The article title really doesn't work. For one thing, Gallen rhymes with "talon" not "fallen", and for another, I actually fell about halfway around the course from St Gallen, after 64km or so. And it wasn't just a fall, it was an assisted fall - at least, the guy in line in front of me was already lying on the ground when I hit (him and) it.

So. I went out on a line that would have been about the right pace for a marathon, and because I was working fairly hard and concentrating on things like staying on the road around the wet downhill bends, omitted to take any food or water. At around the 45-50k mark I got rather impatient with the "arms in the air and legs all over the place" approach to hillclimbing that half the line were displaying, so foolishly decided to attack, and died utterly when I got to the top. My body was clearly saying "ok, you've done a marathon, the race is over". Which was obviously going to be a problem, this race being more than twice as long as a marathon.

So anyway, plodded along very slowly (like, about 12km/h slowly) feeling miserable to about 50k, where I picked up an energy drink and after about a third of that began to feel more normal. Jumped ("lumbered" would be a better word) onto the next line that went past, skated with them for 10k with utterly useless back - alternately standing up and leaning on my knees - then hit the guy in front and fell over him when he fell somewhere shortly after 60. With a faceful of road and a mouthful of teeth (I exaggerate: actually only one and a half teeth came out, and the half wasn't even a real tooth - though there's another one which I think may have been loosened), I decided I'd had enough.

Swiss hospitals are pretty good, though, and didn't charge me for stitching my chin. UK dentist charged through the nose[1] for doing the dental fixup ,though.

The experience really left me smarting all over - metaphorically and literally. As learning experiences go, that one was degree-equivalent and probably wound up costing only marginally less than a term's fees. Eat!

fn1. figuratively speaking

Yesterday was the "Mac 2 North Region Inline Marathon", a.k.a 28 laps around a 1.6k track in Preston Sports Arena. Yes, I know that's more than 42k ... there was some kind of misunderstanding. Nice flat track, beautiful surface, good organisation, even good weather (not sure this was due to the event organisers, but nice to have anyway)

I'm going to chalk this one up to experience (by which I mean that I pretty much bollixed it up). The first few laps felt very very slow, as the entire field (there were only 18 of us there for the full marathon) was formed into one paceline and that was proceeding at a "nobody wants to pull" pace.

After a few laps of this the Powerslide team near the front of the line obviously got bored and decided to make a break. I saw the break as it happened and tried to go with it, but was being overtaken on both sides by faster people and was fairly clear I didn't have the pace for it. Once things had settled down again there was Matthew (a chap from Birmingham Wheels) ahead, and fellow LSSTers Alastair and Ed slightly behind, so formed a three-man paceline with them. Ed dropped off, Alastair and I caught Matthew, and we went round for a few laps together, but after a few laps we lost Alastair and after a few more with Matthew apparently flagging and me doing the bulk of the work I decided that if I was going to be leading all the time I might as well skate on my own anyway. So I pushed on a bit and lost Matthew. I think that was somewhere around lap 8 or 10. The rest of the "race" was mostly just a matter of going around and around saying hello (and sometimes "nice to see you again") to people.

Came in sixth - lapped by the two leaders Hans and Vinnie, but managed to stay on the same lap as the third, fourth and fifth placers. Once I'd finished and stopped I was seized by the sudden worry that I should have done one lap more, so I did. Luckily this was unnecessary, as it wasn't a very fast lap ...

Lessons learnt: work harder to stay with the break at the start. Or stick to races with more people in them. Other things I wish I'd known: I finished only 6s behind the guy in fifth place - if I'd realised he was so close, I'd have worked a bit harder. Doh.

Finishing time 1:32:13 for a 44.8k race, or about a 29km/h average. (Winning time was 1:28:44). What did I say last week about being unlikely to break 1:15 at Preston?

BARLOW Daniel
Open roller fic homme - 14/05/06 - LILLE (59)

Arrivé(e) 18 eme sur 161 avec un temps de 00:57:35
Soit 12 eme sur 62 dans la catégorie SEM
Dossard n° 343

Informations diverses :
Club : London skaters speed team
Vitesse moyenne : 34,38495
see here

The chief attraction of Lille is that if you have (or know someone with) a car, it's one of the cheaper foreign races to enter. E20 for the registration, £50 for the Eurotunnel (per car), and E40 for a twin room at the Etap. And it's a short drive from Calais: you can get there on the Saturday and come back on the Sunday.

Lille is one of the French Inline Cup races, and as seems typical for these things, they only let you do the proper marathon if you're Elite. The rest of us mortals get some other strange length like 30k, 12k, 22k, or whatever the local organisers feel like - the Paris/Eurodisney race was notable for having changed the Open distance from 42 to 22 via 12. And they wonder why LSST tends to go for the German races more often. Anyway, in Lille, the Open race was billed as 30km, or ten laps of the course. (This is, by the way, the kind of thing it's wise to find out in advance: it wasn't until we were lined up at the start that we finally got confirmation it was 10 not 11). The course was on city centre streets, with surfaces to rival London's (a polite way of saying they mostly weren't all that great: potholes, dodgy tarmac repairs and a certain amount of raised ironwork to make it interesting) and was basically a series of straight roads connected by right-angle turns - one right turn and five lefts.

When I got to the start I was on the second row: by the time the usual pushing and shoving had finished I was on the fourth row and had my right skate walled in by those of three other competitors. The start was unsurprisingly late: having all been ready since 11:25 or so, they kept us waiting on the line until about 11:40. It was also surprisingly clean, in the circumstances: it took a few seconds for the people in front of me to get moving, but being more or less on the left-hand edge of the grid, I could push leftwards and start up the gap where nobody ever seems to want to be. (Side note: judging by the number of people who overtook me at this time, my starts are still slower than they need to be)

More or less by the end of the first straight the pack had become on average two lines side-by-side, though it wasn't yet possible to tell who was in which as they were continuously merging and splitting. The big surprise came at the first (left hand) turn, where the entire group slowed right down almost to walking pace to go round the corner, then accelerated once back on the straight. This became something of a recurring theme on the bends, in fact: although none of the subsequent corners were quite that slow, it wasn't until about the fourth lap that most of the skaters actually started crossing over to accelerate through the lefthanders, and I didn't see anyone at all crossover right.

