Zen and the Art of Speedskating

written in Norway, but am posting it from my friend Becky’s office in Lugano, Switzerland…

I write this from the train from Hamar to Oslo, looking out the windows at a new, but quite familiar landscape. The rolling glacier cut hills, farms, evergreens, steeply roofed houses (a sure sign of heavy snowfall areas), farm equipment, lakes and rivers, are identical to the green and hilly parts of upstate New York that are my ancestral stomping grounds (both personally, and for many generations of Loves).

Is this Norway, or the average rural road near Ithaca? (note, no photoshopping, here, it was this grey)

The only thing that you don’t see in upstate NY, is what I am on using right now, exceptional public transportation; This train is very nice, spacious, and I have light/air controls above my head just like an airplane!

A Norwegian recommended that I get out of Hamar, and take some time to see the “big pile of rocks” (their exact word choice) that is the rest of the country. I unfortunately did not have time to leave Hamar, but I feel like I saw a lot. Here are my quick impressions of 10 things about Norway

if any Norwegian wants to reply with “10 things stupid visiting Americans tend to miss when they visit Norway”, I welcome you to do so!

1. Cell phone quiet areas
One of the cars on the trains is “no cell phone car”. It was very pleasant, quiet, and the several other occupants quietly are reading the morning paper, as I am watching the scenery & writing this… I think there should go on the long list of “international good ideas” that many countries would be very well off adopting…

2. Porn and Donald Duck
The conservative right wing in America often wants you to believe that if nudity/sexuality/human body familiarity becomes no big deal, then somehow society falls apart and becomes a Sodom & Gomorrah nightmare worse than any Mad Max/road warrior movie. I point to the obviously functional societies in Europe, and the fact in Europe the human body & human sexuality is very publicly visible, In fact much easier to see than cigarettes.

However it still weirded me out, repressed American that I am, to see in the airport café, “HOT 60+ Mature Action” stocked on the magazine shelf within a foot of a kids-centric Donald Duck Magazine. (Donald Duck is HUGE in Norway).

3. Cigarettes=Death
Check out these warnings on cigarette packs. They take cigarette danger REALLY seriously, good for them! Cigarettes shorten the life of many smokers, and kill lots of them outright. The last time I checked, pictures of naked people don’t do that.

They had lots of creative messages, check out just a portion of them in a larger picture I took.

4. Breakfast in Norway.
I could have been experiencing an anomaly, as I mostly ate in the hotel next to the rink, but I don’t think so. Breakfast here is lots of meats, eggs, salty fish, coffee, fantastic yogurt and cereals. The choices were similar to my favorite USA “Wisconsin-style Breakfast”. All I can say as I pat my full stomach is “Yum!!”

5. Adjustable height showerheads
I should have taken a picture of this, it looks like a normal shower head, but is adjustable on a horizontal pole. This is a small thing, a detail, but as I am a shade under 6 feet tall, and my wife is 5’3, where can I buy one of these for my house? It’s also really nice when you want to get the water REALLY focused on certain tight lower back or neck muscles.

6. Moose-eating Parties
I was informed by a Norwegian skater that he was going to be attending a moose-eating party. The Norway moose population is like the local deer population in upstate NY, people crash into them all the time in cars, with disastrous results, and 25,000 are taken by hunters every year.

I think he was disappointed in my complete underwhelmed non-reaction, but I had just been in a discussion about a particularly VILE form of Scandinavian culinary delight. This is the Icelandic tradition of eating putrid skate. No, not a skate like I use, I mean eating a rotting sea creature (chased with shots of extremely strong liquor). Really, I am not kidding, putrid skate supposedly smells like cat piss. Check out this news report.

Compared to that, moose is a great meal. In fact, I bet Americans have a long traditions of eating moose, that is why there are almost no moose left!

7. KickSleds
Very common on the streets of Hamar, I saw many 50+ year olds gliding about commuting on these. On uphills you just push it like a shopping cart, on downhills, you stand with your feet on the runners and coast, and on the flats, one foot is on the runner, and you kick it along like a skateboard. Two kicks, switch runner, two kicks, switch runner.

Most of the kicksleds I saw had people’s names written in the wood slats, and also had bike locks to prevent them from “disappearing”. Kicksleds are not recreation, they are practical transportation!

