Zen and the Art of Speedskating

The last post was pretty dark & morose, so I will balance it with the happiness I have today.
It was beautiful again outside! 61!! Jessica and I had a blast playing Frisbee in the warmth! I have also gotten lots of great comments and recconected with old friends due to my post the day of 2 peters, and also, I see my brother told a funny story in his blog, about me & pumpkins & a hailstorm. I honestly I can’t remember this story happening, but it sounds like the kind of weird stuff that I do.

I spoke to my coach Boris today, he had read my last post and was worried about me. We talked for a while and he thinks that this training is just exposing certain weaknesses in my specific low skating position strength. Skating is a great sport, but the super deep knee bend position that one must hold to go fast is quite awkward. I am strong, but not skate position strong, and this training reveals that weakness. Ultimately Boris is worried about me getting injured as my body adjusts, and told me some cautionary tales. Yet I feel pretty good under the training load. My body is adapting to become better at skate specific angles; it’s the mind that is still fighting the stress. I am going to experiment with a different eating pattern pre-jump workout, maybe that will help. Boris told me to really make sure my easy days are really easy. So my muscles are fully recovered for jump days. Therefore with encouragement from my coach, Frisbee “training” will be a good substitute for a structured bike ride today!!!

One of my teammates, Eva Rodansky, even called me a few days ago just to check up on me and make sure I was doing ok (she has been through the joys and sorrows of Boris-land, it brought her back to the world cup circuit! and here were times she was going nuts from the effort). I wish I could share more details about exactly the method and madness of Boris’ training program, but its confidential info. But come and train with me and the rest of the folks on the High 5 Speedskating Team! and you too can enjoy the agony and ecstasy! (and improvements!). If that sounds like a plug for a great coach, it is.

My father has been in town the last few days. I am so happy to have him around, Jess says I get this goofy smile when I am around my family. I think dad and I are very similar except for the following details;

I just am 15% smaller and 15% louder.

I also have 30% less pure brain horsepower than dad, but am 30% more spontaneous.

35% less well read but 15% more in touch with redhead attitude.

I have 70% more precise hand eye foot co-ordination, but 98% less effective brain mouth co-ordination.

He reads 90% of the whole new york times every day, I read 50% of the editorial page.

I am 70% more likely to leap before looking than dad, but I am also 40% more likely to have fun doing it, even if the leap ends badly.

I am 85% less knowledgeable about baseball, but 50% more current on music.

He has 30% more freckles than me, yet I am probably in the sun 30% more than he is.

Dad has at least 70% more years in academia than I do, but I have 100% more miles on my car delivering pizza!

We are probably roughly equal in lifetime cycling mileage, he never raced, but did dozens of century rides in the 70’s & 80’s

We can talk for hours and hours in utter contentment, and afterwards I find myself quoting him all the time. It’s always wonderful to see him.

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Filed under: sweat

Is it silly, to constantly celebrate the oncoming warmth? this was a very, cold, long winter… and seeing sun, the flowers coming up, to be in shorts again, to go for my easy bike workout this morning and be comfortable, not a frozen andrewsicle by the end (hard russian jump day tomorrow, so today is easier than pie, today’s workout is about tomorrow, really). Flowers are up all over the place, and I will celebrate as long as I am still astounded to see them. The glacier of winter can crawl into your heart, days like today help melt it.

Today is the day of multiple Peters, Peter #1 is my inline skating friend Peter Doucet, he is a webmaster/great guy/candian inline stud, he commented on my blog yesterday, and it made me smile to see his name. I was walking to my favorite coffee shop, thinking about Peter #1, and then I ran into Peter #2, Peter #2 is Peter Ozolins, bike racer/longtime friend friend of many racing travels. He was coming back from a 2.5 hour ride, and we chatted for a bit.

Both of them are unique, in their life stories and their passions, and are worth writing about here.

Peter #1, Peter Doucet is a true free spirit, a barrel chested quebecois redhead with travel & hip music & speedskating rampaging in his veins, veins powered by a heart that must be as big as a truck tire. Peter Doucet does not come off as serious when you first meet him, at first impression he is funny, charismatic, a live wire of freedom & passion. Many talk about living free, but are too timid in their own lives to actually be free, Peter is a free soul, no question about it.

