Zen and the Art of Speedskating

It wasn’t as though I was nervous about winning or losing. It was… I would get nervous about the fact that I was… every time you race, you’re racing against the clock and you got to be able to dig deep and I got nervous about how much suffering and how much it was going to hurt during the race.
-Eric Heiden

I think of the Lyrics to that REM song, “Everybody Hurts“. Tonight is the Men’s Olympic 1500m, arguably the most painful speedskating event there is. The last lap is always agony, even for the best there has ever been.

p.s. thanks to US national team coach Ryan Shimabukuro, who alerted me in the comments that this is probably Dan Immerfall, not Eric Heiden, in this photo from the 1980 games. Thanks Ryan.

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Filed under: Quotes

Sometimes there is an actor who really strikes at the core of something essential during a role, and becomes part of popular culture afterwards. Pat Morita just passed away at 72, he was astonishing as Mr. Miyagi in the movie The Karate Kid. (check out the list of 103 other films he acted in).

Here is my favorite quote from the movie:

Miyagi: Now, ready?
Daniel Larusso: I guess so.
Miyagi: [sighs] Daniel-san, must talk. Man walk on road. Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk down middle, sooner or later, get squished [makes squish gesture] just like grape. Same here. You karate do “yes,” or karate do “no.” You karate do “guess so,” [makes squish gesture] just like grape. Understand?
Daniel Larusso: Yeah, I understand.
Miyagi: Now, ready?
Daniel Larusso: Yeah, I’m ready.

here is a page of excellent quotes from the Karate Kid, and here are some more.

This quote is true for many things, not just Karate, There is so much baloney about martial arts out there (Bullshido is a good word for it, practiced liberally at McDojos everywhere), and admittedly even the book this blog was named after has FUNDAMENTAL flaws in it, mostly because the author and the Japanese archery master he studied with did not share a language, so mistranslations of concepts abound (a long and good read about this is here, this link is a .pdf file download). Even so, the book Zen in The Art of Archery has become truth, both in Europe and Japan.

Here is my thought for the day: If enough people read a mistranslation as truth, and then practice something like Kyu-Do (trans: “the way of the bow”) and find their own truth, is it still false? If you receive a map to buried treasure, and the map contains lots of mistranslated directions, but when you dig in the specified place you still find treasure, is the map still wrong?

People see/read their own truths into art, books, movies, speedskating, religious texts. However, there is a lot in that sometimes cheesey Karate Kid movie that is still valid, not just about Karate, but about humanity, (somehow, I think of that other mid-80’s movie, “The Breakfast Club” while writing that line, I betray my age here…) Why do I call The Karate Kid cheesey? well, of course anyone with a few months of karate training, (on a beach) can go to an intensely competitive tournament and win first place vs extremely talented people who have dedicated their lives to training… oh, and your master gives you a restored classic car too.

Yet I am frequently reminded of “wax on, wax off”, or of this opening quote when I question my commitment to that intense art form of racing a 500m, I find the 500 almost like trying to do a Kata REALLY FAST and ABSOLUTELY PERFECTLY.

I found an interview with Pat Morita that was very interesting. Evidently, his everyday speaking voice has NO trace of any accent. This was a man with serious talent.

Q: Can you still do karate?
A: I never was able to do karate. That’s calling me a good actor. I act like I can do anything.

Q: You faked it well.
A: Thank you. Well, we had some trainings, some really hardass training prior to the movie. And then of course, before each one, we’d get back into it again.

Q: Do Kids still come up and say, “Mr. Miyagi?”
A: All over the world. I was in London about five months ago and “Oh yeah.” This is a very familiar face now.

p.s. check out the comment my Father made on this post, imagine that something you have said IS someone else’s mistranslated treasure map!

