Zen and the Art of Speedskating

It’s been an exciting weekend here in Salt Lake, and a busy one.

Races this weekend were… interesting, with the World Cup in town next weekend, some of the top sprinters in the world used this weekends race as a warm-up. It was kind of “world cup light”. It was fun sharing the ice with these astonishing athletes. Here are the results.

During my own races, I skated another 500m personal best, 37.08, .3 faster than ever before, but I was disappointed about it, as after a good start, good first corner, and great backstretch, I flounced through the last corner, almost crashing in my second crossover step and barely keeping it together…. I crossed the finish line pissed, as I knew I should have busted into the 36’s… Kip Carpenter was giving me some good natured ribbing after the race, “Where was the howl of joy? Dude! That’s a PB! You should be happy!” Press the play button and see what I mean. Jessica was taping this from one of the stands installed for the coming world cup, a cool thing about this angle is that you can get something of a feel of what 35mph on skates looks like, especially on the backstretch. You can hear her reaction to my stumbling final corner.

After that 500m, for my 1000m I was full of determination to set a PB or die trying, and I blasted off the line and reached the 600m mark .6 faster than ever before, absolutely flying… but the last 400m were almost as fast and fun as dragging 15 cinder blocks through a grease fire in the nude via a rope tied to my nuts, well, not quite that much fun, and somewhat more painful…. I slowed down terribly on the final 400m, to end up almost a half second slower than my PB (how does a 4.1 second speed drop sound from my first lap to the second! Ouch! It should be 2 or less). It was a skating induced case of complete rigor mortis lactic acid poisoning, I did metaphorically die trying! A friend emailed me that on friday night, she dreamed I had died during a 1000m race, and that I blogged about it after death, and people were wondering how I still had internet connectivity!

The top skaters were throwing themselves into their own fires as well, there were quite a few athletes with hacking coughs, glazed eyes, & funny looking walks after the races were over. Why do we do this sport again?

My good friend Jannicke, a Norwegian training in Salt Lake, took this picture of me standing on the start line of the 1000m, trying to relax before they call me to the start, this picture shows my weird lower back scoliosis quite well -look at my shoulders, this is what “standing straight” feels like to me.

There is no point I am trying to make with this photo, except maybe that chubby redheads with glasses, asthma, allergies, scoliosis, and weird reading habits can turn out well in the end. I am actually really glad the my spinal curvature bends the way it does, it forces me down and into the G-forces of the turn, if nature had curved me the opposite way, skating constant left turns would be much more difficult. Flip a coin, I was lucky.

Jannicke has a really nice website actually, You can find it here at http://www.jannickem.com, and she took some fantastic picture of the weekends racing. Her website is her own work, and follows her transition from figure skating to speed skating. She is quite happy to only have the electronic eye measuring her performance now, instead of a panel of subjective judges!

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Filed under: Audio/Video, sweat

Cars, travel, pets, great coffee & paradise bars at Alterra’s on the Wisconsin Lakeshore, we live in a culture & time where so many of our pleasurable & memorable experiences have a price tag associated with them, even if it’s just burning gasoline driving to the state park to shuffle your feet through autumn leaves. Of course, the best things in life are still free, but a lot of cool things aren’t.

Quite frequently I have had people ask me how much my skates cost. I usually do tell, but I always immediately launch into one of my verbal convolutions about money & value & experience & travel & friendships that somehow never comes out the way I intend. So here is my shot at getting it right.

The central concept I want to invoke runs something like this: You can attach a dollar sign to most of the things we do as 21st century inhabitants. But what is the value & use these items & experiences add to our lives? Examining and being aware of our dollar habits, and how it flavors our emotional life is the crucial awareness that explains the lengths skaters & other athletes go to in pursing their sports.

I can give an answer to what my Canadian Van Horne skating boots & Dutch Viking blades cost me, roughly $1200 (2002 prices, since the dollar has tanked, it would be more now…) That is a significant chunk of change, but compared to what many bicyclists spend on bikes, or what ANY SPORT WITH A MOTOR costs, this is cheap for Olympic caliber equipment that will last for years. Even average runners can wear out 3-4 pairs of $100+ shoes a year. In 3-4 seasons, that costs as much as my custom carbon fibre speedskates.

