Zen and the Art of Speedskating

Ohnozone.net and Peter’s inline racing webpage are both producing FANTASTIC coverage of the recent short track world cups in Canada. I love how both of these sites give the overwhelming impression that athletes are PEOPLE, who try incredibly hard, but who are human and crash, get DQ-ed, etc. Sometimes losing, failure, and challenges make success all the sweeter (even simple success vs yourself, the measure that matters the most when you look in the mirror).

Check out this video by Jordan Malone, that he made & posted on Youtube, and look at it with the fact in mind that he just won his first world cup individual medal this weekend!

I have met Jordan once, during North American short track champs in march of 2006. He came across as a humble and hardworking guy, and his video (and what happened to him one month before Olympic trials & how he has persevered) has moved me.

Reading Ohnozone, it makes me wonder if this website could be a true news website? There is a need for it on the long track-side of the sport. However, I am still actively competing & training, and that sucks most of the energy out of me.

So I think the best I can do, for now, is to continue being a storyteller who relates snippets of skate culture & training info when I see it.

Like this particular example of training super-hard and then resting to achieve a top performance vs yourself:

One of my training buddies, Clay Cholewinski, has worked really hard all year. Recently he developed an evil blister on his ankle, missed a week of ice time as it healed, then over thanksgiving he missed some more time.

He came back to the ice really rested; & after a week of dialing his technique back in, he has been ABSOLUTELY FLYING & skating PB after PB. On the first day of the America’s cup, he beat me by .01 in the 500m (and by multiple seconds in the 1000). On day 2, we were paired together for the 500, and had one of the most fun races I have done in a long time. I was quicker for the first 75 meters, and from then on I could hear his clap blades steadily getting closer & closer as we roared around the track.

Here are the two of us in the final corner.

I like the reflection of him in the ice, and how level his shoulders and hips are compared to my tipped ones. Another thing you can see is how close I am to the blocks, my shadow literally hanging over them. That’s tricky to do at top speed, but it makes the distance one skates shorter, and times faster.

Thanks to Don Nelson for the photos (& my new blog masthead is a selection from this excellent image he took of me crawling through the final corner of a 1000m, ouch!)

The reason I bring up rest is that US national championships are now 2 weeks away. Through the training year, objectives change. Summer is often 5+ hours a day. Now the goal is to do very little, on and off the ice in under an hour.

Rest is sometimes the hardest lesson for motivated athletes to learn, and structured rest is often the biggest change made when people go from self-trained to professionally coached. Maybe I should look into developing a week long debilitating blister! Just kidding… Clay peaked early because of his, and it will be interesting to see how long he can hold his peak.

It’s somehow karmically odd that sprinters need more rest than endurance athletes. 3-5 weeks is the usual for sprinters to peak, vs 2-ish for most folks like triathletes or allaround speedskaters.

Filed under: from the coffee shop