After the first lap, it more or less settled down into one line, and the following seven laps were just like the second. I ended up towards the back of the pack, because I was being slack at defending my position (actually, mostly because the people in front of me were being slack about defending their positions, but in a best-defence-is-a-good-offence style I should definitely have been a bit more proactive) which probably meant I suffered more from the concertinaing around every corner, but I reasoned that I was comfortable with the speed and knew I had some in reserve, I could afford to burn some energy if it meant avoiding the full-contact skating probably going on up ahead. And there was no point in trying too hard to catch people on the short straights when I knew they'd usually slow right down on the next corner again anyway. There weas even one serial offender t-stopping in the line. (In fairness, some of the turns were up the inside of a slower line and there wasn't a vast amount of room. But even so, if I were that ultracautious marshalling a streetskate I'd never get to the front ... )

Lap ten started just like any other. After the penultimate turn it got a little bit undisciplined again, which seemed as good a time to take off as any: from near the back I came past about a third of the pack, round the bend and and finished somewhere int he second half of the group, for 18th place. I even hawked, although not terribly stylishly. Afterwards I found out that there'd been a three-man breakaway at some point, which I'd missed due to hanging around at the back - they'd crossed the line about three minutes previously. I'd love to find out when that was.

Upsides

• Stayed with the lead pack for the duration
• Didn't fall
• Wasn't hurting too much at the end - could have pushed it a bit more
• 34km/h average!

Could-do-betters

• Was at the back of the said pack for most of the race, and didn't even see the breakaway happen never mind have an opportunity to join it
• Was still at the back at the end: should have (a) not been there; (b) sprinted earlier, seeing as I was. I'm sure I could have made a few more places up, given more time.

Need to work on

• Acceleration and general manoeuvrability, especially when it comes to stepping in/out of pace lines (there was a lot of barging nearer the front of the line, which was one reason I was at the back)
• Right crossover

Aftereffects

• Back a little sore today

I talked to Hans afterwards. He was in the Elite race and says that there was an attack on every corner there. Compare and contrast ...

PS: if you, like me, multiplied the average speed by the time I spent skating and arrived at a figure greater than 30km, well, so did I. I'm told that the total length was actually about 32-33km.

So, one of the recurring themes in this blog (and my skating generally, to the point that everyone's probably getting quite sick of hearing about it) is my ankle pain. When I last wrote about it I thought that the neoprene thingies had mostly fixed it - or at least limited it to one lump in four (left foot inside) - but after further skating, this proved not to be the case. Definitely worse on that side than the other, though, so I thought it might be a frame placement thing on the left boot and maybe the other parts were just hurting because I was skating on it in a funny way to minimise left side pain.

I hate frame adjustment. Typically, any attempt to adjust my frames is doomed from the moment I first loosen the bolt: the best outcome I can possibly hope for is that I'l be able to put it back the way I found it and it'll feel no worse than before. Often even I don't manage that: I put it back as it was and it still feels uncomfortable and different. Anyway

Observations made yesterday were (a) when I stand in skates on my left leg and bend the knee, the knee bends inwards instead of straight ahead, whereas my right leg does the more usual thing; (b) actually the same thing happens when I'm not in skates if I stand normally on the left foot. If I wedge something under the right side of the foot so it's angled out a bit, the problem goes away. So at that point I was thinking about the possibility that I have a fallen arch that side - and of course, instantly became acutely self-conscious about how I was walking, which seemed to involve putting that foot flatter on the ground than the other.

Today I see that my unshod footprints after getting out of the shower actually look pretty similar on each side, so I'm not as sure that's a valid self-diagnosis. I'm continuing to be acutely conscious of how I'm walking (so probably not walking normally even for me) but am sort of observing that my toe push is not as strong left as right, so perhaps I have weak plantar flexors on that side (it is possible that something odd happened to my gait about a year and a half ago when an accident[1] left me limping for three weeks and off skating for three months). Which is even better news than the fallen arch if true, as at least I can fix that through exercise.

Yeah yeah, I should stop speculating and find someone who actually knows about this stuff who can look at it and tell me what's actually going on.

fn1. I say it was an accident. Really, it was my own fault. I knocked someone over when failing to heelbrake (the pad was more worn than I'd realised) and she fell and sat on my outstretched FSK-encased foot, resulting in a large lower-leg haematoma where the boot cuff dug into my calf - but fortunately, no injury to the other party. Who said heelbrakes were a safety measure?

[ skating log: not a hell of a lot, for primarily this reason. LFNS Friday, then route check on Saturday, which left me in an obscenely bad mood and almost relieved that the rain all day Sunday made it necessary to cancel the Stroll; nothing since. I hope to be out on Friday whatever transpires with my ankles, as I'm riding the music bike ]

Ingredients: one molehill

It may not be as bad as I thought: in fact, my earlier posts between them correctly identify the problem: I'm setting down with a deep outside edge and my body canted over at approximately the same angle as the skate underneath it. Which means I have to travel for ages before I can get it onto the inside and start pushing properly.

Anyway, my recent video review indicates that I'm still doing this (although, I think, at a less extreme angle than before). The difference is that in the pursuit of a slower cadence I'm now travelling much further sideways on that outside edge before rolling the foot over the centre edge to inside: this is, I can't help feeling, counterproductive. And probably explains why my anklebones hurt, which I guess is good news - all I have to do to fix that is, uh, not do it any more.

So, deemphasize the slow cadence practice and concentrate more on what I believe is that "falling from the hips" stuff. At least, some "moving the hips in the opposite direction to the pushing leg, in order to sooner get the skate onto its inside edge" stuff - less of a catchy name, but (I hope) more accurate.

Outside edge setdown: let's put this one to bed. Comments from club members seem to establish the following: (1) nose, knees and toes should be vertical and aligned at setdown, pretty much - an inside edge setdown is to be avoided as it probably means you don't have your weight over the support leg; (2) once you've got the skate on the ground you will soon be wanting an inside edge to start pushing, so you don't want a deep outside edge either; (3) but: a small amount of outside will tend to steer the skate outwards a bit, which is probably a good thing as it helps to get a bit of horizontal displacement between CoG and the wheels, which you'll need to start the push.

It's not really surprising, but it's interesting how much speedskating technique eventually comes down to "ways to more precisely control the direction that the pushing skate is pointing in". Even the humble heel carve: it's effective because it means you get a narrower angle therefore more mechanical disadvantage[1], not because it makes a rasping noise on the tarmac.

Other stuff from the video review: I'm now setting down too early, and I'm continuing to recover and setdown with toe pointing outwards instead of straight ahead. But my kneebend is improved on what it was, and (despite everything said above) my cadence is slower. One thing at a time, I think, and the first priority is to find a skating technique that doesn't eat my ankles.

[ Skating log: most of tomorrow's LFNS route, just to make absolutely sure I know where it goes. 20km? Decided it was too cold to enjoy skating home afterwards, so I didn't ]

fn1. Yes, disadvantage. A mechanical advantage (at least, a MA greater than 1) turns a small force over a large distance into a large force over a small one. What we want is the opposite.

