Zen and the Art of Speedskating

It’s been an exciting weekend here in Salt Lake, and a busy one.

Races this weekend were… interesting, with the World Cup in town next weekend, some of the top sprinters in the world used this weekends race as a warm-up. It was kind of “world cup light”. It was fun sharing the ice with these astonishing athletes. Here are the results.

During my own races, I skated another 500m personal best, 37.08, .3 faster than ever before, but I was disappointed about it, as after a good start, good first corner, and great backstretch, I flounced through the last corner, almost crashing in my second crossover step and barely keeping it together…. I crossed the finish line pissed, as I knew I should have busted into the 36’s… Kip Carpenter was giving me some good natured ribbing after the race, “Where was the howl of joy? Dude! That’s a PB! You should be happy!” Press the play button and see what I mean. Jessica was taping this from one of the stands installed for the coming world cup, a cool thing about this angle is that you can get something of a feel of what 35mph on skates looks like, especially on the backstretch. You can hear her reaction to my stumbling final corner.

After that 500m, for my 1000m I was full of determination to set a PB or die trying, and I blasted off the line and reached the 600m mark .6 faster than ever before, absolutely flying… but the last 400m were almost as fast and fun as dragging 15 cinder blocks through a grease fire in the nude via a rope tied to my nuts, well, not quite that much fun, and somewhat more painful…. I slowed down terribly on the final 400m, to end up almost a half second slower than my PB (how does a 4.1 second speed drop sound from my first lap to the second! Ouch! It should be 2 or less). It was a skating induced case of complete rigor mortis lactic acid poisoning, I did metaphorically die trying! A friend emailed me that on friday night, she dreamed I had died during a 1000m race, and that I blogged about it after death, and people were wondering how I still had internet connectivity!

The top skaters were throwing themselves into their own fires as well, there were quite a few athletes with hacking coughs, glazed eyes, & funny looking walks after the races were over. Why do we do this sport again?

My good friend Jannicke, a Norwegian training in Salt Lake, took this picture of me standing on the start line of the 1000m, trying to relax before they call me to the start, this picture shows my weird lower back scoliosis quite well -look at my shoulders, this is what “standing straight” feels like to me.

There is no point I am trying to make with this photo, except maybe that chubby redheads with glasses, asthma, allergies, scoliosis, and weird reading habits can turn out well in the end. I am actually really glad the my spinal curvature bends the way it does, it forces me down and into the G-forces of the turn, if nature had curved me the opposite way, skating constant left turns would be much more difficult. Flip a coin, I was lucky.

Jannicke has a really nice website actually, You can find it here at http://www.jannickem.com, and she took some fantastic picture of the weekends racing. Her website is her own work, and follows her transition from figure skating to speed skating. She is quite happy to only have the electronic eye measuring her performance now, instead of a panel of subjective judges!

Filed under: Audio/Video, sweat