Zen and the Art of Speedskating

For speedskating around in the sweet mud of the Grass-roots, YouTube is awesome!

I raced a 1000m this weekend, and by the time I was home, Don Nelson had emailed me a link to a youtube of my race! real time & slow-mo, whooo!

(I am still working on my own long video from the last two weekends of racing)

I like what Don calls his YouTube account, speedskatinganalyst.

This was my first 1000m of the year, & since I’ve been bike racing a ton and only skating once a week, this was a race to make mistakes in, and refine physical & psychological execution.

Here is my analysis of what I see, it was a typical early season messy race.

Start: good off the line, snappy for my lack of snap-work. I make a serious mistake not holding the turn on the blocks & sitting back deeper. It costs me time. There is no room to lose time in a sprint! 17.99 opening 200m. It “felt” faster than that time.

First lap: Felt fast, knees together (I skate like a bowlegged old cowboy when I don’t work on this daily), and I get a good draft from my pair, world cup skater Roger Schnieder of Switzerland. My hips are not as strong as I would like them to be in the turns. 27.35 lap, a fast lap for an 18 opener. So I developed more speed in the first 200m than my time suggested.

Last Lap: Ouch! I completely blow up, , and skate position goes to pieces in the final turn, 30.97 lap time. It’s embarrassing to slow down this much & look this bad. The last turn is painful to watch, and painful to do as well.

I have trained so many different ways, over so many years, to fix the last lap blow-up, but I am what I am, and a 3.6 second fade is average for the body I was born with. Many pure sprinters are like this.

Short track does seem to help my fade more than anything else, even more than a whole summer of marathon inline racing. Probably because it helps hip strength to hold the position in the turns.

(info for non speedskaters, anything over a 2 second lap fade in a 1000m is bad, I did load the training pretty hard this week too.)

Overall I am happy though, I skated a 38.12 in my 500m earlier in the day, and this race was a 1:16.3, and those are excellent early season times for me. Usually my first race of the season is a high 38 & a low 1:17. So this is an optimistic weekend.

Both of these races qualified me for Olympic trials in October 2009. 54 weeks from now.. Hmmmm…

I joked with my pair Roger before the race that people always skate PB’s when paired with me.

At masters worlds & US nationals last year, 75% of the races for my pair were PB’s. And sure enough, Roger skates a PB in this 1000m race! His splits were more like a true allarounder. 18.16 / 27.40 / 28.04

Filed under: RACE DAY, Audio/Video