Zen and the Art of Speedskating

There is a rite of passage that many cocky US junior national team skaters have undergone out here in Utah, and I have heard this story from several different victims.

The story goes like this; a hotrod young gun signs up for a 500m time trial out here at the Utah Olympic Oval. They look at the start list and see that they are paired with a medium height, barrel-chested 50-ish fellow who speaks with a Russian accent and has just a touch of grey to his hair. They assume it will be no contest.

Once the gun goes off, they are shocked when the 50 year old blows them away in the race. Congratulations, you have just met Boris Leikin!

In fact, this happened just this past weekend, Boris was paired with a very good younger skater, Jeremy Cox, and here is Boris passing him in the final turn.

Happy Birthday Boris. You turn 53 today, and in the race pictured above, you skated a 38.72! only a few hundredths off of your all time personal best, and the next day’s 1000m you skated a very quick 1:17.58. I asked you how old do you feel, and you answered “hmmmm, about 35“.

You have qualified for, and will skate in, your 3rd Olympic trials twelve days from now, I wonder how many 50+ year olds are going to be competing in winter Olympic trials, in any sport? In the physical off ice tests we do, lifting or jumping, I can’t come close to what you can do.

And on top of that, you have an excellent brain, spot-on skating analytical ability, a unique approach to training, and even willpower to match mine! I was very lucky that last January you asked me to join the group of skaters you coach. I hope my technique doesn’t “hurt your eyes” as much as it did last year.

I wish I could tell a few more Boris stories here, as over the last year, I have amassed quite a few, I mean this guy has done things like building his own car from a pile of parts in a garage in St. Petersburg, but I do respect his privacy somewhat.

I will end this with a picture of Boris in his natural environment, an outdoor hot tub! Somehow I think there will be outdoor hot tubbing and vodka at the party tonight.

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Filed under: from home

After all my Friday-post workout irrational fear, this weekend I had some of the most solid technical and physical races I have ever skated. I feel things are coming together at the right time, my fear is being replaced by cautious optimism (just wait, next weekend I will probably yo-yo back to fear again!!).

I raced my finest 500m ever on Saturday: off the line like a relaxed rocket, great first corner, fantastic draft chasing my pair John Loquai down, I slammed through the final corner as cleanly as I am capable of, terror and lean like I was skating short track, and crossed the finish line in 37.1 seconds

I still can’t bust into the 36’s! and this great feeling race was not even a personal best! It was within .02 of my PB on that crazy fast ice just before the world cup, but still…. I was happy simply because it felt great, and that is enough. After the 500’s were over, I looked at the scoreboard, and was 5th of the 42 skaters who raced that day, I finished in front of some really fast guys who I respect tremendously, and who have beaten me all year. Although this shot of the scoreboard only shows the top 8, there were 12 of us who finished all within 37.1 and 38.1. One misstep in this tough group… I have never finished in front of Donald Stewart before, ever, he says according to his most recent x-rays his foot is “still quite broken, and only hurts in the starts and turns, but it hurts a lot!”

On Sunday, I iced the cake with a 1000m personal best, 1:15.08. Ya’know the feeling when you have a hammer or a tool with a handle that just fits so perfectly into your palm, heft is pleasure? I felt that “sweet spot” on my blades this whole weekend, especially in the straightaway, and I have built that feeling, that handle on my blades, simply through hard work, it’s a nice feeling. Here is a sweet spot moment 250 meters into my 1k PB. It’s really difficult technically to drive that support leg forward aggressively and also keep the pushing leg’s blade pointed straight down the ice, but I am slowly and surely getting it.

I don’t hope for a miracle during Olympic trials, just to be the best Andrew I can be, that will feel miraculous enough…

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Filed under: sweat, from home

Walking away from the ice today, after a good race-prep workout, that 18 wheeler of reality suddenly blindsided me. Olympic trials are 18 DAYS AWAY!! I race both Saturday and Sunday this weekend, but trials is all I could think about.

I feel great on my skates, this Wednesday I skated my fastest lap ever (a 26.29, for you skate geeks), yet thinking about trials, fear hit my stomach like a thousand butterflies flying fighter jets through my gastrointestinal tract. I thought about failure, failure in front of my wife, mother, father, brother, best friends, coach, in-laws, and some dear friends of the family flying thousands of miles to cheer me on!

Failure at what I have focused much of my life on, and sacrificed so much for, over the last 4 years. All of this started on January 5th, 2002, what was I thinking in the pic below, flailing down the ice in my first 500m race ever in Lake Placid, that sent me down this path..

I could make a tiny split second mistake in one of my 500m races during trials, and that could send me crashing into a wall, or, almost worse, just skate a crummy time as nerves torpedo my technique. It happened in my first 500m at nationals last year, and the year before that too!