In the search for a spam filter, my bandaged finger just went wabbling back to the fire, and I have to report that having spent an inordinate amount of time reading random documents on the net - most of which don't have dates or any other easy way to tell whether they reflect the current state of things or not - to find out what and how to install to get spam rejected at SMTP time, the actual process of installing spamassassin with sa-exim is pretty simple.

• Make sure you're using the "split config" option for exim4, and exim4-daemon-heavy
• Follow the instructions in /usr/share/doc/sa-exim/README.Debian
• Comment out the line in /etc/exim4/sa-exim.conf which says SAEximRunCond: 0

The only downside is that initial testing says it's utterly utterly useless. On a random sample of four spam emails (three of which spambayes said were spam and the other it said was 80% likely to be spam) spamassassin utterly failed to assign any of them a score exceeding 4.2

And for this level of service it wants to eat 18 of the 80MB RAM in this virtual machine? Get real. I need that space for, uh, the Ruby instance running this blog.

It may be, of course, that there is a configuration option for "actually do something useful" which I have not yet found, and which is turned off in the default configuration to satisfy the needs of those users who just install this crap because they like the intellectual challenge. It wouldn't surprise me.

Debian, less of an operating system, more of a self-assembly operating system construction kit.

I had planned to write an interesting and comprehensive post covering everything I've been thinking of lately, but when I started trying to work out what should be in it, I got distracted by reading all my past blog entries for the year. Something of a death knell to getting anything done.

So let's keep this strictly factual.

• I am choosing to blame my 111 fall on a combination of (1) bad luck that there was a fall in front of me; (2) being too tired to react in time and get out of its way. So the fix for that is to eat more in long races. Which means no deep introspection needed on how to prevent a reoccurrence
• Milestones in flesh healing: my face has grown back (at least to the point where I really have no excuse for not shaving it any more). My left knee has unbroken skin. My right knee is well on its way to a similar state except for being swollen. Now, this bothers me: if all the fluid on it is the result of the 111, it's been there a week and how come I never noticed it before? I am hoping (if that's the right word) the swelling is instead new and e.g. due to the wound having become infected. Washed it out, slathered it with Germolene and am typing this in bed with the knee in the air. It had better be better soon.
• Work on my skating position continues (subject to knee returning to normality). I spent an hour yesterday in a small car park doing nothing but two-footed slalom, left-footed left turns (right foot toe wheel for balance) and left parallel turns. It took ten minutes to get back to where I was last time I tried it (in St Galen, the night before the 111), which says I haven't fully internalised it yet, but at the end of the session I was whizzing around listening to my wheels squeak, so it's definitely coming along. Next things to work on are underpush (I can do something that approximates it on the right leg, not the left) and one-footed steering without the trailing toe wheel.

The targets between now and Berlin are (1) to get comfortable on my left foot outside edge; (1b) to get my fore/aft balance actually correct - some 111 photos say I'm still too far forward; (2) to heal; (3) having backed off from any kind of "dangerous" skating - fast skating and marshalling - in the interests of (2), not to lose whatever fitness I currently possess. Which is going to be either difficult or tedious, and along with the rest of them frankly impossible until my knee is better.

In the "grateful for small mercies" and/or "look how far we've come" departments: having wasted too much of this evening reading old blog entries, it gives me great pleasure to remind myself that my left knee now bends forwards not sideways when I squat, that I don't ever hear my knees creaking any more, that anklebone pain is a thing of the past, and that the blisters I picked up at Le Mans are gone, buried, forgotten and have not made a reappearance (just as well, as I have managed to lose every single roll of zinc oxide tape I've ever bought). So there is progress on some fronts, it's just that I forget the things I used to have problems with when the problems go away.

Oh, and (brief techy bit) Soks does not do Stupid things when I press C-d to delete the next character.

When you're forwarding mail from one account to another and the greylisting thingummy is installed on the second box ...

A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its
recipients after more than 24 hours on the queue on eval.metacircles.com.

The message identifier is:     1GJ2NC-0007vl-00
The subject of the message is: with the exception of your bread and show to advantage a ideal paramour.
The date of the message is:    Fri, 01 Sep 2006 15:19:38 +0900

Most of the sponginess had gone from my knee on Saturday morning, and a short slow careful skate (a.k.a the Sunday Stroll RC) on Saturday afternoon with a knee brace seemed to have had no bad effect. By Sunday morning, no puffiness at all, and another two short slow and only moderately careful skates (second route check, and the Stroll itself) seemed to produce no complaint whatsoever. Yay me, I can get back to it again.

Which, with only two weeks left to train before Berlin, is something of a relief.

[ Edit: I subsequently also remembered that I put my boots on at 11:30am, and did not remove them until about 7pm, so I think I can reasonably claim they're comfortable ]

content moved to ("What ?)

This phrase expands to: "You have just used a term that I've heard for a year and a half, and I feel I should know, but don't. My curiosity has finally overcome my guilt." The PARC lexicon adds "Moral: don't hesitate to ask questions, even if they seem obvious."

from the Jargon File

And by analogy, this evening another hour spent practising things I should have been able to do a year and a half ago - and finding that most of my problems go away when I bend the knees more ...

• left parallel turns (pretty much got this down now, but it still doesn't feel natural. Helps to concentrate on getting weight further back)
• two-step front-back transitions, anticlockwise (need to get weight over the right foot in the first half of the move, otherwise the left toewheel makes ugly scraping noises instead of rolling cleanly)
• back-front transitions, mostly clockwise because I at least stand a chance this way round - I'll practice my weak side once I can even do it on the strong side, promise. With this one the breakthrough was realising that with sufficient kneebend the first foot can be picked up and placed down facing backwards underneath the body -well, it probably isn't, but it feels like it - instead of out in front[1]. Then it doesn't need a body shift to weight that foot so that the other one can be brought around, because the body is over it already.

The left parallel turn should make me a lot happier going down hills with left-hand bends on them, but I don't expect any of the others ever to be a really useful skill for races (very handy for marshalling, though). But it all works towards the more general "comfortable (therefore relaxed) on skates" and "not completely lopsided" goals. And it makes me feel like I'm learning something.

With that, I shall conclude this ridiculously self-indulgent post, noting only that this is my training diary as well as your source of Really Bad Puns, so sometimes you'll just have to grin and bear it while I witter on for my own benefit.

fn1. "in front" here is with respect to the direction of travel, not to the direction in which I happen to be facing.

Or anyway, the composite. Sigh. As I woke up this morning I clamped my jaw shut, knocking the front tooth that is only half real, and causing the composite portion of it to snap off. In fairness, the dentist did say he thought it was unlikely to stay on.

