A blog about skating and cycling, or vice versa

Hello world#

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

If you followed a link here from http://ww.telent.net/diary/ and are wondering if you reached the right place, then yes. You're probably a couple of days early, though

Marathons 2005#

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

In 2005 I had two skating-related new year's resolutions - which were also the only two of the 8 that I even remember, never mind got anywhere close to fulfilling. One of them was to skate a marathon (yes, 26 miles or 42km), and the other to "skate a marathon in a time I'm not ashamed of". As I noted at the time: "Yes, I am fully prepared for this to involve more than two marathons".

In fact, it took three attempts. The first was at Goodwood, which is a large flat open 3.8km (ish) circuit with an airfield in the middle of it: 11 laps in a time very slightly over 2 hours. The second I managed only about two thirds of, and the third - ah, Berlin.

If you do only one marathon in 2006, it should be Berlin. The course is a single loop of the city on lovely smooth wide proper roads (which have been closed for the duration), with 10000 or so participants and lined with spectators But, once you've done it you'll be wanting to do another, and as it's more or less the last marathon of the season, you're stuck.

Equipment list#

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

On the (probably reasonable) assumption that you've just joined and aren't interested in reading two years' worth of posts in another blog entirely just to catch up, I'm going to say a few words about what I'm skating on.

Roads.

OK, that was probably only the right answer in a very literal sense. I have two pairs of skates that are in usable condition (plus random bits of other skates hiding under my desk at work).

That was the weekend that was#

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Friday night: the LFNS

Saturday: route check for the Stroll, then a Long Slow Skate

Sunday: the Sunday Stroll, followed by the Santa Skate. Which was massive (150 people all dressed as Santa - a sea of red and white fur), and as much fun as I've had on skates in ages. The expressions on drivers' faces were priceless - first at being stopped by a skating Santa, and then on seeing another 150 more of them stream past with Christmas tunes playing from somewhere in their midst. Photos when the people who took them get them on the web, but in the meantime here's the BBC News report

[ Update: here are some rather good photos ]

Random aside: I am going to smack the Blogger editing widget thing in a minute. Every time I try to "delete forward" it saves the current post as a draft.

Podiatric Management in Ice Skating#

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

There are few good articles on skating biomechanics. This is one of the best and most useful. This article was written for podiatrists and published as part of Podiatry Management's sports medicine series.
Currently on the home page of the American Academy of Podiatric Sports Medicine, but the direct link (which, I guess, will probably stay current for longer) is http://www.aapsm.org/humble-skatinga.pdf style="clear:both; padding-bottom: 0.25em;">

A Kent' Annos#

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

is an old Sardinian saying meaning "may you live to be 100", according to many articles on the web which are making me hungry just reading them.

I suspect that when I am there in March, though, I will more often be saying "aargh". Today I paid up for the Experts in Speed March 2006 training camp, which past participants have variously claimed as gruelling, painful, fun, and occassion of two utterly riotous parties (one preceding the rest day, the other just before the flight back). Not sure what to expect now.

(Except for some truly awesome scenery, really rather nice road surfaces, and some absolute bastard hills, if the DVD of the 2004 camp is anything to go by)

I had a short play around with my setdown this evening, on a quiet road near the office that I remembered as having been considerably smoother than it in fact turns out to be (strike that from my planned route for the first Stroll of 2006, then). No dramatic revelations, though.