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Filed under: Quotes, from home

Kick start the golden generator
Sweet talk but don’t intimidate her
Can’t stop the gods from engineering
Feel no need for any interfering
Your image in the dictionary
This life is more than ordinary
Can I get 2 maybe even 3 of these
Come from space to teach you of the Pleiades
Can’t stop the spirits when they need you
This life is more than just a read thru

The Red Hot Chili Peppers, from their song “Can’t Stop”

This was playing at the rink yesterday, I am just about 10% sick right now, and was suffering badly during easy laps (but I finished the workout, dammit!). “Kick start the golden generator” and “This life is more than just a read through”, these lyrics kept me going. It’s amazing how music affects the soul in vulnerable moments.

& Thanks to all who commented on the last post. It’s November, wow…. Olympic trials begins 56 days from today!

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Filed under: Quotes, from the coffee shop

“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

Boreas: the Greek god of the north wind, is speaking:

“Force is what fits me, force! By force I drive the weeping clouds, by force I whip the sea, send gnarled oaks crashing, pack the drifts of snow, and hurl the hailstones down upon the lands. I, when I meet my brothers in the sky, the open sky, my combat field, I fight and wrestle with such force that heaven’s height resounds with our collisions and a blaze of fire struck from the hollow clouds leaps forth. I, when I’ve pierced earth’s vaulted passageways and in her deepest caverns strain and heave my angry shoulders, I put ghosts in fear, and with those tremors terrify the world … ’ With words like these or others no less high, he waves his wings and, as they beat, the whole world felt the blast and all the wide sea surged. Trailing his dusty cloak across the peaks, he swept the ground and was clothed in darkness.”

- Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.681 (this was written roughly 2,000 years ago)

Hurricane Katrina is battering the middle of the US, and last night a quick and sudden cold front swept through Utah from the north. Like wrestlers, the south wind (Notus) pushes in one place and the north wind (Boreas) pulled back in another. It was warm and still when I walked the dog at 10pm, yet at 3am the wind was roaring & gusting, the windows shuddering and the trees skittering like a crowd of worried people, a distinct cold in the air, waking jess and I. This morning it was chilly, brezzy unsettled air, a dim white haze to the sky burning off like tissue paper in blue sky fire.

High temp at 5pm yesterday, 100 degress, today, 72!

We are masters of so much due to our technological wonders, but we are still at the mercy of nature. We are not that far from the polytheistic wonderings of the Greeks and Romans, otherwise why do we name hurricanes? Why do so many watch the weather channel as if it’s a sport? It’s human habit to give a name to aspects of fate beyond our control.

A hundred thousand people probably have been made homeless, and hundreds killed by that soggy swirl of wind and water. There are costal communities that are simply “gone”. I think of my high school friend Jeremy Lyons, New Orleans resident, who was probably in the jaws of Katrina. This photo is a CBC photo of downtown New Orleans, remember, these bricks were moved by wind. When I visited Jeremy in New Orleans years ago, he was in walking distance of the water. I imagine he is ok, as he has too much talent & gravitas to be just washed away, no matter what gods are wrestling nearby, besides, higher powers usually like musicians. But when I hear that 30,000 people have taken refuge in the superdome, I hope he is not one of them.

Shifting gears a bit, there is no Greek myth that goes well with this: I crashed yesterday at top speed; I was doing the very last crossover step before the straightaway, and under the pressure of the turn (low 27 sec lap/33mph), my hips and shoulders were pulled out of line, so that when I put my right blade down making the transition from turning to straightaway strokes, it was not pointed in the precisely correct direction, it threw me onto the ice immediately. I slid diagonally up the straightaway for 50 meters, and gently bounced off the padded wall. It could have been really bad if I had made that mistake a few moments earlier at the apex of the turn, as I would have gone straight into the wall wearing 17.5 inch machetes (skates) on my feet.

The cause of the crash was really all the fatigue I have built up over this last training cycle, I was too tired to hold my technique together properly. But everything means something along the interconnected web we walk during our days, and this crash was a warning to not become to confidant, to appreciate everything I have this very moment, both past accomplishments & present health. It could be taken away in a second. Admittedly this crash was my fault, not like a no-fault hurricane, but where I fell was luck/fate/chance, just like where Hurricane Katrina came ashore.

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Filed under: Quotes, from the coffee shop