Cars, travel, pets, great coffee & paradise bars at Alterra’s on the Wisconsin Lakeshore, we live in a culture & time where so many of our pleasurable & memorable experiences have a price tag associated with them, even if it’s just burning gasoline driving to the state park to shuffle your feet through autumn leaves. Of course, the best things in life are still free, but a lot of cool things aren’t.
Quite frequently I have had people ask me how much my skates cost. I usually do tell, but I always immediately launch into one of my verbal convolutions about money & value & experience & travel & friendships that somehow never comes out the way I intend. So here is my shot at getting it right.
The central concept I want to invoke runs something like this: You can attach a dollar sign to most of the things we do as 21st century inhabitants. But what is the value & use these items & experiences add to our lives? Examining and being aware of our dollar habits, and how it flavors our emotional life is the crucial awareness that explains the lengths skaters & other athletes go to in pursing their sports.
I can give an answer to what my Canadian Van Horne skating boots & Dutch Viking blades cost me, roughly $1200 (2002 prices, since the dollar has tanked, it would be more now…) That is a significant chunk of change, but compared to what many bicyclists spend on bikes, or what ANY SPORT WITH A MOTOR costs, this is cheap for Olympic caliber equipment that will last for years. Even average runners can wear out 3-4 pairs of $100+ shoes a year. In 3-4 seasons, that costs as much as my custom carbon fibre speedskates.
But the price of skates is not speedskating, and indicates nothing of the value of sport & your own personal experience. Instead of asking obsessed/intense speedskaters what their skates cost, if you want to reveal the charged intersection of the spiritual/financial hotwire, instead ask them “how much have you spent on travel to get to races/practice in the last few years?”
Usually the response will be a rolling of the eyes, a hesitation, a groan, and then finally something like “damm, I don’t want to know”.
Then follow up your question with, “Where have you traveled? Do you have friends in faraway places? What are some of your road-trip memories from races? Who are the good people you never would have met unless you did this crazy sport?”
Then the groan is replaced by a smile, and the flood of true value comes rushing forth.
Every skater has their stories, their connections. There are about 10 different places I can think of where I if I showed up to inline or ice skate, I would be greeted like a valued member of the wandering skate-gypsy tribe; and I have developed strong friendships that go far beyond skating, friendships forged in the emotional smelter of racing that are now something else. Most skaters are like that too, since the community is so small, you develop strong connections. I started writing names of good folks I think of and miss. The list quickly became 30+ people, but I decided not to include it here, because I could barely scratch the surface of this eccentric & good-hearted tribe of blade and wheel.
But there is one name I will mention in closing, because true value & travel sometimes results in serendipitous connections with old friends completely unrelated to skating. I have known Satya since I was 13. We went to middle/high school together at ACS, & then attended undergraduate just down the road from each other (Hampshire for me, Smith for her). These days Satya is a smart fish in a big think tank, working as an alternative energy analyst at COWS in Madison, Wisconsin. After I was done racing at US single distance champs a few weeks ago, we went out for brunch and had a wonderful multi-hour catch up on the past DECADE of our lives. Circuitously I have my moth-like obsession with skating & the money I spent to travel to that race, to thank for it. That is true value, & worth every penny.
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Filed under: from home
My good friend 
So I am having an email conversation with my close friend Carla “last-lap” Langenthal, (shown on the right here) and she wrote me about some new acronyms she has come up with. Her email started out with:
ZMS -Zamboni missed spots (the crash shown here was because of big raw chunks of public skating ice, why do so many outdoor rinks have issues like this??)
