Zen and the Art of Speedskating

In the center of the speedskating Galaxy, the Olympics are going on, and its tremendous gravitational pull is felt even in the outlying planets.

Even so, racing goes on all over the universe, even if all eyes are turned to Torino. This past weekend was the combined Junior National Sprint Championships/America’s cup final in Milwaukee. You can see the results here on the WASSC results pages (scroll down a bit, look for the ADT Long Track America Cup final).

I really like Milwaukee, and the good folks of the Milwaukee Skate tribe. Here are a few more faces & moments from this past weekend’s races:

This is the view down the straightaway at the Pettit, lots of people in attendance. I like the hanging snowflakes. Click on the image for a larger picture.

Here is one of the good folks of the skate tribe; Olusegun Sijuwade is possibly the physically strongest man ever to lace up skates. Really… He is a world champion powerlifter and can do things like squat 675, bench 410, and deadlift over 700+… That is scary strong. Here he is sharpening before his race.

Olu is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet, and a talented musician who is often asked to play the national anthem before meets. I lived in his house for several months last winter, and now call peanut butter & jelly sandwiches “Olu Powerbars” (nutritionally, a PB & J is very close to a Powerbar, and easier to eat after a workout).

His feet are big, he does wear a size 44 skate/12 shoe, but not as big as this particular camera angle suggests.

Eleanor Poore came in from the snows of lake placid, skated huge PB’s in her first race on indoor ice. 1.5 seconds in the 500, and a whopping 5 seconds in the 1000. I have known her since she was very young, and it’s wonderful to see someone you care about develop tremendously as an athlete and a person. El, you rock!

Tiffany Wilson, a Canadian going to school in Milwaukee, took second overall in the Senior Women allaround. She is John Dimon’s step-daughter, was coached by Pat Kelly for several years, and somehow managed to fit her new dreadlocks under that hood. Her technique looks pretty good for being 1200m into the 1500m. You can really see that hip pushing into the turn, she is getting nice extension and has a controlled arm swing. Tiffany finished 2nd overall in the Allaround women.

Like myself, Steve Desotell is one of those masters who just races and races and races cause he simply loves this crazy sport. Here he is in the red & blue, 200m into his 1000, with Andrew Hodor of Saratoga springs. Steve was kidding several of the hotshot juniors saying “respect your elders”, since they were roughly 1/3 his age. Then he went out and matched the young guns step for step in every race! Here are the results for their category.

A junior national team skater, I am not quite sure who it is. But I like the lights & impressionistic flavor of the picture. This is an image grab from a video of a 1000m race, and he was haulin! p.s. thanks to Alice in the comments, this is Brent Aussprung.

Carla “last-lap” Langenthal driving for the finish. The finish line timing box is just coming into the picture on the right. Carla won the 3k in the All-around women by .07 seconds from Hedi Shockley. At racing speeds, how far is that? Head to head, over 3,000 meters, at their final lap velocity they would have been separated at the finish line by about 2 feet. (.72 meter, to be exact). I figured this out by tossing numbers through the So-Cal club’s “how fast can you really skate” speed calculator

Some might think I exaggerate when I talk about pain. Here I am 600 meters into the 1000, and then here is my face a few seconds after the finish as I am reaching to take my hood off. As 1000’s go, this one did not feel too bad. Here are the results from the Sprint Men.

Another inliner making the switch to ice, Hedi Shockley, waits for the 1500m start in typical inline down-start mode. She used a nice brew of power, fitness, and emotional intensity to win the overall of the women’s allaround. She actually slipped during this start, and then just flew the rest of the race.

Many thanks for these pictures goes to Marcia Focht, who took many of them, and to Alice Hagen, who loaned me the correct camera cable so I could download them to my computer!

