Year: 2010

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

The importance of rest in training cannot be overstated even if it doesn’t get talked about enough.  Many people train too hard too often, often overtraining.  Factually, they would benefit from more recovery both in an acute (day to day) and long term sense.  In general, I recommend most take 1-2 days of rest from training. But that raises the question: is active rest or passive rest superior from a recovery standpoint.

Defining Active and Passive Rest

First some definitions.  Passive rest should be pretty easy to understand, on a passive rest day you do nothing.  No training at all.  Some might allow for something like a brisk walk.  But basically this is a day completely off.  Sit around, do nothing, relax, recover.   I don’t have much else to say about passive rest beyond that for the time being but I’ll come back to it near the end of this article.… Keep Reading