Crash & a PB
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never tasted victory or defeat.”
-Theodore Roosevelt
As with a lot of quotes, this sounds nice, but living your errors, shortcomings, defeats, and daring failures in an arena in front of friends & family never feels too good. Especially when you screw up going really fast & mash yourself into a wall.
I was absolutely on a PB pace in Saturday’s 500m race, and in the final turn I twisted my shoulders out of line, lost control, and went down.
Hitting the pads this time hurt about as much as getting smacked in the face by my brother while pillow fighting. Now David can hit really hard, but it was not 1/10th of the crash I had on Monday, maybe I have just fine-tuned my “crash technique”. as I was certainly on a mid 26 second lap/35mph speed.
But as the theme of my earlier post on crashing, I got back up again, refocused, and 45 minutes later skated a personal best in the 1000m, 1:15.34. A huge improvement, almost 1.6 seconds! Results are visible here.
This pic is from the last 100, very painful meters.
My 2nd lap fade was only 2.6 seconds, and for me, that is a VAST improvement from my usual pathetic 4+. The wheel of pain of this summer’s dryland workouts is finally showing results in race performance. Thanks Boris!!
Getting off the ice, I also discovered I had skated that 1000m with my right blade that slipped about 2 cm off its normal track, the crash loosened the bolt, and then my start in the 1000m then knocked the blade out of line. I thought the corners felt funny, but I attributed that to mental maladjustment, and not equipment.
When I went to unlace the right skate, I also got carbon fiber splinters in my fingers from a big old crush mark in the toe of my right skate! Nothing a liberal application of nail polish won’t temporarily fix, but it was a big can of “whoa” to open at the end of an emotional whiplash of a day.
I am lucky to have a new pair of boots coming, my old beloved Van Hornes have been pretty much beaten to pieces.
congrats, Andrew!
am i wrong or are you the fastest masters’ in the world at 1000m now? [by far if so; the old one is 1:19] the only records [at the immsc site] i can see are from 04′, where you hold the world record for the 500.
will they recognize this 1000m race result? or do ya have to set it at one of ‘their’ meets?
you have to set these records at one of “their” meets…
but that is ok with me, there are different records for different flavors/levels of competition, international caliber skaters have the ISU, national skaters have US and north american records to shoot for… masters & juniors have thier own records to shoot for.. there are also statisticians who track sea level, altitude, indoor, outdoor, hardtail, clap.. there are so many variables!!! but one still has to skate fast when it counts…
however there is some murky ground especially in the 30-39 age category that I am in, since many top skaters are just over 30, in fact, the current 1000m world record, is held by gerard van velde, and he is only 10 months younger that me!!
thanks for the congrats… really what I care about is that I was MUCH faster vs myself..
and by the way, the first thing i thought when i read your blog the other day was i’m glad you’re ok; don’t start a trend with this kiss-the pads stuff….your accidents made me think… when they first set up the 400m track parameters [long ago] they probably didn’t ever think you guys would be going so fast someday that it’s almost impossible to stay adhered in the corners..