Oh, and I'm reasonably sure from the zombie flesh colour it's recently turned that the tooth next to it (the loosened one) is dead. On the bright side, though, my jaw very nearly doesn't hurt any more.

So, back to soup and foods that don't require biting ...

Another hour this evening skating slowly round the car park. This stuff really is low-hanging fruit: it's almost as satisfying for me to nail a new skill as it must be boring for you to read about it

• left parallel turn: first thing I tried as soon as I got there, and it worked. So, looks like that one's beginning to stick
• front-back transitions still better clockwise than anticlockwise, but improving
• back-front transitions: tried both sides. There's something a bit odd here, actually. If I pick up the left foot and turn it towards the direction of travel, it usually lands pointing out rightwards on an outside edge, and it's easy enough to do a short push and then crossover with the right foot. In the other direction when I lead with the right foot, I have to turn it the full 180 degrees and then the left foot follows some time later. The version with the crossover (left foot leading) is easier to do faster but I need to be able to do it both ways both sides.
• Eddy Matzger's duck/pigeon thing (one footed slalom with trailing toe wheel for balance, propulsion both on regular and underpush). Can more or less get this on the right foot - though not reliably, edges still wrong on left foot (so no underpush)
• and hockey stops, or something that would pass for them in a poor light. Actually, it's really just a parallel turn tight enough that I can feel the wheels break traction on both sides, and I haven't tried it at any kind of speed yet. Didn't spend much time on this because the car park is overlooked by flats and so I don't want to be making lots of annoying squeaking noises at 11pm. Fun, though.

I have a plan for Berlin. Based on the cutoff times we've seen at this stage, block B is going to be massive and contain skaters of all levels from elite skaters who couldn't get a team together to compete in the A block, to "speedness" skaters wearing kneepads and big wheeled rec boots (Fila M100s, K2 Radical 100s, that kind of thing). So, my prediction of how the race will go in block B is roughly as follows:

1. there will be a mass of fifty or a hundred skaters who take off at approximately the same (not killer) pace.
2. after the first 3-4 km, they will form into two parallel lines. These will be continually splitting and remerging, as the stronger skaters near the back of the pack jump off their slow line onto the fast one, then whoever's at the front of the overtaking line tries to merge back in behind the front guy on the line being overtaken
3. those who don't consider they have the skills to be continually jumping between lines will therefore end up at the back
4. possible outcome (1): somebody will overestimate their skill levels at jumping in and out, and cause a stack which will probably take out a whole slew of people in the back half of the line. If I'm not careful it could even be my fault
5. possible outcome (2): everyone stays on their feet but the pack splits properly on a hill or a corner or something and the people at the back get left behind

My plan, therefore, is to acquire the said skills (and confidence) toute suite, which will enable me to stay out of trouble near the front instead of getting shuffled to the back and having someone else's ineptitude take me out. I could kinda sorta claim it'd just be bad luck if I didn't and they did, but I don't really buy that - there's a strong argument that you make your own luck in these circumstances by being better prepared.

Why am I hungry? I've not even exercised today. Tomorrow morning it's back to the dentist, to see what he recommends to fix my front teeth: one slightly loose and dead, and the other about two-thirds snapped off. Maybe he can rebuild them smaller this time, that would save a lot of trouble.

I now have a rebuilt composite on the snapped tooth, and a part-finished root canal on the dead tooth with (I am told, I haven't tried to view it for myself) a temporary filling plugging the hole. More next week.

The anaesthetic has worn off, which is nice, and I am left with a slight but not seriously aching jaw

Yesterday I wrote

Eddy Matzger’s duck/pigeon thing (one footed slalom with trailing toe wheel for balance, propulsion both on regular and underpush). Can more or less get this on the right foot – though not reliably, edges still wrong on left foot (so no underpush)

Didn't get a lot done today, but while experimenting on the way back from the LondonSkate I did find that this one is a whole lot easier if you're moving at some speed than if attempted from a standstill.

Don't think I was actually getting enough underpush to go anywhere, but at least I could get my foot into the right place a few times as I was slowing down. So, practice this one fast at first and aim to get slower as it gets easier.

As time goes by I am getting less and less convinced that Soks is the right choice. As my TODO list notes:

1. something very weird with page titles containing apostrophes;
2. it takes frigging ages to regenerate automatic pages;
3. it eats all my RAM;
4. the dev tree is nowhere to be found and the mailing list is silent.

And when I say "all", it doesn't seem to stop growing

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
 5797 dan       14   0 60664  34m  33m S 13.2 46.7 135:16.61 ruby              
 5800 dan        9   0 60664  34m  33m S  0.0 46.7   0:00.10 ruby              
 5801 dan        9   0 60664  34m  33m R  0.0 46.7   0:00.80 ruby              

This weekend Sebastian Baumgartner of Experts in Speed came to London to do a weekend workshop for LSST members. The programme comprised a short theory session on Friday evening, a full day on Saturday, and a long morning (9:30-2pm) on Sunday including video capture of each skater, then 2-5pm in the Vic with a projector viewing the videos. And it was all very cool. And involved cucumbers, but I'll get to that later.

Sebastian's my kind of coach. I have ranted before about skating instructors who rely on "lies to children" explanations and giving skaters oversimplified pictures to get them to modify their style, then attempt to justify it in terms that might make gut sense but are scientifically bogus. Sebby, instead, actually explains why it matters to get e.g. a straight setdown (in brief, an undercarve probably means your foot is pointing too far out by the time it crosses your centreline and you can start pushing, so you'll get a very short push) and on "second order" matters (e.g. in crossovers, whether one foot should cross over or around the front of the other) maintains the quite reasonable position that you should do whichever is more comfortable. I have no truck with the "appeal to authority" school of coaching, and Sebby's advice to e.g. "play with your angles" to figure out the appropriate toe-out for a given speed/resistence/acceleration sits much better with my brain than the prescriptive approaches of others.

Straight-line skating

General take-home points

• setdown under the body. "Outside edge" is not a holy grail - this is consistent with the conclusions I was coming to back in February . I still have a bit of an undercarve on the right leg.
• one foot on the ground at a time. I seem to be pretty good at this
• for maximum speed, minimise the angle between the direction of the foot and the direction of travel. This is the purpose of carving, which should start as early as possible in the push. Yes, this is not controversial, but it's gratifying to see it spelled out like this. I get better at this as I get faster: if I slow down I have to open my foot much sooner and more. I'd consider this just to be the laws of physics and not worth worrying about were it to happen evenly on both sides, but my left foot is opening sooner than my right.
• a slow and relaxed recovery sets the trailing foot up much better to get the setdown right (see first point above) and to maximise time available for fall/push
• the cucumber. It's like a lemon (a.k.a swizzle) but unstead of steering the skates outwards from the toe, carve them outwards from the heel - thus, a much longer and thinner kind of fruit. This was originally just one of the drills, but, as comedic vegetable references are wont to do, assumed a much bigger role over the course of the weekend and is now a general shorthand for "carve more".