There is no answer to this fear, other than to dredge up a quote from skating mythology:

Dan Jansen’s Father once said to his young son, who was angry about not winning a race:

“Dan, there is more to life than skating around in a circle”.

He is right, I keep reminding myself, it’s the path, it’s the friends, it’s the experience, it’s what I see in the mirror each morning…. Well, its what I see in the mirror after a cup of coffee has opened my eyes, before that I am a sleepy, blind, stumbling mole.

When I talk about these things here, I am trying to convince myself they are true, argue with that hyper-competitive part of myself vs myself that simply wants to #!@$#!@!! win, no matter how unrealistic.

And what is winning anyway? Would someone explain this to the butterflies tearing around my stomach!

On a much happier & less stressed note, a fellow who has sacrificed a lot too, Rodney Kopish, finally qualified for Olympic trials after being frustratingly close all year. Check out his update on his website, and also, he put together a fantastic quicktime movie that rings a bell of truth as to what this experience is like.

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Filed under: from home

All over the world skaters are racing, the international results pages at DESG are simply overflowing. Heck, even Lake Placid is rumored to have opened up the Long track ice this weekend! I always used to celebrate whenever I saw this picture on the Lake Placid webcams showing the concrete replaced by ice.

I would have liked to have raced this past weekend, I could use the work, as I only raced a handful of times in November, but there are more important things than Speedskating.

My cousin Patrick got married this past weekend in Las Vegas, and so Jessica and I hopped into the car and drove the 5+ hours directly south to join my brother, parents, awesome cousins, and the big love/snow family celebration.

Las Vegas is a strange place. Our drive from Salt Lake to Vegas started in a blizzard, but then passed through a heat blasted and bizarre desert landscape that looks more like scenery from the Star Wars Podracer scenes than anything of this earth. Imagine your insulated landspeeder/car skimming across the barren and twisted desert floor at 85mph; mountains and desolation surrounding on every side, you crest a final hilltop and wham! Suddenly a city of 1.5 million people rises from the Mojave Desert. It’s simply wrong!!

I could SEE the hotel I was staying at from 16 miles away. Admittedly, that was because the Stratosphere Hotel is the 800 foot high pin on the right of this photo,, but still…..

You descend into the valley, into one of the most wretched hives of scum and villainy in the known Galaxy, Ruled by the obscene obesity of the all powerful Hutt corporate-crimelords. Here is the view from the top of the Stratosphere. This thing is so big, after it was built jets coming to Vegas had to make changes to their approach patterns. They pass by you on eye level, am I on earth or at the Mos Eisley spaceport???

Getting around Vegas, an ancient taxi driver told us “The mafia was ok, sure they fought among themselves, but they treated people very well, but the corporate mafia!! They are horrible, they treat you like dirt unless their computers say you have spent over $10,000”.

Yet Vegas is nothing, a glittery shell compared to the people who are there. Walking through the casinos, the only way I can describe the scene is this way: A lot of years ago, I owned a bakery, during breaks my employees and I used to watch cars drive up, and we would try to guess, as a person got out of their car, if they were headed for the bagel shop on one side of the bakery or the liquor store on the other side. We got to about 90% accuracy in our predictions, heavy drinkers/alcoholics have a certain dehydrated stiffness to them, and even if they have significant bodyfat, usually there is a wasted aspect to their musculature and a dullness to their eyes, almost as if their bodies were already dead leaves waiting to fall from the tree.

What I saw in the casinos, was overwhelmingly the liquor store crowd. Pouring drinks down their throat and money into the open mouth of Jabba the Hutt. More power to them if they are having a great time, if this fulfills them. Personally it gave Jessica and I the creeps.

But I was not there to gamble, or even to make my elitist and snotty observations; I was there to celebrate Patrick and Rebecca getting married. It was also great to see Patrick marry someone who has the strength of soul that he does. He truly has found a partner, a peer. My cousin is an officer in the US Navy, and flies Helicopters. I said to him, “For the first time in your life, all the people who care about you, friends and family, we are all here.” Without batting an eyelash, Patrick said “well, not everyone is here, about half of my friends are in Iraq right now.”

There are truly more important things than Speedskating, like the safety of friends in very dangerous places.

I will end this entry with an interesting thing I had never seen before, a tradition at military weddings; it’s the “sword arch” and the price of passing is that the bride and groom must give each other a kiss. Marriage traditions abound in endless variations, but it’s all really about joy. Today was Joy, and a doorway into a lifetime of joy for Patrick & Rebecca.

Pat, go ahead and forward this video to all the guys who wished they could have been there (and Grandpa, we missed you as well, I have many pictures I will email to you).

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Filed under: Audio/Video, on the road