But the price of skates is not speedskating, and indicates nothing of the value of sport & your own personal experience. Instead of asking obsessed/intense speedskaters what their skates cost, if you want to reveal the charged intersection of the spiritual/financial hotwire, instead ask them “how much have you spent on travel to get to races/practice in the last few years?”

Usually the response will be a rolling of the eyes, a hesitation, a groan, and then finally something like “damm, I don’t want to know”.

Then follow up your question with, “Where have you traveled? Do you have friends in faraway places? What are some of your road-trip memories from races? Who are the good people you never would have met unless you did this crazy sport?”

Then the groan is replaced by a smile, and the flood of true value comes rushing forth.

Every skater has their stories, their connections. There are about 10 different places I can think of where I if I showed up to inline or ice skate, I would be greeted like a valued member of the wandering skate-gypsy tribe; and I have developed strong friendships that go far beyond skating, friendships forged in the emotional smelter of racing that are now something else. Most skaters are like that too, since the community is so small, you develop strong connections. I started writing names of good folks I think of and miss. The list quickly became 30+ people, but I decided not to include it here, because I could barely scratch the surface of this eccentric & good-hearted tribe of blade and wheel.

But there is one name I will mention in closing, because true value & travel sometimes results in serendipitous connections with old friends completely unrelated to skating. I have known Satya since I was 13. We went to middle/high school together at ACS, & then attended undergraduate just down the road from each other (Hampshire for me, Smith for her). These days Satya is a smart fish in a big think tank, working as an alternative energy analyst at COWS in Madison, Wisconsin. After I was done racing at US single distance champs a few weeks ago, we went out for brunch and had a wonderful multi-hour catch up on the past DECADE of our lives. Circuitously I have my moth-like obsession with skating & the money I spent to travel to that race, to thank for it. That is true value, & worth every penny.

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Filed under: from home

Whoever made the voodoo doll of me, CUT IT OUT!! I get your point! I will try to be a better person! Jeepers creepers!

I suspect amateur voodoo because I have been battling annoying things, not true injuries that would indicate professional work. My right knee and lower left back hurt for 2 weeks, luckily for me ibuprofen is stronger than voodoo, but then once those healed I have been about 15% sick for this past week. Not enough sick to miss workouts, but definitely enough sick to be miserable. I am constantly coughing up colorful phlem-chunks (one hit the computer screen as I wrote this) + dabbing a nose that runs socially inappropriate amounts.

But on the good side, I feel I am skating better and better. They are starting to shave the ice down to be REALLY thin for the world cups. You can really tell, it’s starting to get scary fast.

The accel pictured above (on the warm-up track, mind you) had that same blend of fear and joy one would get riding a performance motorcycle on that crazy twisty stretch of I-95 that runs through the northern part of New York City, or maybe the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Or picture any thrilling-terrifying road! DC Beltway? The Autobahn? That yellow line in the pic is a rope marking the inner boundry of the ice, and my head is over that line. I have my same old technical problems in this pic, flat back, tipped shoulders, however I am really happy about the drive direction of both skate blades, I am getting a lot out of each push & finally using the big butt I was born with.

It’s funny how skaters say things like “hey the ice feels fast today”“ but we never say “wow, this is some fast air”. The reason that altitude-located rinks have all the world records is simply that with thin air, there is less resistance to your forward momentum, there is less oxygen to use too, but that is not as much of a handicap as the thin air is a plus.

Also, the daily fluctuating barometric pressure of the outside conditions affects athletes skating times dramatically. Some coaches in Milwaukee have told me that people skate their best times when it’s blizzarding outside the rink. This is why there are some race days that EVERYONE is setting PB’s. When Ice and Air combine, watch out!

There is a storm moving through now, the mountains are getting hammered with snow. So it’s the best of both worlds in Salt Lake right now, fast ice and fast air!

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Filed under: from home