So, some stuff I need to work on, actually quite a lot of stuff I was getting fairly close to right. Which is nice in a way, but in another way means there's no quick fix I can make to my skating in the next week to get five minutes off my marathon time.

Cornering

We also practised crossovers. Yes, well.

The "standard" drill for crossovers is the one where you go slowly round in a circle with someone on your outside hanging off your arm to provide the resistance that centrifugal force would if you were going faster, and this is supposed to give you a chance to work on getting a good carve on the underpush.

Problem with this for me is, that's not my problem with crossovers. My problem with crossovers is that I still feel massively unbalanced doing them at any kind of speed. When I get a good "poppped ballon" carve on the underpush (and I can when I'm going slow enough, I know how it feels) all I'm thinking of is what's going to happen when I overcarve and highside off the side of the track. And the partner is rarely pulling at the same angle and in the same way as a centrifugal force would, so it's not a good drill for working through that.

(It does occur to me now that I've never yet fallen while crossing over except when leaning over too hard and losing traction, so maybe this is partly psychological).

Hope may exist, though, in the form of the second crossover drill we did. This was unpartnered crossovers around the same circle, with the addition of a two-footed glide in the "legs crossed" position - after the underpush and setdown, instead of picking up the other leg to uncross it, just stay there for a while. It started out feeling pretty weird and got more natural over time - altohugh I've only really tried it anti-clockwise.

Not on the syllabus, but plenty of practice at the end of each straight when skating up and down the Serpentine Road doing other drills: left parallel turns. Now feel just as good that way as the other way once the turn is started, but I'm still a little hesitant about initiating them.

And on the general subject of my left foot outside edge, or lack thereof, there was another circle drill (pushing with the outside foot and steering it in again) that I found very very difficult on the first day not for the reason I was suppsoed to find it difficult, but simply because my left foot wanted to go in a straight line. On the second day when I revisited it, no more problem.

Quite a lot of stuff I need to continue working on: can't offhand think of anything I was getting right. I doubt that more confident crossovers are going to get me five minutes on a marathon time (unless we count time lost due to hypothetically causing a big stack playing around in pacelines, which is one of the scenarios I have in mind - er, see below) but they mght get me in and out of - and further towards the front of - pacelines, which should be good for something.

Other stuff

Sebastian's also heavily involved in the Berlin marathon, and after the video review he talked about one of the things that's concerning the organisers. Basically, it's skaters who are in it purely for their PB, are skating faster than their safe limits and therefore likely to cause/be involved in big stacks such as the one that happened near the start last year. Given that this might quite closely describe my style (go off hard, see what I can stick with, then start being sensible and skating within my limits only after they've dropped me), I, um. I suppose at least I decided to do something about it (hence the last few weeks)

Conclusions

I suspect there is something in general wrong (at least, asymmetric, which for the purpose of skating we will assume is broadly equivalent with "wrong") with my body position. If nothing else it would gratify my sense of neatness if I could ascribe all of my weak left parallel turns, weak right crossovers, early left foot opening, bad left armswing, and weak right carve to a single underlying cause (example: skating while upper body torqued rightwards) because then I could work on fixing that single thing and it should have the requisite knock-on effect. I'll wait until I get the footage from the video review to see if that sheds any more light on it. In the meantime, I did move my right frame inward a little to help with the carve - only, of course, after convincing myself it was veering leftwards when I skated on that foot - and it helped, but I do wonder whether it was actually in the wrong place or whether I am just masking the symptoms of something else.

But that's mostly pseudo-intellectual curiosity rather than anything I actually need to know. Whether there's a systemic problem underneath it all or not, I am quietly confident that it is getting better not worse as I fix the symptoms by practising the weak side.

I haven't done this shameless self-absorbed introspection in months (or at any rate, not in a skating context. Don't ask about my private life). I'd forgotten how much I missed it.

In the last entry I wrote

If nothing else it would gratify my sense of neatness if I could ascribe all of my weak left parallel turns, weak right crossovers, early left foot opening, bad left armswing, and weak right carve to a single underlying cause (example: skating while upper body torqued rightwards)

Had a discussion with Mike in the park this evening while sheltering under a tree from the sudden rain. He maintains that I am incorrect to describe outside edge setdown as "not the holy grail" as several coaches say otherwise - even Sebastian will admit it's good at the elite level, though like the doublepush is not something that most skaters should worry about. However, he (Mike) can't explain a mechanism by which it might help, and nor can I. My suspicion is that it's actually about setting down very slightly inside of the line and using the hip flexors to drive the foot across to the outside where the regular push can start - his is that it enhances the pendulum effect. Someone is going to have to explain the said pendulum effect to me in terms that make it obvious how that helps. Timing issues are always really hard to think about, though.

(Edit the next day: reviewing past pronouncements from Hans on the subject he maintains that NKT is still the goal even when setting down on outside edge, so it can't be about extra push range from setting down over the line. He was talking yesterday about getting more push by rolling the skate from outside to inside edge, which I didn't understand at the time, but now interpret to mean that he's getting a slight amount of extra push using sideways ankle flex instead of just keeping his frames and shinbones in line. Time to look at some more video of other people)

Not a whole lot of skating happened so far this week. Monday was rest, Tuesday was "fall unexpectedly asleep while browsing web" - hence more rest, and today I got 30 minutes or so of crossover drill on the Serpentine Road before the LondonSkate was cancelled due to sudden freaky rain storm.

fn1. Of course, there may not be a problem - I might very well be imagining it.

Between discussing it with Mike at the Long Slow on Saturday, and practising it on my own as often as I remember, I think this gliding business is starting to make sense. I'm still utterly failing to find a form of words that explains it any more clearly than my rambling back at Christmas time and it remains to be seen whether what I think I'm doing actually corresponds to what I am doing, but it feels faster at least. I certainly seem to be able to get a much slower cadence.

Last night I went woefully underprepared (next time take water and a towel: I think I lost about half a pint in sweat) to a spinning class. This morning, feeling unaccountably perky at 9am, I skated to work and found that the bus lane on Old St has been resurfaced and is now actually pretty lovely (not least because I met no buses anywhere along it). Door to door was about a ten-fifteen minute trip, I think, but the trouble is that so much of it is traffic-dependent: it's hard to get much of a stride going when filtering between lanes...

