Zen and the Art of Speedskating

This is not a blog about my marriage, it’s a blog about other things, but it’s worth saying that the smartest thing I have ever said was asking Jessica to marry me. Today is our 4th wedding anniversary!

We went to the Circle Lounge in downtown Salt Lake, told the sushi chef it was our anniversary, and just be crazy creative, we will eat whatever you make! We experienced giant roses made of sashimi! Succulent grilled whitefish collarbone meat! Rice in wild flavors & shapes, perfect asparagus… mmmmm!!! What you see below is the peanut butter chip covered chocolate cake finale to one of the most amazing meals I have ever eaten! And of course, the company was wonderful.

Thanks Jess, for everything. I know a lot of words, but none that clearly says how much I love you.

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Coach Boris called me today, asking me if I was ok, if I have been sick or something, since he has not seen a blog post for a couple of days!! (3, in fact). I am fine, but I certainly have been lapping up this rest week like a hot and thirsty dog standing in the middle of a snow-fed mountain stream.

The house is clean, the laundry is done, my bike is fixed, the dog is hiked, it doesn’t hurt to stand up, and my body and soul is now ready for more hard training! yes, the rest week has accomplished its goal. If you imagine that a rest week for a full time athlete is just sitting on the couch relaxing, you would be half right, for a rest week is around half the training volume of a normal week. I will not reveal the secret blend of training that Boris prescribes for the other half of the time, but suffice it to say like most of my fast-twitch sprinter brethren, I improve dramatically with rest! So the few times I have gone hard this week, I have felt very good!

One of the workouts assigned was a 3-hour bike ride, and I had this crazy idea of riding out to Antelope Island & meeting my wife & car there. Antelope Island is a brown, scorched mountain arising out of the middle of the Great Salt Lake, quite dramatic in its barren lifeless bulk. My companion for this adventure was the qwadzilla himself, Kirk Fogdall. Kirk found a map/route from a local century ride that went out to the island. So we followed their table-top-flat prescribed route along gentle country & cul-de-sac roads, deftly avoiding the myriad of Utah roads that would be courting death-by-SUV.

This route was also liberally painted with directions & indicators from the century, on the biggest climb in the whole ride (where the route crossed I-15) we found BASSO painted in the road. It was such a wild thing to discover the name of the 2nd placed finisher in the recent Tour De France painted on a Utah overpass, that I just had to take a picture of it! I think this is the true sign of bicycle racing’s arrival as a mature American sport, that an Italian bike racer who has probably never stepped foot in the US has his name painted on a rural overpass!

2:15 into the ride, just as my fast-twitch fibers were starting to fatigue, Kirk’s bundled cables of mega-wattage slow twitch power began to kick in, To ride mano-a-mano with the “Fogdall Express” is a wonderful, painful thing; Kirk’s chain began relentlessly marching down his cogset till he was spinning his biggest gear. Kirk sustained over 30mph for much of the way across the final 7 mile long causeway to Antelope Island, displaying the reason he has Colorado State time trial championship medals on his desk. I stuck in his draft with my heart thrashing about in the upper 190’s, happy and determined. I tore my eyes away from his wheel long enough to glimpse the beauty of the glass-calm Salt Lake (and take these the pictures).

As we zipped along at racing pace, we thought of our wives & Kirk’s 2 kids waiting at the end of the causeway with lunch, and the upcoming promise of swimming/floating in the brine shimp saturated soup of the Great Salt Lake. There are a lot of reasons to do hard things, there are a lot of reasons to challenge yourself & discover strength in surprising places. Kirk is as fond of mentioning his beginnings of grey hair as I am fond of reminding him of moments like this, where 35 years olds like us simply do outrun any hints of age in completely consuming moments spinning big gears stupid fast in outrageously beautiful places. What a life!