8. Norwegian Humor
Where is this stereotype of cold & stoic Scandinavians? Most Norwegians I met were quite funny. Not only did one of them discuss moose-eating parties, but another seriously recommended that I take a train to an inland town called “Voss” and go to a certain café where I could order whole smoked sheeps head (eyes and brains included). Now I am a very culinary adventurous American, so maybe he was taken aback when I started asking specifics about how far it was from Hamar? Did the trains go there? If I could have taken an easy train to try this, I would have. But it was over 5 hours each way.. Damm!

9. Euro-Sport
Norwegian TV also covers winter sports on with much more respect than American TV, they show Biathlon, ski jumping, speedskating, and XC skiing as SPORT. Not some odd sideshow full of “personality profiles” because they really have no idea how to show it as an athletic challenge Also, Norway is damm proud that they pretty much stomp all over the world in many winter Olympic sports.

One of the other skaters used to be a ski jumper, I asked him about that sport, and he really went off. He said “yeah, I miss jumping, but now it’s a whole bunch of skeletons on the hill, super skinny anorexic lightweights who focus on gliding off the hill, not jumping. The Nordic combined is now the true ski jumping, as those guys have to have muscle on them to do the cross country ski part.”

10. Vigeland Park in Oslo
I have walked through most of the major New York City museums, if anything this was more moving. This park is a lifetime of work by Gustav Vigeland. There are over 212 stone figures, all depicting stages of human life & emotion. In the center is this incredible obelisk. 17 meters high, weighing several hundred tons, carved of one massive piece of Norwegian granite. There are 121 figures all wound around each other in the obelisk. Incredible. It took 3 stonemasons 14 years to finish just this central piece.

Before you die, resolve to take a walk through Vigeland park, and let all these stages of human emotion, age, and life depicted there, soak into you, it’s INCREDIBLE.

Here is a larger picture view of a few of these sculptures. I was so torn as I was there, take pictures, or just wander and let it soak in??? I decided to take pictures because I knew I wanted to blog about it (a rare moments when this blog changed how I acted in the real world) but now I want to go back to Vigeland, and stroll for hours and hours.

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Filed under: on the road

A picture of my coach Boris Leikin briefly appeared on ESPN.com’s home page during Olympic trials, and now it is in thier archives. Yup, this is Boris, a fantastic shot of him going really fast too.

CHECK IT OUT HERE

Oh, and by the way dear ESPN folks, I am pretty sure Boris finished 31st of the 44 skaters racing the 500m that day, not in XXXX place.

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Filed under: on the road

I have had a very reliable alarm clock. Mark Chrysler is a USA speedskater competing here, a longtime friend of Boris’s, and we train together occasionally in Salt Lake. Mark works nights (he is an intensive care medical specialist), so Norwegian time is Mark’s normal workday. He has been my reliable knock on the door getting my sorry jet-laggin butt to breakfast, and has been great conversation as I slowly caffeinate myself towards reality (or at least as close as I ever get). He dragged me out of some really nice dreams this morning, but hey, there was racing to be done!

First of all, here is a picture of the outside of the Vikingskipet. Click on it if you want the big version (I have it on my desktop right now!) It’s truly huge, there are tiny cars parked up to the left of it. I debated photoshopping this a little to bring out details, but I left it true to the real Norway grey!

To my eye, this is not an upside down Viking ship, this looks more like a prehistoric sea creature, or maybe a shot from a Godzilla movie, as Godzilla’s new thickly plated rival scuttles across the Norwegian snows to do battle!

Anyway, warmup went well this morning, I had power, technique, but not much pop to my skating, and I am still somewhat numb after the emotional rollercoaster of Olympic Trials. It was hard to get myself “ready” to race again. But there are over 100 masters athletes from Norway, Germany, Italy, Holland, Romania and Russia here (As well as Mark and I, the lone North Americans). It’s quite a different scene from Olympic trials, and it took a while for me to get into it.

The speedskating records I am trying to break in the men’s 35-40 Masters International records are 38.63 for the 500m, set by Norwegian Ivar Njos, and a 1:18.31 in the 1000m by Dutch Skater Ledo Beeksma. I have skated much faster than both, but on the scary fast ice of salt lake, not on Euro sea level ice.

The IMSSC has put on many races over the last 9 years, and there have been some quality skaters who have thrown down good times. Not world cup times, true, but hey, we are folks with JOBS!!!

I had no pair for the 500m, but that’s fine. I was doing the “easier/less dangerous” 500m with the inner lane start/outer lane finish. The gun went off and I got off the line with a small slip, but I hit my stride quickly, and went 10.5 for the first 100m (should be faster…..), first turn was ok, but I nailed the backstretch with the afterburners raging and felt that sweet sensation and windroar of top speed. I had a shot! I entered the final outer turn, and made a mistake, in Salt Lake, since the speeds are so high on the world’s fastest ice, one gets in the habit of leaning very deeply.