More of that crossover stuff, and it does seem to help. Tried both sides, and suffer differently on each - turning left I have to concentrate hard to get an outside edge on the left-foot setdown; turning right I'm still not getting much carve on the (right-foot) underpush. Funny how those should both be exactly the same problems I've observed in ordinary skating, isn't it?

To get the left turn working, I must remember to land the left leg well forward (so I'm in the same position as I would be for a parallel turn). For the right turn I haven't found out what works, so more practice needed until I do.

It is a really good drill for building confidence, though: if you can turn around a circle with your legs crossed, both feet on the ground, and on corresponding edges (it doesn't work if the last of those is missing) it's a pretty good indication that your feet are both aligned approximately where they should be and you're not about to stub a toe wheel and go flying. At least, it feels like it. It would be ironic but not altogether surprising if I come out of this with right crossovers better than my left.

In other news, I have created the first non-blog content pages on this site. These are writeups of my current opinons on Outside Edge Setdown and The Fall, and unlike all the various blog entries which touch on either of those subjects are going to remain current whenever my opinions change - i.e. unlike the blog entries, I'll happily go back and edit them as I learn more. At some point I will also create some kind of index of non-blog content on the site so this stuff doesn't get lost.

In other other news, I haven't mentioned my teeth lately. Yesterday I had the icky stuff drained from my dead front tooth again, and it remains under observation to see if the infection ("quite bad", says Mr Dentist) clears up or if he has to attack the problem at the root. Pun intentional.

This is a placeholder page about the fall, which is not a real fall.

Basically, we call it a fall because it feels a bit like you're falling (and if you weren't extending your leg to push, you would be falling), but the goal for good technique is that your upper body height doesn't change - because that would be a waste of energy, not to mention more wearing on the back. So if it works for you to claim there's a fall even when there's no change in vertical height, go ahead, but don't be surprised when more literally-minded people object.

And actually, I don't object so much to this one in itself as to the sloppy (in my eyes) analogies it sometimes seems to pave the way for: "unlock the power of gravity" and so on. Whether you call the non-falling fall a fall or not (and even I do from time to time, on the strict understanding that I am using the word in that narrowly defined technical sense), you can't possibly claim that you're getting free energy from gravity if there's no change in your gravitational potential energy.

Message ends.

I keep coming back to this subject, so here is a page describing everything I think I know about outside edge setdown, which I can update as my opinions change.

(If you arrived here from a search engine: I am not a coach or an instructor or anyone who knows about this stuff, please do not believe anything you read here without applying your own critical reasoning skills. Thanks)

• most people agree it's part of good technique at the top level
• however, at anything below the top level, concentrating on it will often have a detrimental effect on the toe-out angle during the push - most of us are better to settle for a straight setdown

The second point is probably the controversial one, and the reasoning goes like this: most skaters will get their outside edge setdown by setting their foot "across the line" instead of underneath their body. But this is not a good place to start a push from: they will need to steer the foot back to slightly outside of their CoM so that they can start the fall. Either they do this very slowly (and have a long glide in which no work is being done) or they steer quite a wide angle, and then when they cross the centreline they often fail to steer back again ("close the foot") early enough that they can get a good push and carve. Even if they do, who's to say that the advantage of an outside edge setdown (whatever that might be; see below) isn't lost to the disadvantage of friction from all that steering. In summary, you're better off starting with your foot under your body, and if your shins and frames are in line, that means (approximately) centre edge.

So, what is the advantage of an outside edge setdown?

Dunno. Suggestions mooted include

• "it helps the pendulum effect"; ack, a timing issue. Timing issues are really hard to think about
• it's actually about setting down very slightly inside the line and using hip flexors to get a bit of push before we're into the fall where the regular leg muscles can be used. I don't think this is the case
• it's about setting down with the ankle slightly flexed sideways, then unflexing it during the push ("rolling over the edge") to get some extra push from the ankle muscles. I suspect this needs to be done with care and attention to avoid having the ankle collapse during the push.
• I don't like this one, but I've heard it: outside edge will cause the skate to steer slightly to the outside so that the fall can begin. I don't like it because it's by no means uncontroversial that the effect exists

At the moment I'm favouring the third option, but that's a hunch with no data to support it. I am reminded of the controversy surrounding "ankling" on bicycles - here's what Jobst Brandt says

Because life and its aspects can be extremely difficult to understand without experience, to present a full level of complexity to a student or child all at once can be overwhelming. Hence elementary explanations tend to be simple, concise, or simply "wrong" — but in a way that attempts to make the lesson more understandable.

p>. wikipedia

An example in skating might be representing "setdown, glide, push" as three distinct parts of the stroke. It helps to introduce them that way, but it doesn't mean that's what actually happens - it's a tricky matter of timing and the likelihood is that a good skater will be pushing (perhaps at a very narrow angle and not pushing much) practically as soon as he's set down and there's no intervening "skating straight ahead on one leg" stage at all. But still, if someone's not reached this stage and is skating with short choppy strides, then telling them to extend their glide may well have the desired effect of slowing their cadence.

The argument for lies-to-children is purely pragmatic: we do it because it works. That doesn't imbue them with any kind of extra moral value, though: in a situation where they don't serve a pedagogic value, they simply become "lies".

:article

(insert article index ?)

• skating to work and back every day (except for lift home last night)
• LFNS route check last night
• two thirds of route check again this lunchtime

Still to come this weekend: the LFNS itself, a Stroll RC and LSS on Saturday, Mike's Marshal Speed Session (sounds like some kind of Eminem track) and the Stroll on Sunday.

This is a short and non-entertaining blog entry to note that

• yesterday was the LFNS, which comprised 9 miles (guessing) of music bike pedalling (to start point, first half of skate, and back from finish point to storage location) and 6 miles of skating (second half of skate)
• the bike is hard work (it weighs probably as much as I do, so doesn't like acceleration or uphills) but also good fun. Gradually getting out of the habit of pulling on the handlebars (on a recumbent with USS, it doesn't make much difference ;-)
• I spent some of the second half pushing the bike as well. This is quite weird: you can't feel a lot of force through your arms, but you definitely notice the difference in the legs. Bigger toe-out angles at setdown, just like uphills.

So, I know this is a blog about skating and there's a slippery slope when skaters start talking about bicycles, but I'm going to anyway...

This week on the Friday Night Skate I rode the music bike - that which you can see in the photo on the right. (I note in passing that although the bike or parts of it featured in several photos, the only one that has me in shot is taken from far enough away that you can't identify the rider - I'm obviously just not photogenic enough to feature on the web site). It's a Burrows 8 Freight which carries a seriously hefty box on the back full of amps, batteries, speakers and what-have-you. And actually, it's really good fun.