Goals for 2006#

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

OK, let's have some goals for the coming year. Some of these are measurable: some are fuzzier. First up, performance/training goals
  1. Practice my weak side until I'm equally confident crossing over right and parallel turning left as I am now vice versa
  2. Related to that, stop it with the straight-legged crossovers. I do these in FSKs mostly because I can, but on 4x100 they're the swiftest route to a faceplant I've discovered yet.
  3. A sub 9-minute average at Le Mans. Last year we had slightly iffy timing but I think I was doing somewhere between 9:30 and 10 minutes on average. This year I hope to have improved my technique substantially.
  4. Better than 1:18 in Berlin. Why 1:18? That's what Mike got this year :-)
  5. Eat more fruit. Like, any at all would be a start. I know the official recommendation is 5 servings a day: I will be happy if I can reliably and consistently manage a fifth of that
  6. If I'm going to end up spending all evening from sundown to closing time in the Vic (and in my heart of hearts, most Sundays I know this will happen) I will confine myself to two or three pints at most and then switch to soft drinks.
  7. Related to that, find a soft drink I like that isn't Coke
And some make-me-a-nicer-person goals too. Not that they will, but they should help to build the illusion
  1. I will try the Rear Marshal slot on the LFNS/Stroll and at least see if I can stomach being friendly to the novices.
  2. Before sprinting into the distance when marshalling skates I will check behind me and attempt not to lose others who could use the draft.
  3. I will offer my teammates constructive advice when skating behind them (and when reasonably sure I have any)
  4. I will stop claiming that short legs are an excuse for my crappy form
Other stuff I would like to do sometime: try the ramps at Bay66, go back to the climbing wall some time, and also to visit the circus

There must be *somewhere* to skate around here#

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Where "here" is approximately Bethnal Green. Desirable features would include Still, I haven't been looking for long. And I have the day off tomorrow, so if in some miracle of existence I wake up in the morning, I'll go and have a look at the park.

Meanwhile, aargh, pub karaoke has just started up opposite. I am remembering the famous line in the film: "Hundred year later, Miyagi ancestor bring to Okinawa, call kara-te, 'empty hand'.", and concluding that "oke" is Chinese for "of all musical talent whatsoever"

OK, time for my 70g (ish) of post-exercise carbohydrate. Not that I skated far enough to merit it, but there you go.

Setdown too late?#

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

"During the first instant of push-off, the recovery leg is set down beside and slightly ahead of the push leg"
So says Barry Publow in Speed on Skates
"Setdown should be as late as possible so that maximum force can be exerted through the pushing leg"
So (paraphrased) says just about everyone else, it seems.

Happy Christmas#

Sat, 24 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

It's 23:56 as I start writing this, so by the time it's published it'll be Christmas. Happy Christmas. I am somewhere in Worcestershire (my parents' house) for Christmas, without skates. As I struck my knee on the road last night after tripping over a kerb (best not to ask really) and not even relishing the thought of walking up and down stairs (and also as they live at the top of a very steep hill, on a road that's been wet all day) I am not too upset by the prospect of being sans skates until I get home on Tuesday.

Last night there was no LFNS, the season having finished the week previous. But a bunch of us were out anyway to try a few different things that we couldn't really do "officially" - such as the Millennium Bridge (which makes a fantastic noise when skated over) and the down escalator at London Bridge station. Oh, and the concourse of Charing Cross station. You know, the kind of stuff done only by the unrepresentative minority of skaters who give the rest of us law-abiding citizens a bad name and only make life harder for people trying to co-ordinate regular well-planned marshalled group skates. Cough. In fairness we were cautious and prudent, gave way to pedestrians and respected property rights: a very middle class rebellion. Great fun. Finished up by skating down the underpass at Hyde Park Corner, which is shorter than I remember it. Well, I think I was probably going faster this time than I was when I last tried it :-)

(Note for anyone inclined to take the preceding paragraph as admission of anything: I didn't write it. Must have been someone impersonating my online persona)

In the absence of any skating, and not wishing to put my knee under the strain induced by the currently fashionable dry land training practices (low walking is all the rage in LSST right now), I have been watching videos, and thinking about improving the quality of my training (because I'm running out of free days in which to up the quantity).

Videos. Well, video: specifically, it's a video of Jorge Botero skating on a treadmill, which one of the club members lent to me. In fact it's the same one I was talking about in this previous post, but after thinking about it a bit more and experimenting on Friday, I have some avenues to explore.

