Zen and the Art of Speedskating

Posted on 24 Oct 11:01 pm

Day 3 & 4, US single distance champs

You can see the results of Sunday and Monday’s races listed here.

Sure, there were incredible results this last weekend, with Chad Hedrick & Shani Davis both breaking a pair of track records, that is what will go in the media. But what did it feel like to watch a whole slew of talented athletes willingly subject themselves to the punishment of the 3k/5k/10k?

As a pure sprinter, when I watch distance skaters I am always awed by the train wreck of beautiful technique meeting absolutely horrific suffering. I thought that I would do something that emphasized the human experience behind the often dry listing of results, every second in every race was earned by a pounding heart & burning legs. It’s easy to forget that.

I spent much of the flight home to salt lake messing around with some movies I took of the races, and this is the result. Enjoy!

(And no, that is not me in any of these photos, even thought that is my skinsuit on my friend Kirk)…. press the play button to get this show rolling.

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Filed under: Audio/Video, on the road

Day 2, US single distance champs

I am exhausted, happy, and it’s late… so this will be short…

Many of the folks I talked to agree that there is more tension & intensity in this weekend’s races today than at Nationals last year. An Olympic year changes everything. What will Olympic trials be like?!?!?

Full results from todays events are here. Casey Fitzrandolph broke the 500m track record, and Shani Davis broke the 1500m.

I need to go to bed, but I am very happy, In my day 2 500m I skated a 37.77, within .02 of my own PB here at the Pettit, and it felt fast. 2 of my 3 races here were quite satisfying, close to the maximum of what I can do right now. Thanks to everyone who wished me well here in the comments section, and in personal emails. It really means a lot to me. I might never skate at warp 9 like the Olympians do, but warp 7 feels amazing, and is enough. I will fly home on Monday satisfied.

Maybe I am guilty of setting myself internal goals rather than external ones. Maybe I am racing emotionally “in my own lane” just like I physically race on the track, only occasionally crossing the path of others.

There are some skaters who are going to bed tonight probably pretty upset that they were not in that top 5 that makes the Fall World Cup team, upset that they have spent a huge chunk of their lives on this particular skill, and today did not measure up the way they wanted.

I don’t envy them. Maybe it’s because I had 31 years of life before I ever touched long track ice, maybe it’s because of different expectations, but I am quite content with my 14th place of the 22 500m racers today, in both my 500m races, I lined up against guys wearing the USA, and even though I lost both races, I was there, and belonged there (my pair today was Tyler Goff, and hey Tyler, nice race, fantastic backstretch… you have improved a ton this year, and I know you read this blog!).

After watching the 500m races, and seeing skaters blast through the final inner turn at insane velocity and lean angles, My friend Kirk’s dad said “wow, I know way too much about physics to watch this”

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Filed under: on the road

Posted on 21 Oct 03:57 pm

Day 1, US single distance champs

Shani Davis had an amazing day today, taking 2nd place in the 500m to Casey Fitzrandolph, and then knocking a full second off of his own Pettit national ice center rink record in the 1000m. He skated a 1:09.14 in his 1000m race.

He was paired with Joey Cheek, Joey also broke the old rink record by .3 The ice did not feel really fast to me today, and that makes these times even more astonishing.

I missed the start (I was still dazed from my own 1000m race only a few minutes before, hence the heavy breathing). This video is from the backstretch, and shows how closely matched these two amazing athletes were. See how close they come to each other in the crossover, and hear the coaches go ooooh!!

After the races were over, one of the top US sprinters said to me “Shani is either doing some amazing drugs, or we are watching the best speedskater in the world right now, maybe the best of all time. When was the last time a world allaround champion spanked Olympic medalist sprinters like this? Only one name comes to mind, Heiden, and that was not an era of specialization like this one is!”

Pretty strong words, we shall see what this season brings!

As for myself, my 500m felt rushed and imprecise, and slower than I hoped, 38.18. Weirdly enough I was paired with Chad Hedrick, and there was some good natured kidding around in the training room along the lines of “Chad better beat his own webmaster!” Chad skated a 36.76, and what he considers the finest final inner turn he has ever done in a 500m, and from my viewpoint on the outer, it was impressive.

