Zen and the Art of Speedskating

I am so busy with work its not funny… this month I have 5 sites going live, so this will be brief compared to my usual whitmanic standards.

I got paid to skate about a week and a half ago! Occasionally the Utah Olympic oval hosts corporate events. Sometimes they want speed skaters to do a demonstration of what the facility was built for, and I was one of the folks they asked to do a demo for some massive (600+ people) convention for Cingular.

They even made skinsuits for us. Yep, skinsuits in the COLOR OF THE OLYMPIC RINGS. So here we are, looking like the Cingular Skating Power Rangers.

From left to right we have Ray Thacker, Myself, Michael Drews, Paul Nahrwold, Keith Carney, and Inacio Lopez. The Cingular Power Rangers! I like the sound of that, we got to keep the skinsuits too.

The event staff wanted us to skate laps as people were arriving, and then run some demo races to show the sport to the crowd & kick off the entertainment. We were all laughing about the silliness of these primary color costumes in the locker room, but then we stepped onto the ice…..

There was blaring rock music, roving searchlights, rock concert stage lighting illuminating the ice in strange ways, and incredible numbers of people! They were there for some corporate function/celebration, not for us or the other athletes demonstrating other sports; but when we stared skating massive numbers of digital & phone cameras flashed at us like volleys from civil war muskets.

There was a huge projection screen with TV cameras following people in the crowd and us as we skated by. An announcer who was going on and on, there was a giant catering setup with dozens of stations serving teriyaki salmon, wild rice, prime rib, feta cheese salads, endless alcohol, and amazing flowing chocolate fountains you could dip strawberries & pineapple chunks & oreos into.

I had not eaten much that day, and the incredible smell wafting onto the ice was quite distracting. I felt like a dog leaning out the window of a car, with windspeed pressure injecting nasal stimulation directly into my brain stem. Here I am leading the group, feeling hungry, and then here is Ray Thacker taking a pull.

To the crowd (from all over the USA, I talked with quite a few of them after), we were not just a bunch of average skaters; we were the “Olympic Spirit” for lack of a better descriptive term. And I guess since many of us moved to Utah specifically for the skating, I guess we are.

Its funny, but 3 weeks off the ice, and my technique & skate specific strength felt AWFUL! Paul Nahrwold and I were paired together for a demo 500m race, you can see the spotlight following us, and some hint of the size of the crowd. I must admit to glancing at myself in the mammoth projection screen as I zipped by it.

The backstretch was quite dark! Some of the rock and roll stage lighting from the home stretch filtered into the backstretch at odd angles, illuminating the cracks & imperfections in the ice like purple varicose veins. It was quite the rush to skate over that at race velocity.

Afterwards, when it was over, I stepped off the ice & chatted with many different folks. People were coming up to all of us, asking who we were, inquring about our skates, and asking if we had just gotten back from Torino! Thanks, but ummmm, no…..

Then in the locker room, I changed from my Power Ranger blues back into normal clothes, and Inacio and I wandered out towards the remains of the astonishing buffet to do some serious eating.

Suddenly we were just footnotes in a large crowd, No one was looking at us, wanted to talk to us, or even noticed our existence at all… and some selfish part of my heart missed it.

However heaping servings of teriyaki salmon and two visits to the chocolate fountain were sufficient to quell the hungry ego.

Filed under: from home