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“Far from wishing to awaken the artist in the pupil prematurely, the teacher considers it his first task to make him a skilled artisan with sovereign control of his craft. The pupil follows out this intention with untiring industry. As though he had no higher aspirations he bows under his burden with a kind of obtuse devotion, only to discover in the course of years that forms which he perfectly masters no longer oppress but liberate. He grows daily more capable of following any inspiration without technical effort, and also of letting inspiration come to him through meticulous observation. The hand that guides the brush has already caught and executed what floated before the mind at the same moment the mind began to form it, and in the end the pupil no longer knows which of the two-mind or hand-was responsible for the work. “

from Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel

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At the beginning of the amazingly (insert your own descriptive here) movie “Conan The Barbarian” there is a moment at the start of the film that sticks in the minds of many who have seen it. A gaggle of war-captured children are shackled to a massive wheel, the “Wheel of Pain” (a grain grinder, actually). They pass through puberty pushing this monstrosity, wearing grooves into the ground with their feet. One by one, they die from the effort, till finally, only one of them is left, turning this massive wheel. And now he is adult with biceps like cannonballs, legs like howitzers, and very thirsty for revenge, its Conan!

This cinematic image came into my mind during dryland earlier this week. We were doing repeated skate position jumps, with running/minimal recovery between the jumps (that’s me & Eric Krann doing them on the right). We are finishing up a hard training cycle, and the fatigue has really built up in me. 2 hours into the 3 hour workout (and I did 5 hard hours the day before), after hitting my maximum heart rate over and over, after endless efforts at 100%, my brain shut off completely. I had no idea what set we were on, what rep, I could not count, speak, think, I completely had submerged into suffering and effort. There was no moment but now, nothing but the mechanical motions and trying to make each jump big and technically correct. Kirk was worried about me, I was working so hard, I was COMPLETELY SILENT & GRIM for most of the workout…. Imagine that! Andrew quiet!

Weirdly enough, I was still able to fly pretty far each jump. During a brief break, as I was vacantly staring at the ground, with my heart thudding along like a jackhammer, Boris put his arm around my shoulders and said “Yes, its hard, I know, but your muscles are strong enough to do this, they are strong enough to do anything, keep the mind focused, and it will be ok, it’s the mind.” Some spark ignited in the flammable debris of my brain, and I think my last set was even better than my first, as I began to relax into bigger and bigger jumps (max HR for the last set was waaay over 200+ in case you care). This is when that memory from the Conan movie occurred to me.

Lest Mom worry (and she reads this blog) dear Mom, let me clarify that what I am experiencing is common, and actually is probably an essential part of breaking into another level of fitness. Masters cycling world champion Glenn Swan once said “Yeah, you can get to about 90% of your potential with 2 years of hard work, its that last 10% you just have to break your heart to get”. I think he was talking about the wheel of pain, that last 10%. Glenn has been there.

Football players talk in awe and horror about their fall 2-a-day practices, Cadel Evans, during a recent Tour De France breakaway, said he had a moment when he simply could not recall his middle name, no matter how hard he tried, Sprinter Robert Förster even said that he simply blacked out the last 100k of a tough mountain stage, had no memory of it whatsoever. It’s all that last 10%

Everyone builds their own wheel, their own chains of sacrifice, and that is the crucial difference between myself, football players, Tour de France bicycle racers and the mythical Conan (who had no choice). Modern athletes create ourselves anew -wearing grooves into ground of our own choosing; how hard we work combined with that careful equipment choice of picking our parents right (I did! genetically and otherwise) creates who we are. If reaching that last 10% of your ability was not so hard, it would not be worth so much, or be as fulfilling as when you feel that whoosh of sweet velocity & move faster than you have ever gone before.

Of course, this is all just Friday afternoon philosophizing; I exhausted because of this 10% obsession that I have, and I think I will turn my computer off now, and go sleep for most of next week (a rest week!! yay!). oh, wait, I need to go lift weights tonight! and I am already fried from 3 hours today! soooooo…. back to the wheel!!

