Zen and the Art of Speedskating

1. Here is a photo I took at the oval a few days ago of a Japanese university team skater training at the Utah Oval-

They love their speedskating! and I really enjoy watching them train. I wish there was less of a language barrier.

2. For a project I am working on (unconnected with this website) I followed the national allaround team for a lap as they wound up to speed. They were doing multiple 29-30 second laps, that’s roughly 30-32mph (50+Kph), and I shot some interesting video.

This is the closest I have ever come to visually documenting what long track at speed feels like (a 25 second lap is quite insane from this perspective, someday I will capture that on video, if I can ever go that fast again!).

This was in the middle of a long set of these fast laps, so the skaters were already tired as the clip begins. I added in a slow-mo bit of the fast parts, so you can really see the push direction, corner rhythm flow, and control. These guys can REALLY skate!

It’s worth noting this is not even close to their top speed. Liam Ortega is leading, then Pat Meek in red, Chad Hedrick, John Loquai, and Ron Macky is last in line wearing all black & enjoying the considerable draft created at this speed.

Start the YouTube below, or click here for the quicktime.

I really need a helmet cam, going this fast his while handholding a camera is difficult, and frankly, a tad bit dangerous. Also I tend to not breathe as I try & hold the camera steady.

It’s hard to skate very far without breathing (even for an already distance-challenged sprinter!).

3. I’ve got a nasty “owie” that hopefully does not develop into an “injury”. And it’s in an interesting spot.

First of all, I hurt this muscle doing VERY intense off-ice turn simulations, & the muscle that I hurt performs this function according to wikipedia:

The action is primarily to lift the upper leg towards the body when the body is fixed or to pull the body towards the leg when the leg is fixed.

that second half sounds like a turn, doesn’t it?

Can you guess what muscle I hurt?

Here is a hint, I’m quite sure speedskaters have VERY developed versions of this muscle compared to the rest of the population, and in average people it’s about the thickness & length of your forearm.

Guess again…..

Scroll down for the answer

Ok, I admit it, this is a trick question, but a fascinating muscle to understand. I am fairly sure I hurt the upper part of my Psoas major. It lies inside the ribcage, and connects from the inside of your spine into the lower pelvis.

This is a trick question because despite its size, you can’t see the Psoas, at all, it’s completely internal.

I never knew about this muscle until I looked at the actual human dissections at the Bodyworlds III exhibit in Portland. The Psoas is HUGE, and so essential to what we do on ice or wheels (or standing up, for that matter) -when it’s hurting, skating in a powerful position really stings.

The quadriceps get all the attention, but just like the unheralded & virually unknown Piriformis, the Psoas is one of those little essentials in the magical symphony of hip flexors that keeps a skater going.

note: this feels like an “owie”, not a true injury, a bit of rest, minimal intensity, and I should be ok in a few days.

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Filed under: Audio/Video

Waiting to go on the ice are the skates of the national team sprinters, allarounders, a Japanese University Team, & the oval’s F.A.S.T. team.

This picture was shot during a mid-session resurface. I think many are unconsciously holding their skates this way because their legs hurt, and straightening them fully helps.

Late September is the hardest training time of the year; it’s when speed meets volume for elite athletes, and it’s a make or break month for some. I love it and dread it.

The sprinters especially had a horridly hard day-

Here is Tyler Goff, Nick Pearson, and Mike Stein. You can see something in how far back their hips are & the curl of their back in this photo that I have a very hard time doing properly.

Extention & form! even when it’s the end of the day, your legs are a burning mass of jello, and what keeps you upright is determination + years of hard-earned fitness, as shown here by Kreg Greer, Matt Plummer, and Mike Blumel.

When it’s a world cup race, or national championship time in December, this is when the efforts of September will bear fruit.

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Filed under: from home

Over the years I’ve owned almost every kind of blade there is, Bont, Maple, Zandstra, & of course, Viking.

Somehow, no matter what I try, I keep coming back to my trusty Vikings. They are like a pair of comfy shoes that I skate quite fast in. On ebay last year I bought a pair of classic Viking sprint specials, and they are so much fun to skate on (slower than a clapskate, but fun).

I mentioned to my host, Jules, that I’d like to visit the Viking Factory, to see the place my blades were made.

Ignorant American that I am, I did not know that they don’t give public tours. But Jules is resourceful, and made several phone calls. Because of this website, and my connection with Dimon Sports (John has been a big Viking customer for many years), he was able to arrange one! Mazzel Jules!!!

Oddly enough the first photo I see walking in the door is inline racing!! These guys are racing on 2-wheel Viking skeelers in the late 1940’s . The combination of wheels & ice has gone on for a long time!

Henk, Simon, and Bianca were wonderful hosts, and I saw many things that I’d like to relate about the largest speedskate manufacturer in the world. The first room I saw was their “Hall of fame” containing the following bits of skating eccentricity.

The VERY FIRST clapskate from February of 1985, note how there is no true pivot, the boot itself flexes.

The different stages that metal is cut, shaped, and folded to make an old-style hardtail Viking skate.

Olympic 10k gold medalist Bob DeJong had his old Vikings turned into a pair of dancing shoes for his moment on “dancing with the stars”.

A computer in your skate? Actually this was a mechanism that Viking built so you could use a toe-start, & use the superior pressure of fixed blade for the first few steps, then after a set amount of time it would release to a clap-skate for the rest of the race.

The ISU banned things like this, but the prototype lives on. I wonder if it uses Mac or Windows operating system? (probably Mac! fewer crashes! actually the viking blade straighter machine runs on ancient MS-DOS!!)

There was poster after poster of signed Dutch & German world champions; among them were these fast North Americans:

After the hall of fame, we went into the very heart of the factory & saw every step in the blade life cycle.

