right one, in the turns my left elbow sticks out like sail, and under the high pressure of the turn my rhythm is powerful but choppy & without flow. However there are numerous things I am doing so much better than in the past, and I can happily blame Boris for most of them.

I begin to rest now, I feel a huge psychological pressure fall away, and in a week or so, all this fatigue will be shed like old skin too. I will emerge as a new, faster self, to race better vs myself & this new, higher standard. Right now it hurts to walk, but I am smiling everywhere I go.

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Filed under: sweat, from the coffee shop

Who cares what Derek Jeter’s batting average is in spring training? Or how many passes Tom Brady completes during a preseason scrimmage? These early season endeavors are the chances to get an athlete back into the groove, before things get serious, and those numbers really matter. They matter only for analysis, & further preparation.

Yesterday was my first race of the season, the deseret classic (yes mom, thats the correct spelling of the strange mormon word deseret), and it had quite the early season atmosphere. No one was really prepared to race at 100%, in our group we have not really even skated at top speed this season, as we are still building the solid foundation and technique framing/wiring for the house of speed, but a pre-season race is a good thing.

My first 500m of the season is always a keystone cops on clap blades affair anyway, I stumble off the line, skate from my toes, rush the turns with my weight in the wrong place, and always engage in some very vulgar usage of American vernacular once I have caught my breath after a race. Better to get this out of the way early.

I raced 2 500m races, My first 500m was no exception to my usual ugly rule, I stumbled off the start, went down the opening 100m with my knees farther apart than a Paris showgirl and my upper body swiveling L to R like I had been drinking Jack Daniels instead of Gatorade, then in the first turn, my left arm, instead of nicely gluing itself to my back, hung out in a position halfway out there, not swinging, and not on my back either. Yeah, that ugly! The finish of the first turn was ok, once I sorted out my arm, the backstretch was nice, got a good draft off of my pair, tentatively took the final inner, and relaxed too much on the final 100m (and my relaxing did not lengthen my stroke! aaaagh!) and my pair, Michael Stein, caught me on the line, we both crossed with a 38.55. Once I caught my breath after the finish, I was swearing like a sailor. The overall results from this race are a .pdf downloadable file available here. Here is the webpage with all the .pdf file results from all the races available.

All digital evidence of my first race has been destroyed; it was so ugly it would have damaged my computer’s hard drive to remain there.

However I had another chance, and my second 500m of the day felt much better, and Here is a movie of it.

the previous file is a pretty small, easily digestable movie with both start and finish, but if you want it crystal clear, here are the larger, high quality, native video formats… these are both 26mb files, so don’t try this without high speed!!!
here is the start and first 100 meters
and here is the last 200m and finish.

The pictures to the right here, grabbed from the video of my 2nd 500, make me happy, this corner was very solid. But at the beginning of the video I see my left hand moves in the wrong direction when the gun goes off, & my hips are too high for the first 100m, I wanted to drop my tempo just before entering the first turn so I could set up the turn perfectly, and I dropped my tempo about 50m into the race (you can see me kick it back up just before the turn). Mistakes, mistakes, but my final outer turn felt extremely solid! One of the best I have ever skated, and in the final 100m my right leg is following my new patterns of knee and ankles passing close together, my left leg is still in the old habits.. so I am half better. Neither skate is set down pointing directly down the track, but that will come as I get more used to managing & maintaining top speed.

Its funny, but my finishing time was 38.44, only .12 faster than the race before that felt sooo ugly. If both races were raced at the same moment, that’s maybe a 1.8 meter difference at the finish, as I am moving about 15 meters a second. Speedskating is such a strange sport.

But there is an important pattern that emerges from the stumbling and swearing of a preseason race; I very predictably improve from my first race to my season personal best. Last season, 2004-2005, from my first 500m race of the year to my PB the difference was 1.6 seconds, , 1.4 seconds the year in 2003-2004, and a whisker short of 2 seconds in 2002-2003. So if my physical personal mathematics remain constant, my guess is that after skating a 38.44, my best races this year will end up in the mid-36’s. I am aspiring to bust out a 35 this year, but time will tell, I have never have had the coaching before that I do now, but also every .1 becomes harder & harder to earn as the windforce you must overcome cubes in resistance.

Every step I take that shows improvement makes me happy, the 2.5 to 3.5 seconds that I am slower than the National Sprint team studs is still a huge mountain to climb though. I have the willpower, snap, and strength for this mountain, but do I have the time to learn what I still need to know? And I don’t mean learn it intellectually, but learn it in the fibers of my body and the ingrained movement patterns within my mind?.

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Filed under: sweat

Coach Boris called me today, asking me if I was ok, if I have been sick or something, since he has not seen a blog post for a couple of days!! (3, in fact). I am fine, but I certainly have been lapping up this rest week like a hot and thirsty dog standing in the middle of a snow-fed mountain stream.

The house is clean, the laundry is done, my bike is fixed, the dog is hiked, it doesn’t hurt to stand up, and my body and soul is now ready for more hard training! yes, the rest week has accomplished its goal. If you imagine that a rest week for a full time athlete is just sitting on the couch relaxing, you would be half right, for a rest week is around half the training volume of a normal week. I will not reveal the secret blend of training that Boris prescribes for the other half of the time, but suffice it to say like most of my fast-twitch sprinter brethren, I improve dramatically with rest! So the few times I have gone hard this week, I have felt very good!

One of the workouts assigned was a 3-hour bike ride, and I had this crazy idea of riding out to Antelope Island & meeting my wife & car there. Antelope Island is a brown, scorched mountain arising out of the middle of the Great Salt Lake, quite dramatic in its barren lifeless bulk. My companion for this adventure was the qwadzilla himself, Kirk Fogdall. Kirk found a map/route from a local century ride that went out to the island. So we followed their table-top-flat prescribed route along gentle country & cul-de-sac roads, deftly avoiding the myriad of Utah roads that would be courting death-by-SUV.

This route was also liberally painted with directions & indicators from the century, on the biggest climb in the whole ride (where the route crossed I-15) we found BASSO painted in the road. It was such a wild thing to discover the name of the 2nd placed finisher in the recent Tour De France painted on a Utah overpass, that I just had to take a picture of it! I think this is the true sign of bicycle racing’s arrival as a mature American sport, that an Italian bike racer who has probably never stepped foot in the US has his name painted on a rural overpass!

2:15 into the ride, just as my fast-twitch fibers were starting to fatigue, Kirk’s bundled cables of mega-wattage slow twitch power began to kick in, To ride mano-a-mano with the “Fogdall Express” is a wonderful, painful thing; Kirk’s chain began relentlessly marching down his cogset till he was spinning his biggest gear. Kirk sustained over 30mph for much of the way across the final 7 mile long causeway to Antelope Island, displaying the reason he has Colorado State time trial championship medals on his desk. I stuck in his draft with my heart thrashing about in the upper 190’s, happy and determined. I tore my eyes away from his wheel long enough to glimpse the beauty of the glass-calm Salt Lake (and take these the pictures).

As we zipped along at racing pace, we thought of our wives & Kirk’s 2 kids waiting at the end of the causeway with lunch, and the upcoming promise of swimming/floating in the brine shimp saturated soup of the Great Salt Lake. There are a lot of reasons to do hard things, there are a lot of reasons to challenge yourself & discover strength in surprising places. Kirk is as fond of mentioning his beginnings of grey hair as I am fond of reminding him of moments like this, where 35 years olds like us simply do outrun any hints of age in completely consuming moments spinning big gears stupid fast in outrageously beautiful places. What a life!

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Filed under: sweat