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I just got back from New York City this past weekend, celebrating my father-in-law’s 75th birthday, pictured to the right here are some of the most precious of natural resources that New York City produces. I am bringing them to feed to everyone on my speedskating team after practice today. Why? Well, cause they are my friends, and also here is a story to explain why food after practice is an absolute necessity:

The athletes are moving powerfully, there is pop to every motion and the technique is excellent. In the turns, on the straights, snap and power, they are uncomplainingly doing everything the coach is asking, putting 100% concentration & sweat into the practice, it’s a thing of beauty. The sport they are doing does not matter, it could be anything, the following is what matters;

Halfway through the practice, the coach calls the team over, and says: “ok, each of you describe what you will be doing in the 30 minutes after we are done here.” The athletes describe a whole range of things. Stretching, chatting, getting changed out of sweaty gear, talking on cel phones, driving home to be with family/getting back to work. Etc, etc, etc, etc.

The coach listens patiently, and then announces “ok, those of you who did not mention that they are properly eating within 30 minutes, you are not allowed to finish the workout today: get off the ice/field/track/etc, you might work hard here, but the workout does not make you faster, what makes you faster is the RECOVERY following the workout. By not refueling properly, and missing the carbohydrate window, you are ROBBING yourself of the benefit of all the excellent work you are putting in right here, right now. I am just making it 100% explicit that those who have bad recovery habits are not completing this workout, because what you have done to your own body, practice after practice, is skipped gaining some of the benefit from what we are doing here. Its just as if you were goofing & being disrespectful while everyone else is working hard, but you are disrespecting yourself, and that is almost worse.”

The athletes who are forced to leave complain, are ticked off, but the coach is firm, and they leave with a very important lesson learned.

This is an allegorical story, Boris & Rex did not do this, but I have always wanted to see a coach actually have the balls to sacrifice part of one workout to make a really strong point to their athletes (especially young athletes) who have horrible recovery habits. Years ago I went to a lecture by the nutritionist of the Denver Broncos, and she described how changing eating lifelong bad eating habits (both timing and content) made a huge difference for many football players who were simply used to hitting McDonalds about an hour and a half after getting off the field. This is why many pro and college teams now feed their athletes on a daily basis, US speedskating does, it lays out a whole spread for the National team. Nutrition is as important as ice time & coaching.

People might see me going fast, or tossing about big weight in the gym, but its really true that what MADE me fast, is bio-chemical recovery events taking place after the workout (repeated thousands of times through my lifetime). The workout creates the possibility to become something; proper recovery habits make it an actuality. Sleep, massage, a balance of food that matches your own needs, it is all part of the jigsaw puzzle that makes up someday having a race that fully reaches your potential. Working hard, focusing, having good technique, proper equipment, and wanting it bad are certainly undeniable pieces of the equation. But food is the most powerful drug available to any athlete, both in what you eat, and the timing involved. Check out the research you can find online, its all there. Its not rocket science, but most athletes don’t have a clue.

If your “workout” is not really over until you have recovered from it, and you are in serious training for a competitive event, then you are “always” working out in some respect. What a thought! Frightening, but true, this is probably why control freaks tends to do VERY well at grueling individual sports.

I am lucky enough that my body will often physically put me to sleep very rapidly following a workout if I don’t get food immediately, so I have no choice but to eat right away, or I might not make it home.

Nutrition is also highly personal, I don’t necessarily recommend bagels post workout, that’s a ton of pure carbs. It’s all about what works best for you individually & what kind of workout you are doing. I almost always drink a sports drink during the workout, and like clockwork, I step off the ice/bike, and I immediately drink an ensure + usually something else, banana, sandwich, I often have a pile of things like canned pineapple, Gatorades, & ensures in the trunk of my car, and munch through them when necessary. Research says you shouldn’t eat a huge meal immediately, just something, but that something really has to be fairly immediate & proper, or your body suffers.

Lest I sound “holier than thou” I certainly have weaknesses when it comes to food, as I never really analyzed the total ratios of what I eat in terms of protein/carbs/fat. Anecdotally I feel healthier eating a very carnivorous diet, but that is just my impression, not backed up by any facts, If I really care about every .1 of a second in my races, its time for me to do that. Also instead of just having a “sweet tooth” or two, I have inherited my mom’s “sweet tusks”

So I am publicly declaring here & today that I am swearing off refined sugar & starting my nutriton journal until I drop a few more pounds. Ah, beloved mountain dew, sweet orange scones & lovely krispy kremes, I shall meet you again someday, but no time soon…..

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