Hamar is at least a second slower per 400m than Salt Lake due to the thicker & damper sea level air. So I entered the final turn a little close to the blocks, leaned over at my normal salt lake lean angle, and suddenly was millimeters from stepping on the inside lane markers and flying into the wall. I didn’t miss a step, but I cut off some of my power through the apex of the turn, barely avoided crashing, made it to the final 100m straightaway and tried to groove & drive. You can’t gain speed on the final 100, all you can do is not slow down, and today, I didn’t!!…. I crossed the line and saw 38.17!!!!!!!!!!

I felt happy in a calm, solid, full-meal kind of way. All sorts of European skaters came over to congratulate me on my age group WORLD RECORD! Here is a picture of the final results sheet.

Officially this is not a World Record, the ISU does not officially recognize masters “World Records” even though they are in negotiation with the International Masters Speed Skating Comittee to do just that, but they recognize the IMSSC as the people who should put on races designed to bring the best older skaters in the world together.

So I usually try to be cautious and always call this by the proper title, a “Masters International” record. But ALL the European skaters who congratulated me called this a “World Record”. So maybe, in my heart, I can let it be that, even if my mouth says something else.

After a round of conversation & back slapping, I got back to the business of warming up properly for my 1000m. It’s really easy to just sit around and chat, and after good races, that is what you want to do. But rinks are COLD, and the body needs to shake out the effort you have just made. So I like getting on the stationary bike, and doing 2-3 maximum RPM sprints & break a brand new sweat. Also it gives you a chance to do the mental visualization of seeing yourself execute perfect technique in the perfect race, over and over.

So now its time for the 1000m, They call myself and German good fella Jens Kroll (I know him from my first trip to Europe) to the line. There is a lot of oxygen in this lowland atmosphere. It’s time for another try at the “skate-to-die” maximum effort!

The 1000m is simply a sprint that is just a little too long, like the 400m running race in track and field, you have to start super hard, and then maintain maximum speed as your legs explode into a thousand flaming bits, it usually hits me about 200 meters to the finish .

When the gun goes off, I get off the line well, hit the tricky first corner and snap through it perfectly. Two arms till 250 meters, then one arm and drive, second corner goes well. I am at maximum speed in the backstretch, in the third corner it starts to hurt. The picture here is from my fastest 1000m at Olympic trials, but at basically the same moment.

Unusually early pain! crap! When I feel it in the 3rd corner, that is not good. I make myself sit lower and drive. I get the bell for the final lap. The 4th, and second to last corner is crucial in the 1000m, spectators can’t see it, but a radar gun would tell you this is where most skaters begin to slow down. So you have to really nail this turn like the race ends right there. I try, and it’s a ragged effort that somehow gets power into the ice.

There are so many masters racing here, they have had to run another pair of racers at the same time. It’s called a quartet start. I come out of the turn, and I am already catching the quartet who 200 meters behind me! My legs are cooked, I miss full weight shift on a few of the strokes, the final corner is completely ugly, and tunnel vision is taking over for the final 50.

I cross the line and there is no time on the scoreboard!! They are not running electronic timing for the 1000m! It is many long minutes till someone announces the time 1:15.71!! Another record, and this is 2.9 seconds faster than the previous record! I am thrilled! And happiness floods me in a much stronger way than after the 500. This truly has been the season of the 1000m for me. Here is the final results sheet. Mark Chrysler had an excellent 1000, super solid technique, and finished first in his age group, and 3rd overall. We Americans are pretty good sprinters, at all ages. I am coughing from this effort for the next several hours, it always amazes me how much you can wreck your body in a shade over a minute.

A European Master congratulates me and says “Your first 200 was very solid, but you were somewhat stiff in the last 200.” Ha! Every 1000m is like that for me!!

Oddly enough, this very respectable Hamar time would have landed me 12th of 19 in the 1000m Norwegian Single Distance Championships, very similar to the 12th of 17 that I was at the US Single Distance Championships in Milwaukee this October!

Thanks for reading, I race again tomorrow, and since this is a single distance competition, tomorrow I am simply gonna take ever risk I can in that 500m final inner turn, and try to go faster!

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Filed under: on the road, sweat

Wireless bandwidth whore than I am, I am killing time and writing from the Minneapolis airport, I just wanted to let my brother know, that so far my bad airport karma is temporarily at bay!!

