Zen and the Art of Speedskating

A blog reader/speedskater sent me a very nice email, including this image. And it’s worth sharing-

This winter scene of a natural ice skater, cruising long with his hands on his back is truly a “hallmark moment”, and I do mean that literally.

Here is what the artist wrote to me:

My work here in Kansas City has been at Hallmark Cards - as an illustrator. A few years ago I designed a Christmas card I hope you might enjoy.

I thought I would share it with you out of gratitude and respect for a fellow skater and designer.

Anyway, the card is finally in the stores this year. To have anyone in the “real” speedskating world aware of it and even send it would be more honor than I could handle.

Thank you so very much for such great work! I enjoy your writing, your point of view and dedication.

-Ken Sheldon

I asked Ken where a person can buy this card, because frankly, I’d like to own a box of them.

Currently it’s available in the set called “boxed Christmas cards” and also can be ordered via their paper catalog (& in hallmark “gold crown” stores), however currently there is no online link.

The card has metallic foil on the skater and trees & there is glitter on the skate tracks. So I think the hardworking pixels of the internet do not do this image justice.

Thanks Ken!

(and thanks also to the managers at Hallmark, as evidently there was quite a vigorous discussion about my query if it’s ok for this image copyright of Hallmark Inc. to appear in blog-land.)

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Filed under: from home

One of the only pictures I took during the recent holiday, this is my brother, during thanksgiving dinner.

At the moment of this picture, I was giving him some good-natured crap about the fact that he has Diet Coke in his wine glass. It just seems so wrong. His effortless response?

“That’s just how I roll”.

I like that. It’s a great motto/excuse/maxim/philosophy.

And it’s always wonderful to roll with family, no matter what they choose as their beverage in whatever glass….. It’s been a house full of Love (the Love family, as it were).

Here are a few images my bro took of Salt Lake.

Liberty Park

and the great Salt Lake-

looking, as usual, like a borrowed piece of another planet

I have got to get back into the blogging groove… Even though I have been skating short track a bit, I’ve been off the long track due to my blade problems. Frankly I am scared to go faster than easy laps due to how twisted my blades are.

There is just something about long track. A bit like baseball, that just seems to create words & thoughts. It’s not that short track is not wonderful too, but there is just no mental room for anything during screaming laps on the tiny frozen hamster wheel.

I like the big wheel. I have replacements blades on order, hopefully will get them soon.

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Filed under: from home

When John Lennon died, part of mourning that loss for many musicians was listening to & playing his music.

I’ve been silent on this blog for the past week mainly because of Norman Mailer’s death. I’ve been reading & re-reading the work of his that hit me like a literary sledgehammer roughly a decade ago (he hit that same sensitive spot that Kerouac & Pink Floyd nailed when I was a teenager).

Mailer could be a difficult fellow, pugilistic, rude, brillaint, cranky, barely in control at times, and he pointedly tried to explore some of the darkest, nastiest, most brutal parts of a man’s heart. Many people dislike him for this.

However like watching a world-class speedskater, I frequently see Mailer doing things on the page that leave me as awed as watching Wotherspoon or Kramer on the ice.

His retrospective The Time of our Time, is specifically the “greatest hits album” I’ve been listening to.

Mailer was fascinated with boxing, was great friends with Muhammad Ali, and opened his retrospective with a selection describing another writer who dabbled in boxing, Hemmingway, getting the snot kicked out of him in the ring.

This is how he ended that bit, I think he meant this to describe himself as well-

Most men find their profoundest passion in looking for a way to escape their private and secret torture. It is not likely that Hemingway was a brave man who sought danger for the sake of the sensations it provided him.

What is more likely the truth of his long odyssey is that he struggled with his cowardice and against a secret lust to suicide all of his life, that his inner landscape was a nightmare, and he spent his nights wrestling with the gods.

It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.

There are two kinds of brave men. Those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.

Inspiration can come from many directions of one’s life, thanks Norman, for what I have felt & thought while reading your words.

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Filed under: Quotes

Exhausted after watching 3 amazing days of world cup racing, I have few words in my rink-addled exhausted brain right now, just images grabbed from the 11.29GB of video I shot.

Enrico Fabris 5k world record!! Fantastico!!! It was a thing of smooth beauty for 10 laps, he sped up slowly & relentlessly.

His last 2 laps were incredible, as he knew what speed he had to skate to beat Sven Kramer’s time & get the WR. It looked like it hurt quite a bit too.

Fabris was not the only Italian success of the weekend, Chiara Simonato won the women’s 1000m. Fortza Italia!

The most exciting race I have EVER seen live, Wotherspoon vs Davis 1000m, incredible speed of Jeremy at the opener, and the incredible stamina of Shani as he came roaring back in the final 200m (this image is from the last turn). At the finish only .01 separated these two amazing athletes. The top 4 men all went faster than Shani’s world record from last year.

German Jenny Wolf & Chinese Beixing Wang were in a class by themselves in the women’s 500m. Every men’s race broke or tied the previous world record. However no records were skated in any of the women’s races, odd.

Wolf looks stronger than last year though, and even though her races contained a few technical stumbles, she skated the fastest opener ever for a woman, a 10.18

In his first solo world cup race, Trevor Marsicano skated a new US junior National record. Here he is blowing past veteran German skater Jan Freisinger on the backstretch during the last lap of a 1500m.

I wish I had images of it, but the next day he annihilated the US junior 5k record by 19 seconds.

I’ve been in this very cheap plastic chair before, focusing & stressing like Kip Carpenter is, waiting for his 500m start. Or maybe Kip is calm? Probably not. I find the moments before they call you to the start line for a sprint race gut-wrenchingly horrid.

Because you must explode off the start line like a rocket, and then calm down to a smooth aggressive control for that last turn

-or it can get very scary, very fast.

As Joon Mun of Korea finds out here, it’s amazing he did not crash, even with a totally out of control final turn, he STILL managed to still go 34.7

The Koreans all looked amazingly strong in the sprint distances. Although they did not win a race, I’d say their male sprinters, as a group, have the most depth of any nation.

Many of my friends volunteered to get an front row seat on all the action. Matt Plummer’s lifetime of skating ability makes him quite overqualified to be a block chaser. A few small things being different, & he could have been out here as a competitor. Someday I am sure he will be.

I bet Matt’s mental tape recorder was running as he watched these women zip by in 1000m races, as surely as my camera was.

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

Jeremy Wotherspoon has had an incredible speedskating career, even before what he did today.

He won a silver medal in his first Olympics in 1998, and went on to win more world cup races than any other skater in the history of the sport. However the 2002 & 2006 games were, frankly, disasters for someone so talented. After Torino he took some time away from the sport.

According to the local “skate-tribe” gossip, he trained with the Canadian bobsled team for a while, then even got burned out on that & went to Norway.

I hear he worked 17 hour days on a fishing boat for several months, in a place where no one knew him, growing a huge beard in the process.

I don’t know what answers he found there, but I do know this- whatever he found helped him smash the 500m world record into quivering bits in his first race back.

In the process Jeremy skated the fastest 400m lap any human being has EVER done. A 24.44!! this WR could stand for a while, unless he breaks it again Sunday!

Watching the race through my camera viewfinder, I could literally see Jeremy surging with power on the straightaway, awesome!

Here is the video, enjoy the high quality quicktime, or click the Youtube below.

Enjoy.. a… few…. Images…. Too…

I’m… going… to…. Bed…. More…tomorrow…

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Filed under: from home