Zen and the Art of Speedskating

There are 2 kinds of respect in the world, respect flavor #1 is the kind you feel for someone who is doing something you can’t imagine what it’s like, like a gymnast doing a triple twist off a pommel horse.

Respect flavor #2 is the kind where you have done the activity, and can accurately imagine what an individual is experiencing. I am getting to the point where I can look at some world cup level skaters and think, “yeah, I can picture doing that, I am a few steps slower, gosh I respect them, but its within the possibilities of what I could someday do”.

However, the winningest world cup skater ever, Jeremy Wotherspoon, has shown up for some training with the US national team. I watched him do a stunningly fast 800m, and upon hearing the times yelled out by the coaches, I felt a heaping serving of respect flavor #1! If ‘Spoon took off that Canadian national team suit and exposed a superman logo on his chest, many would not be surprised. He actually looks like he comes from the same physical mold as Wayne Gretzky, He is very tall, wide-eyed, long legged, and insanely talented. Nice guy too. After practice was over, I told him I can see that he is working very hard by his facial expression, but it’s amazing how smooth his technique remains. He smiled and said “That is the trick, really.” Very few skaters just leave me slack-jawed with awe when they really air it out, Casey Fitzrandolph is one, Jeremy is another.

I also asked Chris Needham why his ever-present Boston Red Sox cap is never torn from head by the wind during workouts, even at the warp-speed velocities that earned him National Sprint team status. He removed his hat, rubbed his hand across his thin buzz of hair, and said “its not hair, it’s really Velcro!”

I put some extra internal pressure on myself today as well, Frank Day, owner-inventor of Powercranks, and one of my sponsors/web design clients stopped by the Oval, on his way back from an expo. It was great to see him. Powercranks are tremendous training tools for skaters, especially in the early season. They condition the hip flexors & hamstrings like nothing else, & cut about .5 off of my opening 100m last season. If you survive the ego-killing adaptation to them, they are amazing. I know about a half-dozen speedskaters who use them, ranging from short trackers to marathoners & coaches. I spend lots of time on mine from April through July. Frank is a good guy, and I am also great friends with his #2 man, Andrew Weber.

I put self-inflicted pressure on myself to skate really well that practice, especially as Frank was there with his video camera. I flew for most of practice, but right at the end of the workout, it’s came my turn to lead our group at top speed; my legs started to burn in the first corner, in the final corner my technique came completely apart, and my new Russian training partner (& the second fastest russian sprinter in the world) Sergei Kornilov went flying by me, I struggled and stumbled to a time much slower than I expected of myself. I was furious. Angry that I could not perform when I really wanted to throw down a good time in front of someone who believes in me.

Boris was very happy with my times, Frank was impressed seeing what I do in person, & what a world class speedskating facility looks like. But I had put myself in “race-mind” and failed, I asked of my body and it could not deliver the way I wanted.

Later that evening, during workout #2, pissed at that physical meltdown earlier, I consciously picked up my intensity & speed every moment I felt tired, My body and mind began to have this conversation every time I was about halfway up the nearly vertical hill I was running up.

Body: I can’t do this! This HURTS!!

Mind: Go Faster! Loser! Don’t EVER get passed again like you did today! WORK HARDER!!

Body: Lactic acid burn!! Danger!! Exceeding muscular limits!

Mind: Fuck off, weak loser, PICK IT UP!! MORE!!

Body: really? Ok, how’s this, Heart Rate of 194!!!

Mind: Ha! That’s nothing! More footspeed!

Body: You just earned yourself tunnel vision for the last 50m of this hill!

Mind: Who needs to see? I am not here, I am in the last 150m of my 1000m race at Olympic trials!! I am strong and moving FASTER!!

Body: Think you are so cool, playing mind games!! fine! I am now removing all sensation from your legs except for scary pins & needles.

Mind: HA! BUT I AM STILL INCREACING MY SPEED!! Here is the hilltop! YEAH!!

Body: have some involuntary retching, compliments of me… plus you get to walk like a bowlegged drunk cowboy for the next couple of minutes.

Mind: See, you can do it, you should be proud.

The body doesn’t say anything to this final taunt from the mind, & grimly releases loads of endorphins to heal the mind/body rift

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Filed under: sweat

Grammatically this sign implies that traffic here “has already been calmed”. How they do this is not mentioned. I am imagining this neighborhood does aerial spraying of the car population with sedatives, selective culling of the most aggressive of the automotive species by highly trained commandoes, or maybe they spike gasoline with something that makes the cars sluggish & not dangerous, (they are experimenting with sterilizing deer with bait set out in the woods, why not cars?).