Look at the size of this plane!! A few moments after I took this picture, this huge machine rolled away from the gate, roared into the sky, and is now on its way to Tokyo with a belly stuffed full of 400+ people, thousands of gallons of jet fuel, mountains of luggage, and who knows how much commercial cargo. All traveling at about mach .8/550mph.

Astonishing…. Look at the tiny dude beneath it! No matter how old I get, there is some part of me that is still 10 years old and simply loves huge machines. However as an adult, I now have a clearer idea of the magnitude of multiple human lives that dreamed, created, built, improved, & maintained things like this giant plane. Somehow that just deepens the wonder and strangeness of it all. It kind of looks like a fish from this angle. One very big fish!

How many thousands of miles am I traveling for a grand total of 11 minutes of skating fast in a circle? My own dreams, my own small inspirations, this tiny digital dollop of words, all riding within machines that are even more powerfully odd & improbable than anything I could ever create in a hundred lifetimes. Here is the startlist for the races in Hamar. A lot of other really fit people, all riding their own blade-centric dreams, are also traveling as well, check out the number of older studs doing 5k’s & 10k’s!

Onward across the pond!!!

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Filed under: on the road

I am very tired, body & soul, my brother has been blogging about this race weekend like a crazy man, and provides some interesting perspectives. I am so thankful for him, even if he picks on me (it’s payback for our youth, and I deserve it).

Here are some statistics & thoughts on how the Can-Am races went for me, as compared to the previous 3 times I have competed in Calgary.

The pic below is me blasting off the line in my second 500, you can even see the upper hip flexors in my right leg bulging through my skinsuit, as I drive that right leg forward, thanks Powercranks!!!

Top Blade Training Camp, Summer 2002
500: 41.26

Can-Am 2003
500: - 38.84 - 39.19 - 38.69
1000: - 1:19.1 - 1:18.17

Can-Am 2004
500: - 37.79 - 37.5 - 37.41
1000: - 1:18.2 - 1:17.02

Can-Am 2005 (the last 2 days)
500: - 37.40 - 37.33
1000: - 1:16.08 - 1:15.36

There is a definite curve of improvement here, yet I am sad with these results, unsure of so many things. I had desperately hoped to break into the 36’s in the 500m, I almost expected it, continuing my traditional Can-Am 1+ second 500m improvement. But the ice was slower than at previous Can-Am’s, and more importantly, my corner technique was more Herman Munster than Ninja Puma. Olympic trials are 33 days from today, and I need to chop almost a second off the 500 (and that is a lot) if I want to reach my goals.

I am certainly happy with the 1000m improvements, and I think that yesterday’s 1:15.36 is the best 1000 I have ever skated. My personal best is only .1 faster, and that was on a scary fast ice day in Salt Lake.

In the pic here, a few moments after my 1000, as I am leg-locked, heaving and retching to myself through a haze of lactic acidosis, I let my brother behind the video camera know how truly satisfied I am.

But my 1000m will never be truly OUTSTANDING vs the big dogs who gallop 1000’s between 1:07 and 1:12. Whereas I think hidden within my unrealized technique, genetics, & individual psychology, there is a scary good 500 lurking, I just need to keep focused, & let the speed come to me.

The odd sport that is the subject of this blog completes me in fundamental ways (I am sure many of the skating gypsies who read this know what I mean). Even the challenges, uncertainties, ups and downs, I would rather strive & lose than couch surf. I would rather be wise from a soul filling failure than happy and unvaryingly empty.

I wish I could truly record what skating feels like, post that here in a format you all could replay in your kinesthetic/proprioceptive cerebrums. Although I love cycling, and the feeling of going for a long ride on a hot day is wonderful, I never forget that I am straddling a gangly, cabled, clicking machine. But skates disappear, and I am simple, free, a creature of pure flight & focus.

Find the thing you have a knack for, something you are good at, something you love, and something where “work” is a joy. Find this thing, and throw your entire soul into it; good things will happen. From my juncture of 34 years old, feet in several worlds, this seems to be the key to living a happy life.

I am not sure if it matters what the pursuit itself is. The list of possibilities is endless. I think in my own skating obsession I might be getting close to the maximum of speed that my body can do, it fills me with a feeling like riding an elevator traveling too fast, and waiting for the jarring crash or U-turn slingshot back the other way.

Thanks for reading, writing this made me feel a lot better. I was riding that elevator violently up and down all yesterday.

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Filed under: on the road, sweat