But I think because of this part of his nature, some people forget to appreciate the serious and accomplished Peter. The job he does with Peters Inline Racing Web Pages is spectacular in its scope (he updates content all the time!! can I tell you how hard that is!), he runs so many races, organizations, and other skate related stuff, (check out his bio) and on top of that, he is one of Canada’s top inline speedskaters, represents Canada at worlds year after year. Ice and inline, he skates it all. They day I realized that this niche sport of speedskating would be significantly less & somehow soulless without him, that was the day that I believe I suddenly recognized the real Peter, the bounce of the peter “whoot! whoot!” moment suddenly replaced by a serious cornerstone of the US and Candian inline scene (and world scene).

Anyway, I was thinking about Peter #1, when Peter #2 rides up, 10:30am and he is just finished with his 2.5 hour ride.

Peter #2 is Peter Ozolins (here is a link to his website) Imagine a curly blond greyhound, around 6’2” with calm blue eyes and a soft voice, and who rides a bike like he has a gravity-defying rocket strapped to his back. That is Peter O, he oozes athlete. Search for him on google, and you get pages and pages of results.

I met him when we both first started bike racing back in the dark ages of the early 90’s, back when I was 18 and he was 12. Even then, Peter could simply blow my doors off. A tremendous athletic talent, thin as an arrow, he threw his soul completely into the fires of bike racing. He lived and raced in Europe/France in his teens, and won the New York State Junior cycling championship. We all thought he was headed to be a pro, he had the tools and had made the sacrifices. He once stayed with me in Colorado during a spring cross-country racing/training trip, and was simply frighteningly strong. Even while not acclimated to the altitude, he placed 2nd in the nutcake hard Boulder Roubaix in the ferocious colorado cat III’s.

But one day later that year, speeding his bike down a steep hill on a typical everyday rainy Ithaca day, a car suddenly pulled out in front of him from a side street, as he reached for the brake levers he recounted thinking “wow, these won’t help very much”.

He broke dozens of bones, ribs, hips & arm, was in a coma, and then a wheelchair for six weeks afterward. His father told me he thought Peter was going to die. I think the next years were very hard for him, as the accident changed him in many ways. Gone was the ultra-confident cocky neo-pro, He got his college degree in photography, was a firefighter in the pacific northwest, built docks & decks on cayuga lake, but the bike called him again.

One you have touched the finish line first a few times, it becomes magnetic, addictive, and Peter has touched first place more than a few times. Fighting through the wind, clawing through the struggling swarm of the peloton, endless training days and being away from family for long stretches training in warmer climes, the bike keeps calling. I always wonder what his goals are, now that pro-hood will not happen for him, but I have always admired his drive, He is hardcore this season again, and has repeatedly ridden around Cayuga lake already this year (its about 100 miles) in rain & snow & crap, sacrificing to be fast.

So many sacrifices to be fast.

Both Peters are in their late 20’s, on that difficult cusp of full time racer vs full time career. They probably will never meet, although they have both probably raced the Chris Thater races in Binghamton on the same day. It’s too bad, they would have a lot to talk about, about determination, drive, athlete passion/poverty, about relationships & if its easier to date other athletes or not, about being on the road, about sacrificing to achieve excellence in things that will never be celebrated on the front pages of newspapers, about being unique fellows who have both chosen to take the paths that are less traveled by,

in my eyes, that makes all the difference…

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

I am depressed this morning, moody and grim. I blame art. I have imbibed lots of wonderful art this weekend, and I blame that. On Friday Jess and I met some of her vet school friends, and saw the phenomenal, amazing acapella group bc3 (as well as the very good Ithaca College group Voicestream) then later in the weekend we went to see the movie sideways, and on top of that, I am reading the excellent novel Middlesex (after just this last month finishing an equally terrific novel, wicked, the life and times of the wicked witch of the west)

Literature, cinema, and music have combined to place me in that introspective state that, like a sucking ocean undertow, just can bring you down till the salt water wins. Some people find the effect of art uplifting, fundamentally, I don’t. I can’t simply see something, be moved, and then get on with my life, it continues to move me as my mind chews on it. Images work their way into the coils of my brain, and stay there, like a flashbulb of a camera. This is also why I don’t watch the X-files with my wife (who is a huge fan) it gives me nightmares, almost every time.