All blades start out on this massive roll of flexible steel, and then are fed through a machine that stamps them into blades, you can see a bin of them behind the spool

Then they have the tube welded on, and are sent to the Viking blade robot. It needs no breaks, no vacation, has minimal healthcare needs, and if you have bought a pair of top Viking blades in the past 7 years (roughly 50,000+ blades) this fella has handled them.

You have seen the robot in action in my previous post-

Although some of their boots are made in China, and some in Romania, there is lots of activity by guys in blue jumpsuits.

After the blade construction facility we were led upstairs to a room that was off limits until very recently.

About 5 years ago, Viking must have realized that with custom boots becoming more & more common, they had to get into the custom boot game if they were going to continue being a “skate” company, instead of just a “blade” company.

Only in the past 2 years have they even allowed folks like me into their upstairs room where they make them.

Here is a rack of boots for the German National team, although the only name I can read on them is Sverre Haugli, and he is an elite Norwegian Allarounder.

Here is a set of boots for Jan Bos, what I would give for just a few moments to skate as smoothly as “the catman” does. Will world cups be won on this boot?

As customs go, these boots have a radically different philosophy than most North American customs. They were not that stiff or freakishly light. They were built with “ice feel” being paramount. Viking believes that a boot needs some inbuilt flex to feel the ice (Van Horne’s flex a little bit too, same idea), this is quite unlike my SS customs, or a Marchese, that are so stiff you can almost skate short track on them.

Note that one of the logos on Bos’ boot is printed backward, they gave some long convoluted answer about the one facing the TV cameras being correct, so that is why the one on the other side is backwards. I’ve noticed almost their entire lot of customs look like this.

They save the foot castings of everyone they do boots for. This is their WALL OF FEET. Just for the completely skate-crazy fans out there, click on the image and you can see a full size version, you can read many of the names on these boxes.

For Eric Gee in toronto, just starting out on making customs, I thought you would appreciate this larval custom boot.

Back down the stairs to their warehouse. OMIGOSH! THAT IS 100,000 SKATES!!!

These shelves were truly endless-

There is a weird secret to the Viking factory in these shelves-

On a normal year, they will sell 20-30,000 pairs of skates. But in a year where significant natural ice covers the canals in Holland, they will sell over 100,000 skates!

You can’t just make that many skates all at once, so they have them in stock. Just waiting for the canals to freeze, and the Dutch public to go crazy again.

The Dutch wait for ice like skiers wait for snow, and you can imagine how this company feels about global warming!

And how about these littlest Vikings? They look warm & comfy & like I would have put stickers all over them if they had been mine

If you are looking for breaking news from Viking, I think there are 2 things worth mentioning, that are not commonly known.

1. Viking will be releasing a brand new short track blade in a few weeks. They used to have one some years ago. But this is a whole new design. The first prototypes should be in John Dimon’s hands soon.

2. Viking has been doing experiments with heavier skaters using slightly thicker blades in certain conditions. Their PM 1.1 blade is an example of that, and it’s a blade that already has world records to its name. They found that depending on the size, power & style of the athlete, on “warmer” indoor ice a thicker blade has better feel & speed. Lighter athletes or hard outdoor ice are best served by the standard thickness (or thinner). They also are making their 1.1 mm thick blades by starting with 1.3 mm steel, and grinding it down.

Whoa, this post has gotten long. Again, I want to truly thank Henk, Bianca, and Simon, for being wonderful hosts. (when I arrived, Bianca knew John Dimon & I are Diet Coke addicts, so guess what she had waiting!)

I’ve always known Viking blades as a “thing” now I know some of the good people who make the company work.

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Filed under: on the road

Andrew has invited me to make a post on his blog, and though I am his wife, it is a privilege nonetheless.

The reason he encouraged me to do this is because I went wild for the Amsterdam Friday Night Skate (FNS). I’ve done the Salt Lake City FNS before, which is great fun with a small group of friends.

But this was different – even though it was small by Amsterdam standards, only 150 people or so, it felt massive to me. We were a pack of friendly night marauders, sweeping through the streets and parks and canals.

For those of you who have done big skates like San Francisco, St. Petersburg, or Paris, this is old news, but to a newbie like me, the inner workings of a big FNS are pretty cool. The organizers of the Amsterdam FNS pick a different course every week and scout it out the Wednesday before. They’ve just celebrated 10 years of doing this.

Amsterdam FNS is sponsored by an in-line company and a local youth hostel, and the money goes towards the flashing vests, traffic-directing batons, and walkie-talkies the organizers use.

There are blockers who stop traffic so we can just cruise through. We do stop at certain red lights, to let the stragglers catch up. Once the pack has passed, the blockers have to sprint to the front of the pack so they can block at their next assigned street. There are a small group of doctors and nurses who cruise at the back to help anyone who crashes. I saw two crashes, but the doc I talked to at the end said they weren’t serious.

We met cool locals, tourists like us, and even a marathon in-liner from Israel. Everybody was friendly and everybody could really skate. For me, this was the highlight of our trip.

Enjoy the video – Andrew took all the footage, and I put it together. Here is the link for the high quality quicktime, or click below to start the YouTube-

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Filed under: Audio/Video

I have so many posts half done, mountains of information to relate. My days here have been so full, I’ve been skating & Museum-ing, not writing & photoshopping (the Viking factory post is HUGE!).

I am actually looking forward to the 17 hour travel day to get back to SLC, so I can properly catch up.

But for the moment, here is Jessica and I last night, at the gigantic Amsterdam Friday night skate.

If you skate, no matter if it’s recreationally or competitively, an urban skate of this size is an important thing to experience, at least once or twice in your life.

I can’t imagine getting to do it every friday!!

That must be what heaven is like…

More soon…. A whole lot more!!!

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Filed under: on the road