My 1000m went much better, a huge sea level PB, 1:16.53, 1.8 seconds faster than I skated at nationals here last year. So I am content.

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Filed under: Audio/Video, on the road

Fortune Cookie

On I-93 between Chicago and Milwaukee, at the Oasis rest stop (the one that arches over the highway) I grabbed some Chinese food from Panda Express, and the fortune cookie fortune pictured below arrived with the meal.

I think this is the best possible prophecy that a speedskater could get right now, as the racing season is now truly underway, and the monstrously hard times/hard work of the summer tapers dramatically to the speedwork & hopeful joy of a successful racing season. With the short and long track racing seasons now truly underway, most athletes I know are feeling & hoping for this to some extent.

Even the lucky numbers mentioned have correlation:

I am 34
I use an 11 tooth cog when I am sprinting on my road bike
I skated a low 27 second lap today in training
42 is an important number, this link & this link talk about why
This is my 5th season racing long track
If I race well, I could possibly skate a 37 tomorrow.

(Numerology is a steaming pile of bunk, but fun to mess with)

I am not really superstitious, but I save good things, and this fortune is going in my wallet.

There were some intense faces at the Milwaukee oval today, & stress is rising like steam from some people. For folks who can make the US world cup team, especially the distance skaters, tomorrow is dreadfully important. In fact, the way qualification for the Olympic games is written, if an endurance skater doesn’t make the fall world cup team in the 3k-5k-10k, going to the games becomes an extreme longshot.

I have nothing at stake for this weekends races but my own internal barometer of self-esteem, no pressure other than what I put on myself (usually that is a lot). But in all seriousness, one thing athletes/motivated folks must do is create goals for themselves that are attainable; but that they have work REALLY hard to reach. You will never hear me fantasizing about going to the Olympic games, that’s unrealistic for me, and there are those who mess themselves up with unrealistic dreams & become bitter quitters. So I never talk about the Olympic games, but I do talk about taking consistent & tiny steps up this mountain I am climbing. Hard work/hard times fade to joy, that is all I am striving for.

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Filed under: on the road

Posted on 12 Sep 02:03 pm

Detroit Airport

What is it with flying and me? Is there some fundamentally busted part of my Karma that makes my traveling via air so prone to extended bouts of misery? I do enjoy the varied smorgasbord of airport people watching quite a bit, but today I am spending almost 12 hours in the Detroit airport, and I have had an overdose of:

Women in floral print jumpsuits & badly dyed blond hair
Fat guys in software company polo shirts
Couples who cant bear to be out of physical contact, next to the baggage claim
Precicely groomed men talking earnestly on cel phones with clients
Airline stewardesses with ponytails like perfect paintbrushes
Skinny Japanese tourists sleeping off jet lag in corners
Pale guys in flip flops, khaki shorts, & t-shirts from bars proclaiming vapid young alchololic attitude
$7 tuna fish sandwiches served by hardworking folks who make less than that per hour
and my favorite people watching gem of today; -a harried Northwest employee yelling into her cel phone as she rushes down a hall “Damm! I told her over and over! That is something an Embassy needs to approve!”.

Wow, maybe my day is not that bad after all. What would I look like in that unflattering peoplewatching searchlight?? hmmm…

Shambling grad student with a huge ass and coffee stained ibook.

At least there is wireless here, and a coffee spigot every 10 feet, I spent much of the day surfing pictures of the burning man festival, I am absolutely fascinated, maybe that will be my week vacation next year. hmmmmm….

I am looking forward to being home, looking forward to getting back to hard training. Ever miss work after a long vacation? Truly I needed this break, but am really rested & eager to go again. It’s been ass-busting training since April, but now there are only 3 more hard weeks of training then the competitive season will truly be here. A wise friend said to me once, “Things are best in their beginnings”. Once this season starts, all beginnings will truly be over, and I will get to weigh my self-esteem against the stopwatch again, and the days will fly by, each day descending rapidly to Olympic trials, I better not blink, or I will miss it.

