Month: March 2010

I described some basics of skating technique in No Regrets Part 4 along with the fact that my years of inlining had done more harm than good.  My technique on everything was flat out awful and it was clear that my original 1.5 year plan was insane.  I was no Chad Hedrick or Derek Parra.  That first 1.5 years came and went in a flash but I decided to sign on for 4 more years.  I won’t detail every one of them, of course.  I’ll just the high (and low) points.

Fixing My Technique

I knew that I’d have to rebuild my technique from the ground up to get anywhere in the sport.  And that was a problem.  With nearly a decade of doing it wrong, my body had a lot of patterns ingrained and they were all wrong. I’ve fixed people’s technique in the weight room and it takes endless, endless repetition and practice. … Keep Reading

Continuing from Part 3, now I was in Salt Lake City, I had a teammate and I had a coach.  Now what?

A Primer on Speed Skating Part 1: Are You Serious?

As I mentioned in No Regrets Part 2, there is a small tradition of inline skaters successfully making the switch to the ice.  I had assumed that my years skating inline (and recall that I did fairly well in my last season) would make my switch easier.  Oh how wrong I was.  Quite in fact, if anything it did more harm than good.  My years doing things wrong would make reprogramming my nervous system that much more labor intensive.  I’ll come back to this at the end of today’s installment.

As I quickly found out, my technique absolutely sucked.  I mean everything I did was wrong.  I was fit as hell and strong as hell but it didn’t do me any good on the ice. … Keep Reading

Continuing from No Regrets Part 2, where I had wrapped up in Austin and gone to Salt Lake City.

It Begins

It would actually be about a week before I got a pair of blades for my boots so I couldn’t get on the ice immediately.  My first task was to find a gym, I did this before finding a place to live.  I found a fantastic one down the road about a mile and joined immediately.  Sadly it would get bought out by Gold’s Gym a year or two later and ruined before being closed.  But I could continue my weight room assault and cardio until I got my blades.

They finally arrived and I started going to club ice sessions.  Now, the oval has a ‘coaching’ program in place, it’s run with about the same level of competency and organization as everything else they do there; which is to say, with less skill than the average little league soccer team.… Keep Reading

If you didn’t read No Regrets Part 1, I’d strongly suggest that you do or what follows won’t make any sense at all.

2004: Ice Camp

By the summer of 2004, my fitness was improving but I was still without a race circuit to attend.  I wasn’t sure what to do. I was biding my time in Austin, not really doing much with my life, books were selling, I was dating a very crazy girl.  And in poking around the Internet, I came across a used pair of ice speed skating boots (that turned out to be six sizes too big) on Ebay.  What the hell, I thought, let’s pick them up.  You know, just in case.

Part of me must have been thinking about the ice because, somehow, I then managed to stumble across an Introduction to Long-track camp being held at the Salt Lake City Olympic Oval.   I signed up immediately. … Keep Reading

This is the start of a very different series of articles than I tend to write.  For the most part, I haven’t and don’t talk that much abut personal stuff here.  I used to do that on a separate blog but I tend to think of those as places where people chatter inanely about myself.  But this piece is a little bit different.  Today I want to start a fairly long series describing the 5.5 years I spent in Salt Lake City pursuing ice speed skating.  How I made the choice to do that so that I’d have no regrets.

Introduction

For the past 5.5 years, as many of you know (and some of you probably don’t), I’ve been living in Salt Lake City training full time at the Utah Olympic Oval (aka the Fastest Ice On Earth).  I moved up here in the late summer of 2004 to pursue a singular goal which I’ll get to in Part 2.… Keep Reading