A blog about skating and cycling, or vice versa

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.