Brief history: In first grade, I wrote a poem that blew my teacher away, and for the next two decades, my public and internal identity was as a writer. I went through high school, undergrad, and grad school getting a great literary education. Honing my craft, and seeing a life mapped out in front of me as a teacher & practicing artist.

But in high school as I was winning literary contests, true joy for me was playing hockey, diving in front of slapshots to block them, taking booming slapshots, and slamming into the boards along with other slathering crazies like myself.

In undergraduate school, as I was being published right and left, accepted almost every time I submitted writing to a publication, true joy for me was the rainy New England collegiate cycling races, and the muddy cyclo-cross racing in the fall. The pic here is of the “usual suspects” of the Hampshire College cycling team after the UMass cyclo-cross race. From L to R is Chris, Able, Earl, Donnie, Me (with smashed bike) and Evan (wearing the rubber gloves he always used to race in during foul weather, note his gap toothed smile from a bike crash earlier that year).

In grad school, I won Colorado State Universities highest literary award, I was president of the organization of graduate student writers, and graduated with distinction from my final exams. But the sharpest memory of my time there was the day I decided to cycle from my house at 5,000 feet in Fort Collins to Cameron pass at 10,200 feet and back. It was 142 miles round trip. I loved every moment of it. Descending home from the pass, I was over 50mph for about 10 minutes, incredible, passing back over what had taken me hours to climb.

The 43.84 seconds of my first 500m race in lake placid, where I suddenly discovered I had real talent at something athletic, and that someday I would skate Olympic trials (it was obvious immediately), suddenly gave me internal permission to think of myself in context of what I loved to do. It changed everything.

I still write a lot (here, for example) maybe now even more than I did when I was a true “student” of it. But I don’t create “art” anymore, I have not completed a poem in years that drinks high octane draughts from the flagon of the muse (meaning: that I think is really any good).

But I am happier now, much happier. Hmmm, its noon, I need to go and do my Russian Jump program workout. Almost 3 hours of intense working out! but when I am done, I will feel like Sisyphus who finally pushes the rock over the top of the hill. With poetry, that rock never reaches the top.

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Filed under: from home

Where do you lead me, my dear dog/blog, beside the rushing waters of glinting bandwidth? Where do the words beckon? How does the world flow, in and outside of my own self?

I like what blogging does to the mind.. A professor once said to me that a poem is the residue from poetry… Let me translate that from the academeese: the moment of inspired composition, the thrilling moment of writing something new & getting it right, is poetry. The poem what comes from that moment, the poem is just like the track a wildebeest leaves in dirt, but its not the beast itself.

So what is blogging? Why is it so infectious that suddenly we novelize our lives, and observe and think aloud on paper.. Why is it that my brother, my friend chris, my buddy Ulises, and another friend of mine who I admire but publishes VERY anonymously, so I shouldn’t link to her, suddenly find the desire to touch that hotwire of the wildebeest of blog (maybe it’s a different animal for others, maybe a dog or bird or bison…)

I don’t know, but its beautiful today, the sun is glinting off of fall creek, my dog Lilly is so happy to be outside her tail is almost spinning circles with every joyful step. Spring is coming, poking through the thawing ground. My own life just feels right today, both in the logical and illogical realms.

From the logical side of my life, I took a look at my projected finances this next coming year, as I aim on training close to full time to gived my best shot at Olympic trials. I now have an earnings target I must shoot for this year with my web design work, its high, but not unachievable!

Illogically I did my monstrously hard, Boris dictated, Russian Jump program yesterday, and my body really liked it. It was hard, but I can feel strength improvement in the burning throne of the sprint-centric skating posture. Also, at that grandest level of illogicality, I feel loved today, from many directions. My wife, friends, clients, all think I am a worthwhile use of organic material, the sun smiles today, and I do too!

And yes, I thought up most of this while walking Lilly. Dog is my co-pilot for today.

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Filed under: from the coffee shop