The box weighs, I am told, about 50kg, and the bike is 20kg or so unloaded, so altogether the total weight with me on it is a bit more than twice what I'm used to lugging up hills, and makes acceleration from a stop not all it could be (stamp down on the pedal and the thing wobbles: it takes about three smooth and careful pedal strokes before you can really get going), but once it's up to speed it's pretty much a breeze, and I was keeping up with the front of the skate on the fast bits. Steering is twitchy at low speeds: fine once you relax a bit and don't try to fight it. I and everyone I know who's tried it thought that this is due to the steep fork angle: Mike Burrows claims otherwise). But overall, was a good cardio workout in better company and with better tunes than a spinning class, and no ankle pain. Also a really good way to warm up the knees (which I think need more of it than I get from skating) and - oh boy - must be about the first time I've used my calf muscles in two years. Starting to feel that now...

After one last attempt at soldering a wire to a very small pad on the motherboard of my XBox (the "D0" connection, a necessity for adding a modchip so I can run Linux on it), I have finally decided: fuck it, if Man was meant to meddle with this crap, he'd have - well, I don't know, but either some kind of natural appendage or else a suitable tool for doing so. The natural size of the solder droplet covers about five times the area of the pad it's supposed to attach to: even the wire (the thinnest stuff I could find in Maplins) is thicker than the pad. That plus it appears that a 12W soldering iron doesn't ever seem to get hot enough to actually melt silver solder, and, well.

I can totally accept that some electronics tasks require skills I don't have, and it seems pretty clear this is another of them, but whatever cretin decided to describe modchip soldering as "simple" deserves to have officers of the Trading Standards Institute go round and insert his temperature controlled Weller soldering station through his pupil and into his optic nerve.

Did I say "waste of money"? £45 for the xbox (second hand), £15 for the modchip, a tenner (I think, can't recall) for the xbox controller-> usb adaptor, £10 or so again for the USB wireless adaptor (it was supposed to be a media centre thingy, and I'm not running ethernet all the way to the stereo just so I can get mp3s across the network to it) and various sums of money spent on low-temperature solder, desoldering braid, a new 12W pencil tip soldering iron when it became obvious that my gas-powered iron stood no chance at all of doing the job, and it starts to add up. By this point it's started to add up to the kind of number that makes me think "I could have bought an ordinary PC, and it probably wouldn't be that ugly either" and it's still not doing anything useful.

To give you an idea, obviously it depends on the size and resolution of your monitor, but in this picture the image in the right is closer to actual size than the one on the left. Go on, I dare you to tell me I'm ham-fisted.

I wrote:

It would be ironic but not altogether surprising if I come out of this with right crossovers better than my left.

I've been putting off writing about this for a week, because I couldn't find a form of words that would entertain readers as much as being there and being part of it entertained me. On reflection, this is entirely understandable as a parade down the Embankment with five radio-linked music systems, fifty skaters, dancers, slalom, jumps, fancy dress, and (best bit) a cohort of insufficiently dressed samba dancers on the float in front is always going to be more fun to be in the middle of than to read about.

Anyway, you might get a better idea from the video:

• http://www.skateaddict.org/video/thamesfest06_HD.wmv HD version - 1280x720 WMV 191MB

• http://www.skateaddict.org/video/thamesfest06_web.wmv Small web version - 384x216 WMV 19MB

Another year, another Berlin. Slightly (who am I kidding: "entirely") disappointing 1:17:52 caused by being tripped after about five minutes and losing the front of the block. And then falling again entirely on my own a few miles later when I was skating like a mong.

My predictions for this race were correct in broad outline but not entirely accurate: rather than being just two lines it was more like two lines plus large assortment of random skaters trying to force their way in here and there (it was one of them that got me); it was slow enough that it wasn't just the strong skaters pushing to the front, it was everybody; instead of the anticipated big stack that wiped out a bunch of people, we had many small stacks taking one or two or three. I counted five such, not including the ones I was involved in. Everyone assures me that the front of block B continued to be a rather unpleasant place to skate for some time after I involuntarily left it.

My plan for coping with it was a more unambiguous washout. Ho hum.

Our team came 12th overall, with 179 laps. Last year the LSST team 1 came 37th (and the team 2, which I was in, 137th). So, woohoo. Personally, my fastest lap was 7:45, and average 8:09.

So, a good result for the team, a personal result that I'm not entirely happy about (despite anything I might have said at the end of last season about aiming for sub 9 minute average ;-). Comparing averages with my teammates I'm about seventh, so really, fortunate that we were racing with each other instead of against each other on this occasion. I could blame my stack on the second lap (slipped on a setdown, staggered a bit, superman slide into the crash barrier on both knees and elbows) having rather taken the wind out of my sails for the rest of the event, but I think it's more likely to be my general crapness (previously discussed) at going around corners, and at catching people who are going faster than me. I should spend more time chasing cyclists.

Not been out much since, though I'm hoping that the sulk will wear off soon. New boots are - well, they're still lovely, but wearing them for eight out of twenty-four hours over a weekend with 35 degree temperatures was probably not the best way to acclimatise my feet to them, and I now have some interesting raw patches on my anklebones. (On the outsides, which suggests that I haven't really learnt my edges perfectly yet). But I don't have massive pain from my lumpy inner ankle shooting up my leg constantly as I did in the old boots, so on balance I'm pretty happy still. Or would be if I wasn't sulking.

Side note: Hans got second place in the soloist cagetory, survived mostly intact, and so far has raised two thousand quid for charity, which I think is pretty damned impressive on all counts.

So, hydrocolloid dressing ("moist wound healing") is supposed to be the wonder treatment for this stuff. I have to say, I really dislike it. I know they're supposed to stop filling up with goo when they're - well, full - but in my experience they never do. Instead they force themselves open at one edge and I get yucky yellow gunk around the edges that soaks into my clothes. OK, so perhaps they're usually intended for large flat areas and expecting them to work on joints like knees and elbows is unrealistic, but really - what's the point otherwise? It's the knees and elbows that stick out - large flat areas are not even going to get most of the damage in the first place.

After my fall in Sardinia in which I scraped a load of skin off my upper lip, I had a think about the concept underlying "moist wound healing", and figured out that all I really needed was something that would ideally (a) keep the gunk in, (b) keep the air out, (c) stay in place - and that some kind of grease would probably fulfill all three requirements reasonably. Specifically, if Vaseline is good for raw skin caused by nappy rash and chapped lips, why not for raw skin caused by road rash and scraped lips too? And it seemed to work remarkably well - no scarring at all. It also has the advantage that the wound can be massaged through it - at least, this may or may not be an advantage medically speaking (it seems to be generally held as a Good Thing to massage scar tissue, but I'm not sure the same applies to disturbing the manky green (fibrin?) stuff that covers the wound in the earlier stages of healing), but it is a guilty pleasure that's almost as much fun as picking at scabs and doesn't feel as though it's nearly as damaging.

