Zen and the Art of Speedskating

My grandfather is a short wave radio enthusiast. As a kid, I remember sitting on the floor of his radio room, as he spoke to people all over the world.

My generation does the same thing, even though our technology is slightly different. It’s still a ton of fun, especially when you connect with good people who share your interests.

A Swedish natural ice skater, Erik Rosengren, emailed me with an equipment question. I happened to be on email at that moment, and we struck up a lively discussion about a number of topics.

Erik directed me to some online photo albums of his work, exellent information about skating in sweden, and YouTube-ery of some incredible natural ice conditions.

It’s absolutely breathtaking!

With his permission, I am republishing a few of his pictures, words, and videos here.

My main interest is longdistance ice-skating on natural ice. The area around Stockholm is ideal for this type of skating,and from november to april, thousands of skaters are out every weekend on lakes and the Baltic Sea.

a bit of Global Warming?

That’s me in the water. Falling through the ice is a bit shocking the first time, but after that it’s nothing major.

For me, it happens once or twice each season. On this occasion I was actually looking into the LCD-display of my camera, trying to change some settings and did not notice that the edge that I was skating on made a sharp turn. If you look closely you can actually see me holding the camera in my right hand. I learn something every time I skate on natural ice.

I’m learning just by looking at these pictures! for example, humans are not the only mammal who can have fun zipping along natural ice! You can see more of Erik’s work here.

Links for information in English about skating on natural ice are:
The Stockholm Ice Skate Sailing and Touring Club
Linköpings Långfärdsskridsko Klubb

Other good pages are
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/getaways/54676_swedenskate17.shtml

http://naturetravels.wordpress.com/2007/02/

http://www.s3.kth.se/~giese/iskunskap/

http://www.valley.net/~ice/viking/index.html

There is a well known competition in Sweden called Vikingarännet, with skaters from Sweden, Finland, The Netherlands and a few other countries.

There is a company based here in Stockholm which specializes in skate tours for Dutch skaters. Here are links to pages with information from these trips
http://www.snabelslash.com/bo/?m=2&date=2006-02-17
http://www.snabelslash.com/bo/?m=2&date=2007-02-23

This is a pretty popular dutch site
http://www.nordicskatingcenter.nl/

I can go on and on forever about this long distance iceskating, but I’ll sum it up by providing some links to movie clips:

and here are some others
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-Xl-d6yjGXE
http://youtube.com/watch?v=_H6Tx4D7380
http://youtube.com/watch?v=36vtWSHkdgQ
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xMOJTSC2P6o

Thanks Erik!! And thanks for the kind mention of this blog on the Stockholm Speedskaters club website

also on the web, this website was mentioned on the facinating potpourri that is the Readers and Writers Blog.

here is what they said:

Zen and the Art of Speedskating, which is strangely appealing, despite a lot of content about, yes, speedskating.

If I must be something in this world, I don’t mind if it is “strangely appealing“.. kind of like natural ice skating in Sweden!

Filed under: from home