And there are some cars in need of calming here too. After a delightful dinner with my insightful friend Kate, we were standing outside of Maxie’s Supper Club in the pleasant dusk. There was an intersection and train tracks next to Maxie’s, and a train was slowly making its way towards the intersection. Our stomachs were full of great food and we chatted along in a blissful post-dinner haze.

Suddenly we are jolted out of our conversation by a tremendous BANG.

A large green SUV has run a red light, and squarely t-boned a small red sports car. Glass and plastic bodywork scatter across the asphalt & for an instant, I think the train is going to hit the tangled cars, but they don’t slide onto the tracks. Wait staff pour out of Maxie’s calling 911 & waving a heavy-duty flashlight to direct traffic. A woman on a Vespa scooter, who was immediately behind the red car, pulls off the road, and then she runs to the window of the smashed sports car, where the driver is looking around, dazed, and he is holding his neck.

It’s at this moment when I have the sickening realization, that I KNOW the passenger of the red car, and the woman on the scooter. I know them quite well, actually. The anonymous suddenly becomes tremendously personal.

Luckily, in the final analysis, Ben was not seriously injured, I thank the dumb clockwork of chance also that Chris’s scooter was following Ben’s car, and not the other way around, or Chris would be dead/extremely seriously hurt…

Kate talked to the very upset driver of the green SUV, she was on the way to the hospital herself, her father is in critical condition, and she did not pay attention for a split second, or was distracted by the blazing headlight of the train, and did not see the red light.

There is something in the air right now, some ions of awful convergence. If folks have creative ideas of how to “calm traffic”, speak now!

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Filed under: on the road

Engaging in some serious coach-ordered rest, I went to see the Soldier Hollow Classic Sheepdog Championship with Jessica. I found it such a refreshing mental breeze to watch these dogs rocket about, especially in light of the continuing agonies of New Orleans.

Watching a sheepdog championship live, wow! Its so HARD what they ask these dogs to do! Me on my mountain bike with Jessica yelling directions, we would do far worse! The crucial difference between the owners & the dog though, is that the owners are competing, the dog is in the moment of work & accomplishing what they were bred to do, they are dogs being dogs 100% fulfilled. I wish I were more like a dog sometimes, unaware of winning and losing, just aware of being a DOG!!! Aware of just velocity and the pleasure of the chase & the job.

These pictures are of Bess, a 10 year old female Border Collie from Colorado, with her well-trained human Tony Stewart. Bess has some top level dog medals in her paws and was 3rd of 145 dogs (!!) at nationals last year and 2nd in this event last year of the 50 dogs entered. In my best race at nationals last year I finished 12th of 28!! Ha! The herding dog world is far more competitive than the human speedskating world, Bess & Tony probably train more hours than I do too. This was not a 100% successful run for this duo, although they qualified for the final round, and you can see it in Tony’s expression in the final picture. But look how Bess trots! Ahhhh! To be a dog fulfilled!

The following poem is by Miguel De Unamuno, (translated by Robert Bly) I am not sure why this moved me after seeing Border Collies tearing around so happy & focused, but somehow, it truly fit the mood of the day…

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
Sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
That brushes your heel as it turns going by,
The man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
Which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
But to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
Is the work, start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like a seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

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Filed under: Quotes, from home

I wrote about my friend Jeremy, Musician/High School friend/resident of America’s favorite underwater city, in my previous post. When I write about someone I know in this public place, I usually email them & let them know out of courtesy. After all, this is the Internet, and I respect other people’s desire for privacy. This blog gets 100+ readers a day from all over the world, so even though I started it for freinds/family to follow my progress towards Olympic trials, it’s not really private at all, I don’t mind, but others might.

Also, in the case of Jeremy, I emailed him out of worry. He has a 5 year old daughter & wife, so it’s not just a case of him being able to swim for it like Roy Scheider at the end of the movie Jaws, his guitars lashed together like pontoons. Jeremy is ok, he just wrote me back privately & also commented on the previous post. Like 80% of New Orleans residents, he got the hell out of town before Katrina came ashore. But his home & fellow ACS‘er Greg Schatz’s homes are almost certainly flooded, & his hometown of the last 13 years is going to be uninhabitable for a long time, it’s quickly turning into “a toxic swamp”. He’s going to have to relocate for a year or two. Put yourself in his shoes for a moment, really.