Experiments today and yesterday suggest so far that Vaseline is probably just as effective though not nearly as convenient on the knee, largely because of the necessity in many situations for clothing that stops my legs from getting cold. That said, I have happily [1] spent the last several hours sitting at home hacking up a mailing list interface for the LFNS web site and stopping periodically to admire Nature's amazing healing powers as they apply to my right leg: it's all jolly entertaining.

What else is worth knowing?

• I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice
• It's not sterile, so don't use it if the wound is not clean (personally I tend to believe modern society ha an unnatural obsession with "sterile" that's led us directly to the current crop of superbugs, that for most people white blood cells are pretty good at their job, and that provided your tetanus jabs are up to date this stuff isn't really worth worrying about until it happens - see, I told you I wasn't a doctor)
• It's not first aid for burns. The object there is to reduce the latent heat of the wound, so cold water is a better bet.

fn1. as happy as anyone can be while attempting to write in PHP, anyway. But that's a topic for another blog

Richmond Park this morning: very-nearly-three [*] laps of the outer loop, for a total distance of about 30km. Ankles fine until I stopped skating, but suddenly after sitting down for a few minutes in the cafe afterwards they decided to make their presence felt - in fact, I skipped out on the Stroll route check I was going to do this afternoon (not that it matters, I'm riding the bike tomorrow anyway and don't really need to know where I'm going) and went home instead. So, rats.

And then when I got home I wanted nothing so much as a few hours sleep. I've been running a sleep deficit of an hour or so a night for most of this week, I guess that and the exercise and the early start - especially the early start: getting up before 9am on a Saturday is just wrong - just caught up with me.

fn1. Everyone else did three full laps starting from the Roehampton car park; I skated up (and I mean up) from the tube station and joined them partway around at Richmond Gate. The horizontal distance I skated was marginally shorter, but I could claim that the extra vertical made up for it.

I don't know if this is a sensible analysis of possible problems with my skating style, or just a self-indulgent way to spend a lunch hour, but I have just been back through all my blog entries to find every time this year I've had a serious stack (I think I've mostly been pretty good at writing them down), where "serious" is "anything in a race, or anything needing first aid treatment", and why, and what I ought to do about it. In chronological order, then

• Sardinia, March: snowploughing from speeds too high for it to be sensible
• Berlin 1/2 marathon, April: clipped skate in paceline
• Le Mans, 2 July: weight too far forwards in a corner, landed the skate wrong
• Tatem training 25 July: relay push before I had time to brace
• LFNS 28 July: came unstuck on diesel patch while snowploughing downhill
• LIM 6 August: clipped skate in paceline
• St Gallen: skater fell in front of me and I was too tired to react in time. Should have eaten earlier
• Berlin: first fall, tripped by someone trying to join line. Second fall caused by skating like a mong.

Arising:

• The first point that strikes me is that there are actually far fewer falls in there than I was expecting - averaged over the year, less than one per month
• it took one fall too many to learn when not to snowplough
• a lot of it is paceline argy bargy. I think I could get a lot more aggressive about defending my place ("arm on the shoulder of the guy in front"-style) when people are trying to join the line, instead of assuming they know what they're doing when they try to slip into a gap that's not there.
• don't forget to eat (no danger of forgetting that one) - now I do every race with an energy drink for hydration, not plain water
• avoid relays. That one may not be entirely tenable, I think I will probably need a better coping strategy there.

After Berlin I was vaguely considering the possibility of doing another race to round the season off in a more satisfactory fashion, so today (prompted by the sale at Germanwings) I mostly spontaneously decided to register for Cologne next weekend.

That said, with winning times around 1:12 - 1:15 in previous years, I still don't think it's going to be my opportunity to break 1:15 this year. Perhaps I should do as in Hannover-Celle and aim for "x minutes behind the leader" - in which case, x<9:46, whatever time that turns out to be.

Note to self: use the glutes.

That bears a little explanation. Problem identified by Sebby the other week was that I wasn't carving much on my right foot, and indeed when I pay attention to it I can feel that leg just "running away" as I straighten it - I'm not getting the same feeling of power as I do on the left leg. (Yes, I know, "feeling of power", hopelessly unscientific. Shut it.) On a left side push it does actually feel as though I am briefly "hanging" in midair for the first few instants of the push, whereas on the right it's all over far too quickly.

So, back I go to the stepping-from-side-to-side drills to see if I can capture the same feeling on the right side and identify what's different between the two, and the difference seems to be that the glutes are active on the left and not on the right: getting my bum further back seems to have the desired effect.

In other news, lately I have taken to brushing my teeth (those I still have, anyway) while in skating position and standing on a wobble board. I'll crack this balance thing someday.

I found this in a notebook while I was tidying up. Judging from the reference to Newfoundland, I assume I wrote it in the summer of 2000 when I flew there on holiday.

I'm not proud (if I were, obviously I wouldn't be posting it). I just think some of the puns are bad enough to be worth preserving

SCENE 1 : A plane, somewhere near Newfoundland

|Prologue: Hail, Gentles all, and welcome to our flight. We respectfully commend our safety video to your sight.|

|1st Passenger: Have we not armrests and seatbacks? And digit may prevail against digital TV| |2nd Passenger: Tis true. Mayhap it showeth Frasier, or cartoons purchased from the BBC| |3rd Passenger: On Channel 2 the film is dross| |2nd Passenger: The rest also; to miss it is no loss| |Omnes: Twice around the video spool / Can any of't be watched at all?|

|2nd P: By the pricking of my thumbs, plastic chicken this way comes| |1st P: Dinner calls | |2nd P: Who wrote this anyway?| |3rd P: anon| |Omnes: There is fowl, and foulest fare, Ascend the broken cloud - attain thin air|

|Pilot: Once more we set ablaze the seatbelt light: rejoin your pews, enfold yourselves in clasps of metal bright| |Be not afright: for tho' we pass through turbulent fields, our radar speaks sooth - all this will pass in a moment|

...

|I must arise and do those things that are needful. I guess I drank too much orange juice|

The Lords sit in their thrones in Business Class
Accustom'd to command as troops to drums, they bid the flight attendants with their thumbs
And ruminate on State affairs, foretold by complimentary newspapers
I wish I'd brought a book
Yet e'en we the commoners are plyed
With shortbread (French) and cups of plastic and of iced water
I still wish I'd brought a book
Maybe I could read the inflight magazine again.