Zen and the Art of Speedskating

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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