I want to reprint a part of his excellent comment on my previous post here. As I said before, disasters are hard to understand in simple numbers, storm surge stats, wind MPH, and vague pronouncements by the president looking down from Air Force One. Stuff like that does not reveal the lives impacted. When I wrote my previous post, I had just been sitting in front of my laptop screen, and following Internet links to satellite images. I live on a mountainside in the middle of a desert; it’s a little hard to imagine New Orleans right now, despite my own experience of having a knee-deep/front row seat to a water based natural disaster I wrote in abstract metaphor, later that day, I went to the Utah Olympic Oval’s weight room for my 2nd workout, and then I watched scenes of devastation & saw interviews with sobbing, distraught people, all of my metaphor seemed hollow & like tweedy professorial self-absorption.

These are Jeremy’s words, his take on what’s happening:

the other day I called one of these friends and left her a message, just to say hi because I hadn’t seen her in a while. She returned my call a day or two later, to say hi because we hadn’t seen each other in a while. We commiserated about how slow it is for musicians in New Orleans in August, and she gave me some suggestions about a place to get a gig. And she told me she loved me and hoped to see me soon.

A few days after that, I was calling her from Baton Rouge. “You’re staying? Why?” She and her husband, another street musician, as well as other dear old friends from the streets had decided to stick it out and weather the storm. “What if it floods the house?” Then they could go upstairs, she said. “What if the wind tears the roof off?” They could go downstairs, she said, apparently unaware of the fallibility of her plan. Well, now I have had no word of them. Have they reached a shelter? Did they get rescued? I have no idea, and I may not know for weeks, or months. They may still be sitting on their island, happily drinking the time away, until the booze runs out. Or they may have decided to go down with the ship they so dearly loved, and upon whose mercies they have always relied.
-Jeremy Lyons

I think that in moments like this, the Blogosphere is a great way for those of us so far away, to grasp what is going on & to move a few steps beyond what comes in over the TV & radio. Also socially open source software, like wikipedia’s developing Katrina page, are astonishing resources.

But nothing replaces the words of those who are most directly impacted. Thanks Jeremy.

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Filed under: from home

Liberally compressing a whole weeks worth of conversations between coach Boris and I into a paragraph, roughly the following exchange occurred:

Andrew: I am going faster and faster doing our workouts/drills, and am getting close to my all time fastest lap (27.01), can I please go all out just once! and try to go really fast!

Boris: No, you are not technically ready yet.

Andrew: Pllleeeeeeze!!!

Boris: No, Why are you so intent on going fast right now? Its coming together well, You will go really fast this year!

Andrew: I have done every step of every workout you have assigned since march (exception: august 21st). I been suffering like a sled dog, I want to go faster than I ever have before, not for physical reasons, but for psychological ones, to feel that all this sacrifice is really getting me somewhere. I know intellectually and even physically that I am improving, but I want the stopwatch to tell me as well.

Boris: There is this old Russian saying, “If something is prohibited, but very desirable, it is probably a good idea to do it”. Ok, you may try.

Result: Even though I am extremely tired at the end of this training cycle, and skated rushed and sloppy when I turned on the turbos, I pounded out a 26.41 for a flying 400m!!! (33.9mph/54.5kph average speed-figured out here-, and thanks to Dimon Sports for the fast suit) The whole rink heard me howl when I saw the time, Kirk Fogdall, skating behind me, also did an all time best, a 29.2 with both hands on his back!

How much has a whole year of soul-crushing hard work earned me?? So far, its .6 of a second improvement from my fastest lap last year.

Boris is heading to Russia for business and to meet with one of his speedskating yodas. He did some taping of the team to show yoda, and recorded my 26.41, click on the picture to the right to see/download it, its only 1.3mb. When I look at this, I see my usual technical flaws, they are all evident in the video: in the straights my left knee follows an inefficient arc compared to the right one, in the turns my left elbow sticks out like sail, and under the high pressure of the turn my rhythm is powerful but choppy & without flow. However there are numerous things I am doing so much better than in the past, and I can happily blame Boris for most of them.

I begin to rest now, I feel a huge psychological pressure fall away, and in a week or so, all this fatigue will be shed like old skin too. I will emerge as a new, faster self, to race better vs myself & this new, higher standard. Right now it hurts to walk, but I am smiling everywhere I go.

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Filed under: sweat, from the coffee shop