Year: 2010

Continuing from No Regrets: Part 6, it’s the start of my final season on the ice.  What would happen?

Summer Training 2009

We got straight into summer training and it was on almost immediately.   We were on inline once per week, short-track twice weekly, drylanding, biking and doing weights.  And everything was clicking.  I was starting to get comfortable on the short-track and inline workouts were going well.  Dryland had always gone well and I was getting stronger on the bike.  My technique was finally catching up with my fitness which was at a lifetime peak.

I was literally on the beginner performance improvement curve again with nearly every workout a PR on both inline and short-track.  Either I’d skate a faster average lap time or the same speed for more laps or whatever.   After years of frustration it was a very nice place to be again.

For example, the previous year my best sprint lap on short-track was 14.5 seconds. … Keep Reading

I described speed skating training a bit in No Regrets Part 5.  But ultimately you don’t train to train.  You train to race.

Ice Speedskating Racing: An Overview

People used to ask me all the time when racing season started and in this regard, ice speed skating is that much stranger.  Outside of a few events that nobody cares about, there really isn’t a racing series except for the top skaters at least not in the United States.  They skate World Cup and World Championships (both the overall and individual distances) and there are a handful of other events at most.

For everybody else, here’s how it works:

You train your brains out to skate practice time trials.  Once these started they were usually held at least twice per month from about October to March.  Typically you sign up for two distances (you really can’t physically do more than that) and go race to post a time butt-early on Saturday.… Keep Reading

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