Here is one of my favorite pieces of the Detroit airport. How many eyes have stopped to appreciate this work of splashy art? & how the water jets splash off/on/patterns/etc. Last time I was here, I tossed a euro in, today, just a quarter.

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Filed under: on the road

Traffic Calmed/Traffic Angry

Grammatically this sign implies that traffic here “has already been calmed”. How they do this is not mentioned. I am imagining this neighborhood does aerial spraying of the car population with sedatives, selective culling of the most aggressive of the automotive species by highly trained commandoes, or maybe they spike gasoline with something that makes the cars sluggish & not dangerous, (they are experimenting with sterilizing deer with bait set out in the woods, why not cars?).

And there are some cars in need of calming here too. After a delightful dinner with my insightful friend Kate, we were standing outside of Maxie’s Supper Club in the pleasant dusk. There was an intersection and train tracks next to Maxie’s, and a train was slowly making its way towards the intersection. Our stomachs were full of great food and we chatted along in a blissful post-dinner haze.

Suddenly we are jolted out of our conversation by a tremendous BANG.

A large green SUV has run a red light, and squarely t-boned a small red sports car. Glass and plastic bodywork scatter across the asphalt & for an instant, I think the train is going to hit the tangled cars, but they don’t slide onto the tracks. Wait staff pour out of Maxie’s calling 911 & waving a heavy-duty flashlight to direct traffic. A woman on a Vespa scooter, who was immediately behind the red car, pulls off the road, and then she runs to the window of the smashed sports car, where the driver is looking around, dazed, and he is holding his neck.

It’s at this moment when I have the sickening realization, that I KNOW the passenger of the red car, and the woman on the scooter. I know them quite well, actually. The anonymous suddenly becomes tremendously personal.

Luckily, in the final analysis, Ben was not seriously injured, I thank the dumb clockwork of chance also that Chris’s scooter was following Ben’s car, and not the other way around, or Chris would be dead/extremely seriously hurt…

Kate talked to the very upset driver of the green SUV, she was on the way to the hospital herself, her father is in critical condition, and she did not pay attention for a split second, or was distracted by the blazing headlight of the train, and did not see the red light.

There is something in the air right now, some ions of awful convergence. If folks have creative ideas of how to “calm traffic”, speak now!

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Filed under: on the road

Posted on 07 Sep 06:58 am

Break the wineglass towards Ithaca

My friend Jeremy, metioned in earlier posts has a story about him in the Raleigh NC NBC station. He’s a talented guy, and after 13 years living in New Orleans, is relocating to Boston.

as for me, I just came across this quote:

Here’s the new rule: Break the wineglass
And fall toward the glassblower’s breath
-Rumi, 12th century

In connection to this, I am back in Ithaca N.Y. for 5 days of reconnecting with friends, family, and recharging myself with that original/illogical voltage of origins. There is a place in each of us, a landscape that is home, no matter where we actually live. To my family, home will always be the rolling green hills of upstate NY. From Jamestown in the west where my mom spent her early years, to the boundary of Rockland/Orange County outside of NYC to the east, Upstate NY is where my direct ancestors have been since 1705 (as my brother talks about in his post “Ghosts”).

I certainly love the mountain west; I spent 8 years living in Colorado & who I am as an individual fits fully with life in the thin air & blue skies. But if I break that wineglass of the immediate me, and fall towards origins, that glassblowers breath is a cool, crisp day, shaping riotously green glacier-cut hills rising alongside the finger lakes. Hills wound with roads are so steep they make even the hardest bicycle racers weep and sneer, with trees meeting overhead in a tunnel of green. Yeah… home…

Sure, the weather in Ithaca is uniquely miserable 6-8 months a year, like living on the slopes of a receding, dirty glacier, but there are moments of clarity, Gimme Coffee, and days of astonishing beauty, especially in the early fall. When it comes to Ithaca, those days seems to be what lodges in the memory, more than the grey slush & bitter winds of March (well, it’s usually cruddy from mid-October to April).