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

It wasn’t as though I was nervous about winning or losing. It was… I would get nervous about the fact that I was… every time you race, you’re racing against the clock and you got to be able to dig deep and I got nervous about how much suffering and how much it was going to hurt during the race.
-Eric Heiden

I think of the Lyrics to that REM song, “Everybody Hurts“. Tonight is the Men’s Olympic 1500m, arguably the most painful speedskating event there is. The last lap is always agony, even for the best there has ever been.

p.s. thanks to US national team coach Ryan Shimabukuro, who alerted me in the comments that this is probably Dan Immerfall, not Eric Heiden, in this photo from the 1980 games. Thanks Ryan.

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Filed under: Quotes

I skated really well this past weekend, placing 3rd out of the 19 juniors and seniors in the America’s cup sprint, I even won $50 for my 3rd place, whoo-hoo! Also I am writing from one of my favorite places on this planet, the upstairs tables at the Lakeshore Alterra Coffee Shop in Milwaukee. But my heart is all churned up right now for 2 reasons.

Reason #1
Shani Davis should be triumphant in his 1000m gold medal. Incredible! Amazing! But his interview right afterwards left me really depressed. One of my cool cousins called me a few moments after the NBC coverage ended and asked me “You know these guys, is Shani a complete jerk?” No, he is not a jerk. I can barely imagine the media crapstorm he has endured, and some of the articles about him & the whole team pursuit thing were frankly stupid. Chad is visibly annoyed as well from the incessant media pounding on this simple issue.

I can only imagine that Shani was so utterly infuriated with the media, that after his gold medal, he did not want to talk with them. But it’s too bad it came across as it did to my cousin, and I imagine, others as well. It was his chance to really say “here is who I am”. It was his chance to be overjoyed, and for those of us watching to share in it. The interviewer was so flummoxed; she asked him if he was angry… Wow…

Do I know who the real Shani is? His mom has written me and said I am only an acquaintance, not a friend. I can accept that, and I totally understand her instinct to protect her son from the many people who try to glom onto someone with his talent.

How I know Shani is that last year at US nationals, I was staying at the same house as he was, and I drove him to the races each morning, and did some hanging out at the house in the evenings. I wish I could substitute the mental image I have of the soft-spoken, low-key guy for what I saw on NBC. Sure, he is a complex person, and has a complex story, and I can’t imagine how anyone could capture him in a media sound bite. I would not even begin to try.

Actually, the thing I want to really put in place of that NBC interview is Shani on the ice in Milwaukee evening sessions. Kids are drawn to him, and he relates superbly well to them, and when he is not skating too fast for them to follow, he often is completely surrounded. Before his race, he said “this is for the kids in the Evanston speed skating club”. Yeah, that is Shani… my friend Carla said that her first memory of Shani is at a short track meet, he was carrying several kids around on his back.

Sure there is skating politics going on about this and that & blah-blah, but it’s gotten out of hand, and it’s ludicrous in this happy moment, that this is being talked about, that I am even talking about it. In the paragraph of the future, still to be written, I hope people remember him for how he skated to a gold medal, and all the other championships he has won. He always wanted his skates to do the talking….

Reason #2
My dog ran off yesterday afternoon, she is still missing. I am in Milwaukee, and Jessica is at a continuing education Vet Symposium in Las Vegas. Our beloved Husky/Shepard cross Lilly was staying with next door neighbors. Lilly knows them & their dogs, and we have left her with them before. They were hiking up in the snow-covered mountain trails above our house with a whole gaggle of happy canines, and Lilly ran off.

This was yesterday. Last night it snowing, and got down to 15 degrees in urban Salt Lake. Surely it was much colder up in the hills. Lilly did not show up at home, the local shelters have not found her. Lilly is a very fearful dog, she was abused before we got her, and is quite scared of people she does not know. This was her last week, on the same trail she dissapeared from.

I have this sinking feeling that she avoided people, and froze to death last night, under some bush up in the mountains. She is an indoor dog, and has not grown the thick coat she would need to survive.

The whole family who is taking care of her is making huge efforts to search. I fear for the worst.

This is why my heart is churning. Usually, when I feel bad, looking at nature gives me some perspective, some grounding, no matter what is going on. Not today.