What I'm observing, in essence, is that when he's recovered his trailing leg as far as the support leg, he continues to move sideways and mostly in a fairly vertical ampersand. This continues (with a small amount of lean) until he's well into the push, and when he sets down on the right foot it's considerably further left (on the road; not by reference to his centre of mass) than the left foot was when he was gliding on that one. I, by contrast, recover the trailing leg to my midpoint, start pushing and tilting (without much overall lateral displacement of my hips), and (having been taught to keep my knees together during the fall) when I land the recovery leg it's somewhere out the other side of my body next to the pushing leg, on an outside edge, and I have to bring it back before I can get it to do anything useful. In short, when I glide I'm really just skating on one foot, and when I push I'm tilting too much too soon: if I can play with the angles a bit I think I can get into a situation where I have some small amount of lean to generate a lateral force, but am not falling over so rapidly that I have to start an all-out push there and then, which will come to an end as soon as my leg reaches full extension.

Something in that doesn't seem to make sense insofar as travelling sideways sounds like a complete waste of energy that could be used in travelling forwards, but I have to get the recovering leg back underneath me somehow, and as far as I can see, all I'm doing once it gets there is absorbing that motion by bending my support leg further - so in fact it's not about wasting energy but, given that it's necessary to expend energy accelerating the trailing leg sideways to come back under me, to get some use from that KE when I decelerate it again. See, I told you there would be secondary school physics involved.

Do I ramble? Probably. It's something to try when I have wheels again, anyway.

Quality of training: well, see, it's like this. I spend so much time skating that I don't have time to train. in the spring when the LondonSkate starts up, my week is going to look something like this:

Currently I'm thinking I should claim Wednesday is a rest day (on the grounds that it's hardly exercise at all), spend more of my time on route checks working on efficient skating technique instead of skating in that rather pointless grey area between the aerobic training zone and the anaerobic threshold, and get at least one proper high-intensity workout a week, because none of the above ever leave me feeling like I want to throw up. The Roller-Montreal site has some interesting stuff about this.

TANSTAAFL#

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

(article title reflects signs of a not-nearly-misspent-enough youth)
There is no free lunch from glide or gravity. The only thing that can move me forward faster is doing more work per minute with some muscle.

Some bodily motions may feel like I'm getting something for free -- by "falling" or "pendulum" to the other side, or by "extending the glide".

Physics says that it's true that some of these motions can increase the amount of force in a particular phase of the stroke-cycle. But they can do that only by robbing power from some other phase -- or by wasting time and slowing down some other phase.

Don't get fooled by the easy promises: feeling the "glide" or the "fall" can be fun -- but it really helps only comes together with the muscular work of a "push" or a "lift" -- though that muscular work might come at different time than the "free lunch" feeling. Better to learn which of your muscles can really help you go -- in clever unexpected ways.

Tricky "Secrets" of Ski Skating, Ken Roberts

OK, so it's actually about XC skiing. But, you know, the physics is pretty similar.

Anyone who had a heart#

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

I went out to Decathlon today at lunchtime (it was cold and the roads were slightly slippery, which I take as vindication of my decision not to go out and skate last night when it was colder and probably even more slippery), to find that the £25 special offer HRM they had before Christmas is now a £17 HRM. As you'd expect for that price it's a very basic model: it tells the time, it has a target zone (and can optionally beep when the user is outside it), there's a stopwatch, and that's about your lot. I spent a lot of time reading about the various advanced features I could have had - with infrared PC download being probably the most compelling - before deciding that I would probably make actual use of them about as often as I train wearing my GPS and therefore there was not much point in blowing upwards of a hundred squid on one.

Lately I've been measuring my pulse before getting up in the morning - it seems to be stuck around 48 - which makes it interesting at least that my measured heart rate in the middle of the afternoon while standing still is something upwards of 90 - or not far off 50% of 220-age. Sitting down knocks 20 off that. Perhaps laying off the coffee would do more.

[ Edit: or then again, getting used to the strap seems to have done the trick. Standing up spikes it for a few seconds, but then it drops back down to 60, which is more or less the same as when sitting down ]

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