Home is such a funny thing in people’s lives. These pictures were all taken today, driving around in the convertible Avis rented me (Avis rep: Mr Love, we are all out of the tiny cheap car you reserved, will a Chrysler Sebring convertible for the same rate be acceptable to you???)

The hills in this first photo rises a solid 1,200 feet from downtown Ithaca nestled between them to their true crest, in places it’s steeper than most can imagine. Just try….. did you?? not even close!! Unless you imagined 30-45 minutes on your bike, heart pounding like a jackhammer, out of the saddle clawing your way upward in your ego crusher tinyest gear.

Its soooo green here, lush & beautiful. Too bad winter hits so hard, & that for half the year it’s the beloved land of perpetual murk. Otherwise it would be paradise.

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Filed under: on the road, from the coffee shop

Bonneville Salt Flats

I will never bounce across the moon’s dusty surface, never ride my mountain bike down Olympus Mons on Mars, I will never speedskate across the frozen methane surface of Pluto, or see the great red spot of Saturn from inside the great red spot of Saturn. But that’s ok, I leave things like that to my great-grandchildren, I am content within my life to explore the places on planet earth that are just as weird, alien, and beyond the bounds of normal.

When I found out that the Bonneville Salt Flats, that featureless detritus of prehistoric ocean/current rocket-car playground, was only an hour+ from my front door, I just had to go there. To me the idea of riding with no road, trail, or visible guide except the horizon is quite compelling psychologically. Here is what I saw as I started out.

With all the pictures in this post, click on them to see a much larger version.

Certainly I have a ton of hard work in my life these days, and stress about an uncertain racing future, but I also have some freedoms that I won’t have 6 months from now when office cubicle world will reclaim me. Today’s 2 hours of cycling intervals (an easy day, in boris-land) could be done on the salt flats, All I had to do was convince myself to step out the door, into the car, and make use of this freedom. Sometimes that’s the hardest part, to simply to get out the door & use the freedoms available in ones life.

I arrived to discover stunning scenery, and that recent rains had turned the “packed salt concrete” to the riding consistency of a muddy field. It was not the lightning surface I had imagined. But still, it was cool to look down at the front tire and see it caked in salt. The Speedway itself was actually flooded with water, and I saw a few SUV’s splashing about with salt caked on their roofs (that’s gotta be as bad for a car as winter in Ithaca). So I headed across the sticky Salt flats towards the mountains, spinning my granny gear in the grabby salt-soil.

There were several obvious climate zones visible as I rolled across the desert, the expanse of the lifeless salt flat itself, a transition to desert dunes, a 50 foot wide zone of sinkholes, then a normal, sandy, rocky desert that became the foothills to the Silver Island Mountains. I rode through all of them, climbed into the saddle between two mountains, yet spent the bulk of my ride in the dune zone pictured here. The ground was quite hard, and it was amazing simply pedaling for mile after mile through this, and when my HR monitor beeped at me informing that it was time for another interval, it was perfect terrain for heart pounding high-speed dune slalom fun.

During one of my intervals, I saw something blast away from me between the dunes that looked like a cross between a mongoose, kangaroo, and a ground hugging cruise missile. As fast as my 15 years of bike racing can make a mountain bike go, this animal was scary fast & left me waaay behind, I did not get a good look at it. It wasn’t until I startled another into blastoff that I realized I was seeing a desert jack rabbit, antelope jack rabbit or black tailed jack rabbit to be precise.

When one thinks of rabbits, one thinks of the John Goodman of the rabbit world, domestic pets, what I saw rocketing among the dunes was the Michael Johnson of rabbits. Took my breath away with their agility. They even have disorienting markings on their ears that look like eyes staring back at you as they run. I did not see any high performance vehicles at the Bonneville salt flats, but I saw an animal that impressed me just as much.

The intervals began to wear on me, and I finally turned around in the dunes to head back & took this brief pic (yes mom, I wore my helmet, I just had to balance the camera on it).

To end this post, I saw this visage for a loooong time heading back to my car.