Here is the view of lake Michigan. I love the colors that change by the day, the shape of the shoreline, even through the blustery, damp cold. It froze my hands to take this shot (Click on the image for a huge L-R panorama). I thought of my dog, is she cold? is she still alive? Lilly, come home!!

UPDATE!!!: LILLY HAS BEEN FOUND!!! Very late last night, in a snowstorm, some good Samaritans noticed a scared and freezing dog, who was obviously lost. Lilly had headed down the hill when lost, and not uphill into the mountains, it saved her life. The good samaritans spent a lot of time to get her to trust them, (she actually jumped into their car before she would let them touch her). Lilly is micro-chipped, and has a tag indicating that she is, and the micro-chip company number. This morning, they called, and got in touch with the number on her collar. So all is well!

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Filed under: from the coffee shop

I am not a machine, I am a human being
-Anni Friesinger

Wouldn’t it be so easy if the athletes on TV responded as quickly and perfectly as computer video games, like machines, and the harder you urged them onward from the comfort of your TV view, the faster they go!

But that is how things go in the movies and in video games; we have become a culture of comfortable control in so many respects. Yet maybe this is why sports occupy more and more fascination within the modern psychological airspace; because Anni Friesinger is not a machine, and no matter how hard her fans hope, or how hard Anni herself tries, she does not always win. She was 4th, actually, in the 3k. She has been the best in the world for years, and she misses the podium in the Olympics.

We love sports because winning moves us, but as often, gut-wrenching loss is equally enthralling.

The pain of an athlete, who has trained their whole life for something, is like a car wreck we can’t look away from. Figure skaters crashing on the first jump of a program, skiers who miss a slalom gate, XC ski racers struggling up hills as the winners accelerate away from them, Michelle Kwan explaining at a news conference how the spirit is willing but her body has failed. There can only be one winner, many losers.

Hmmm, in fact, there are 2,600 athletes competing in Torino. Only 84 gold medal events (there are some team sports, like hockey, counted as “one” medal, but the ratio is still pretty bad)..

Since my own limited experience of just having competed at one Olympic trials, I find watching the Olympics sometimes a wrenching experience. I am not sure if I ever made it clear here how much disappointment I feel looking back on my 500m races during Olympic trials. It was me vs. myself, and I still feel like I failed. I have a picture in the clutter of my desk, its of my stumble in the final corner of my 2nd 500, both arms windmilling wildly. It hurts to look at. Sure, I am proud to have competed there, they were fast races compared to many others, but for me, they still feel like failures. I desperately wanted that top 10 finish, to earn the right to wear the USA on my skinsuit. In the overall rankings after the 2 500m races, I was 11th.

Maybe we do this for the failure, the pain, for the striving that makes us better in the long run. But I wanted to take a moment here to thank someone, someone who I think is in a lot of pain right now, and someone who has meant a lot to this sport:

Without K.C. Boutiette there would probably have been no Derek Parra, no Jen Rodrieguz, no Joey Cheek, no Chad Hedrick winning medals at the Olympics. Even though I don’t belong in that list of athletes, his life gave me the idea to ice a try as well. Without K.C. the arc of my life would have been different, and this blog would never have existed.

K.C. is special because he was the first top inline speedskater to try long-track ice, he grabbed a spot on the 1994 US Olympic team, and opened a lot of eyes. He competed in 94, 98, 2002, and this is his final games.

Maybe someone else would have been that first inliner to make the ice scene, maybe it was an inevitable progression, but K.C. was the definitive pioneer, the first, the one who turned possibility into reality.

But K.C. is not a machine, he has suffered with a back injury for years, and kept training hard for that elusive goal, that stamp of a medal, that validation of all that effort.

He has placed 5th twice in Olympic races, his final event in his 4th Olympics was a few days ago, his final shot (and an excellent chance) at an Olympic medal. But K.C’s legs locked up in the last laps of the team pursuit, and he finished 10 meters behind teammates Chad and Charles, and Italy beat the US team, knocking them out of contention for a medal.

