Crouching Tiger, Drunken Panda
This is Paul Nahrwold, skating on the HUGE green treadmill that lives at the far end of the Utah Olympic Oval. They use this monstrosity for all sorts of physiological testing and technique work. It’s nice because no matter how fast you skate, your coach is always still right there. It can go really fast. They have the blue catch strap so that if you fall, it does not shoot you off to splat against the far wall 450+ feet away.
I can think of many east coast inline skaters who would love to have this giant treadmill in their basement during those rainy days/weeks/months that define so much of New England.
Sigh, that beloved green landscape of perpetual murk…. My wife is visiting friends & family back east this week, and I am using my lonely energy for training, work, and rearranging all the furniture in our house (a couch in the kitchen? why not!!…)
This weekend they opened the Utah Olympic Oval to the impatient members of the Utah Skate tribe. Far from being “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” smooth & assured, the first sessions have felt like “Drunken Panda, Spastic Rhino” for myself and others. However the normal early season skate uglies are definitely somewhat tempered by goofy happy smiles on most everyone’s face.
Ugh…. am suddenly…. tired…. training has…. sucked out…. my brain… need to…. eat… sleep… do it again… tomorrow… zzzzzzzz…
Filed under: sweat
13 Responses to “Crouching Tiger, Drunken Panda”
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MY BUTT LOOKS AWESOME!!!! Nice pictures Andrew. I had forgotten about that Dutch website I found it last year and I was amazed that someone had all my results.
Drews was doing the Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon Wutang style hands because Leif was making fun of his hands when he was doing the Vulcan Peace sign.
Hey Andrew,
I’ve been reading your blog for months and it’s always entertaining & inspirational. Keep up the great work!
I would LOVE to have one of those treadmills for the winter (snow is the devil you know). Atleast in Toronto you can skate up to about January before the snow blocks off the roads, mind you it does get a bit chilly.
I will try my luck at long track this winter and we’ll see how well inline transfers over
Andrew! You’re sharing top-secret USSPEEDSKATING intellectual property! Be careful….Soon, every child in Norway will have one of these giant treadmills in their home!
Hi Again Andrew,
Tony Moribito, Ken Anderson, and I occasionally attach to Carl Cepuran and head down to a treadmill that is an ice simulator in Bensonville (burb of chicago). Same set-up as the picture but with a hard plastic that requires blades instead of wheels. Mostly used by the hockey folks. PS: don’t grab hold of blades just after exiting treadmill untill frictional heat dissipates a little.
Wow, the image of a ‘Drunken Panda, Spastic Rhino’ is just great. I can appreciate it today, this past weekend I did an Eddie Matzger clinic (http://www.bremertonspeed.org/2006/2006-08-Eddy/) and after two days of land drills and on skate drills I can barely move my legs.
Once I got my skates on this morning I could not tear myself away from starting at all the basic drills and with any luck rebuild myself into a wiser/better skater.
how lucky you are to be training at that beautiful ice palace in salt lake. imagine heading into the pettit in milwaukee with no lighting, post-state fair week, etc. Truly demotivating if you aren’t really into the rhythm of ice skating right now. I’d rather be on the bike…or even inlining…sounds like a good idea. Maybe I’ll just visualize the olympic oval as I stumble and skid around…
why not just skip a few steps and visualize a sad and disappointing skating career instead? that will be the ungloriuous and inevitable outcome of your woe-is-me, unmotivated, perspectiveless outlook on skating (and life?). beauty is in the eye of the beholder and i prefer to look at skating at the pettit in the summer of 2006 as the chance to skate indoors in milwaukee in JULY close to home/school/big city/lots of great training peers/lots of coaches to choose from/great short track,long track,cycling,inline community/all of the preceeding. the skaters of a generation and a half ago had to wait until mid-November for such a treat and then had to do it outside under the whim of the weather that day where the only atmospheric contstants where the exhaust of vehicles on I-94 and the industrial pollutants from nearby industrial plants. i’ll happily dodge the discarded, half-eaten remains of cream puffs and corn-on-the-cobs to be able to skate on ice in the summer at the “mood-lit” proud palace of skating pain and pleasure called the pettit! either take a few weeks off to shake off your dour, over-trained or over-pampered attitude, or, get out there and skate and LIKE IT! either way, quit your whining, it’s unbecoming of a speedskater!
Hey Andrew…so is your blog the way Jessica finds out you put the couch in the kitchen?
And pretty glasses add a little to the mood lighting.
Carla
I will move the couch back to a normal location before my sweet wife returns home…. I am eccentric, but not crazy…
and I too, love the Pettit, it has a lot of character!!! it always seems so strange to me when I am there for major races, and they turn all the lights on full blast.. it’s like a different rink…
its so funny, whenever I hear skaters complain about indoor ice… sure indoor ice has variable days, but I once did a 5k outdoors in lake placid wending my way around weird growths in the outer lane that looked like blooming ice cabbages…
compared to that.. all indoor is a dream…
I wouldn’t want people to start saying I’m dishonest, though. I do constantly complain about being cold, I comment at least every other week that I wish we had windows like salt lake’s, and I make fun of things…like the new (from state fair) tables with umbrellas - yesterday I was joking, “they were having a problem with the sun in here?” (ok, ok, they do brighten it up nicely) But I’d rather have funny things to complain about than not skate. And more about the glasses, the purple or pink ones are a pleasant color, the amber ones make it look like there could possibly be sun, and the grey ones my mom gave me are nice and light. I always think light blue would look nice, but I’m not going to buy light blue glasses just to make the air look pretty.
(Andrew, remember when you told me you’d looked up symptoms of anemia, and chewing ice was one of them? Blooming ice cabbages sounds like the gourmet version of whatever ice someone might find to chew. Not me, don’t worry.)
[…] e of humor & irony. Another example is here: on the way to the oval I saw that the “Drunken Panda” of my earlier post had been out for some late night partying, and one of Salt Lake’s Finest […]
fine, fine, the pettit aint that bad. i’m just not ready to give up summer,I guess. Woe is not me nor am I over trained/pampered, I didn’t think I sounded that bad! geez….
Does anyone know if there is a treadmill like this for inline skaters in the Boston area?