Zen and the Art of Speedskating

The Utah sun is blazing with that strange radiant heat that feels like someone is pressing a hot frying pan against your exposed skin. The mercury is in the upper 90’s, So of course, with as unnatural a sport as 400m long track speedskating is, today is the PERFECT day to have our first on ice practice!!

Out of the fires and into the freezer! It was such a pleasant moment to step from the blast furnace into the 40-degree air of the Utah Olympic oval facility. The whole speedskating team was bouncy and happy, like kids and Christmas. As skaters, we do a lot of lifting and dryland training, and most view them as necessary evils. I find Cycling fun, but I used to race bikes, many skaters are less than enthusiastic about a 3 hour ride up a mountain.

But today, we get to finally do what we truly love to do! Skate! Of course the first 20 minutes or so was pretty weird, but after that, the whole team settled down into a nice rhythm. Here Eva and Kirk are doing some endurance laps, smooth as buttah (yeah Kirk, I know you don’t FEEL like buttah, maybe more like crusty gray gravy, but the impression is definitely at least margarine).

It was a fun day, and I got to see how fundamentally Boris and Rex have changed how I skate through 4 months of intensive body crushing/muscle remolding dryland work. I was overjoyed at the differences in my straightaway stroke. In fact, I was getting so much power out of my straightaways, when I was in the correct rhythm I pretty much found it impossible to skate in the paceline (since its my first day on ice, I had very little control over “feathering” my speed), I would pull out of the flailing line and skate in the outer lanes on my own. Not chasing the velocity, but relaxing and letting it come to me. Zoooom! I think I have the best of two worlds, one coach leaning up against the pads, the other following directly behind me, step by step. Both were happy with my progress (and the progress of the group in general), both say there still is a way to go. Here are Boris and I.

It’s funny, but when I look at this picture, in the past all I would have seen is the good things going on technically (and there are some good things here), but now all I can see are flaws, there are about 2 or 3 quite fundamental ones here that are robbing me of power. But I won’t spoil this otherwise nice shot by describing them. You can see my clap blade opening quite nicely on my right foot too.

After 2 hours of icey playtime, I re-emerged from the freezer back to the fires. It’s much harder going from cold to hot. Locals are in flip-flops and stick to the shade, every car is a sealed aluminum-glass envelope & has the air conditioner running full blast.

Living in Utah will be a contrast of fire and ice, a rotating sign on a bank says 99 degrees, ugh, and I hear Utah gets MUCH hotter than it is today. I can’t wait to get back to the freezer again.

Filed under: sweat