I read the results online before NBC coverage started; I read that KC was in tears afterwards. I skipped watching the coverage; I did not want to see this. I have a hard enough time watching other athletes in other sports suffer. Not this, not this good guy who has always been so friendly & open hearted, I don’t want that memory. (they replayed his tears several times, so I saw it anyway, damm).

K.C. I think that the inliners who have won medals at the Olympics, all of them ought to shave a tiny bit from the backside of each one, melt the shards together, and give it to you.

Or maybe those of us who stepped onto the ice following your inspiration, maybe we can all take a slice of our joy, and en masse brew a tonic against the wrenching I imagine is in your gut at the end of your career. I wish we could all do that right now. A roomful of us, how many? several hundred at least, probably more, a standing ovation just for you that goes on and on.

I came across this line in a poem by an obscure beatnik writer:

Like everything else I have
Somebody showed it to me and I found it by myself

He was writing about a huge boulder on the seashore, that wobbles every time a wave hits it, but I thought of speedskating, K.C. and his pain…. I hope he is at peace.

There is a much worse pain in this world, after all, it’s just skating, it’s just joy, just failure, just pain, just the Olympics…

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Filed under: on the road

The Olympics had their opening ceremony yesterday! And Chris Witty was selected by all the other Olympic team captains! to carry in the flag, leading the US team!

It says something about the success of US speedskaters that she is the third speedskater in a row selected for this honor. It also says something about the kind of challenges & internal pain Chris has overcome in her life, and the respect other athletes have for her. I don’t need to go into that here; the media will do that well enough. Here is what she had to say herself when they announced her selection.

What I can say about the half-dozen conversations that I have had with Chris is this: she is very humble about her accomplishments. She realizes that she has led an unusual life as a professional athlete; she appreciates it, and has stayed a normal person even though she has a gold medal & the 1000m world record attached to her name. She talks about how she sees Eric Heiden handle his own dollop of reknown, and how she admires his approach.

She is also quite funny in a thoughtful way; here is an example; she told me about her two dogs, both are rescue dogs, both are Husky-Heeler breed mixes. She said that her dogs can’t seem to decide if they are independent and aloof huskies, or people-centric blue heelers, and they vacillate between both behaviors in a schizophrenic way.

Here is Kip Carpenter & Chris Witty in the stands during the opening ceremony. Kip is such a goofball, he actually is the person who sent me these pictures! So I suppose its ok to post it!

hmmmm…. Its strange to have watched the Olympics over and over, and now I know many of these people…. wow….

As for me, on this beautiful day in Salt Lake, as the Olympics begin, I felt a door of my life close, I missed watching the opening ceremony, since I was at a job interview.

Somehow that is mythically appropriate. The Olympics start, and the gravitational pull of the working world grounds many of us who were soaring along, defying gravity, chasing skate dreams.

It was a good interview, and I think my chances at working there are excellent. But halfway through, as I was comfortably bantering back and forth with the interviewer about web/tech stuff, I suddenly felt a door close in my life, a door signifying the transition from being someone who put my athletic dreams ahead of everything, towards another set of priorities, another arranging of rewards.

And it was emotionally jarring to feel that door slam shut, another skater told me she also felt that door close while driving to a job interview. I have another interview on Monday.

Airplane pilots talk in reverent tones about flying, motorcyclists about the wind & open road, horseback riders about the surge of a huge animal responding to your commands. I understand, I really do understand. I could no more stop skating than I could stop looking at the mountains, the sunset, from living life with every sense wide open. My skates are practically my feet. But what goals? how much sacrifice, how much financial pain? How much more can I really justify now that Olympic trials are over?

And nothing is really written in stone, I think over time, if I prove my ability, this job could offer me the flexibility I need to continue competing at a high level. I will have almost a month off at the end of the season, and then only once a day training for several months afterwards, so we shall see.

There is training, Training and TRAINING. I have been TRAINING for the last 2 years.

I am so happy for the whole US national speedskating team… I have seen every one of them suffer physically during hard on ice workouts, and then emotionally through the normal season ups & downs, and Olympic trials. These smiles you see, this is part of the reward! keep flying my friends, keep flying.

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Filed under: from home