It would shimmer in an out of view depending on how the wind made the mirage bend and dance. The intervals were over and my body was tired, knowing that one of the littlest nibs shining out of this mirage was my car did not make it get closer to me any faster. There was salt caked all over me (not just my own salt, for once). I often say that racing & training is an amazing memory-making machine, today had some good memories.

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Filed under: on the road, sweat

Posted on 07 Jul 08:15 am

Homes in the Heart

Could you make a game winning pool shot facing this kind of distraction?

Well, this is my ol buddy Aaron Dimmitt, and his best efforts at weirdness not withstanding, I did make the shot after a few tries. Aaron and his brothers own Allsis, they provides great hosting services (you are viewing a site hosted by them) many of my web design clients are hosted there, and I heartily recommend this exceptional bunch of fellows.

Every place in this world has something that it does uniquely well, some aspect of life that is simply outstanding in its own way. In Fort Collins, Colorado, that hometown gift can be found while playing pool with good friends, & drinking micro-brew beer late into the night at Coopersmiths (ok, after my 3 hour workout that day, I managed about 1/3 of a glass before I felt ill). This is Aaron and his exceptionally cool girlfriend Laura. We laughed and laughed till our heads hurt from it.

I wondered in a previous post “How many “homes” does a heart have room for??”. (in my heart right now, its 5 so far) It’s a good, hard question, this last weekend Jessica were in Fort Collins, Colorado. I lived there for 8 years. It was interesting to be back, to suddenly reopen a Rorschach-esque street map of a town and the associated memories.

I had some of the hardest and most challenging years of my life in Fort Collins, but they really shaped who I am in a tremendously positive way, so I would not trade those hard times for anything, but even so seeing Fort Collins itself again was a mixed bag. It was good to be there with Jessica, for whom Fort Collins is the first two years of our relationship together, and her memories are much happier than mine. We really enjoyed driving by our first house near city park, and walking through Old Town. I walked with her memories this last weekend more than I did my own.

I also got to see my dear friends Evan and Susan, and their 2 kids, Ben and Ellie. As a very wise woman I know says: “Children are true wealth” Evan and Susan are quite wealthy, I have known Evan for 16 years (!!!!!!). Once we were 2 poor bachelors/bike-trash/racers living in a microscopic apartment with 6 bicycles. Now we are happily married men with big houses and waaay more to our lives than can be packed into a hatchback with a roof rack. He is a terrific father & small business owner (of the amazing Evan’s Front Range Salsa).

We stayed really late one night comparing what life is like for each one of us now. We compared the views from the radically different mountains we are climbing. In many ways, his life has changed more than mine has, as fatherhood is a bigger jump of horizons than my shift from being bike-trash to being skate-trash. I think that it takes a radically different kind of strength & endurance to be the father of a 3.5 and a 2 year old (even a super cute 2 year old like ellie here) than it does to try and be a world class speedskater, but at the end of our days, we are both men who crawl into bed exausted.

Evan, I am so glad to have met you that rainy, slushy day 16 years ago on that mountain bike trail in Massachusetts, how far we have come, and miles still to go, miles still to go.

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Filed under: on the road

Driving Pictures part II

Here are the last few pictures from the drive. Wyoming is a wonderful, weird place, with truly bizarre topography and rapidly changing climates. All of these pictures were taken within 3 hours of each other, on a 200-mile stretch of Interstate 80 near the Utah border.

Pulling into a rest stop, I saw this Gazelle on the side of the road; Lilly was VERY interested in the silent, calculating way of her wolf ancestors. We rolled 200 yards further down the road to the actual rest stop, and I was making a mental note to have a firm grip on Lilly’s leash, when I noticed the MASSIVE prairie dog town next to the rest stop. Lilly went normal dog ballistic this time, seeing all of the chittering faces popping up out of the sage brush, all taunting her in the high pitched & sophisticated language of prairie dog. Getting out of the car would have been an invitation to dog disaster, so I continued on.

Wyoming is insanely windy, and wind farms are as plentiful as hydropower is in the rain soaked east. These things are HUGE

its june, and its snowing, welcome to wyoming!

50 miles later, gorgeous sky