A blog about skating and cycling, or vice versa

round up#

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 12:00:00 +0000

From two updates in the last two weeks the reader may determine that I'm either (a) having too much fun skating to be writing about it, or (b) not doing enough skating to have thought of anything interesting to write. Unhappily it's more towards the latter end: continual experimentation with my ankles (the "have we got it right this time? Seems good so far ... so far .. so far ... ow!" cycle of optimism and letdown, and the awareness that in a week and a half I'll be off to Sardinia and will either have to have found an accommodation with them that doesn't involve violence, or admit defeat and take rec skates as well) have left me rather unexcited about just going out for the fun of it.

Currently we're up to

(yes, all of them at once). The last two of these have not yet been proven not to work, but so far I've only tried a route check and a Sunday stroll with them, which is not really long enough to expose the problem. Today I have some kind of head/nose cold and shivers, and am disinclined to do anything more to narrow down the problem, or indeed much else that involves moving more than six feet from bed.

[ Total skating since I last blogged: Tuesday route check, Friday LFNS, Saturday route check, Sunday Stroll. 65km? Sounds more in km, of course. ]

Rubber abuse#

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

No, I'm not completely shameless. If I were completely shameless, the post title would mention rubber and would pun on the word "screw". But the fact remains that yes, it's still all a big fraud to get misdirected traffic from people searching google for their favourite fetishes.

(Anything I say about Lycratm, if you insist, on the other hand, is entirely legitimate. Erm)

Yes, well. As I said a while back, I tabbed my frames to get rid of the ten degree cant. Inspecting them again recently I found that a couple of weeks even of low-intensity skating had compressed the non-slip PVC tape I'd used for that purpose so that what had started out as a couple of mm of rise had become much less pronounced over time, so this morning I decided to look for some alternative solution. The answer appeared to be a non-slip rubber bathmat which was half-price in Woolworths: cut bits out of it and stick them in the frame. Unfortunately, my first foray out with this new approach was the Sunday Stroll, during the course of which they also compressed slightly, or in fact enough that the heel bolt on the left frame came loose and then fell out. Fortunately I noticed the resulting rather odd skating experience ("what's that clicking noise?") before anything really bad happened, and was able to get a taxi to a skate shop from the Stroll halfway point. My luck continued to be good: the shop in question (Slick Willies; all hail Slick Wllies) had a suitably sized replacement bolt and I was in and out of it in just about enough time to rejoin the skate as it arrived on Knightsbridge just before it re-entered the Park. The moral: after playing with frames, tighten the bolts: in fact, probably leave them overnight to see what happens, then tighten them again before skating on them, then stop after a mile and tighten them again.

I am resigned to the prospect of having to get a second pair of skates for Sardinia (my current Crossmax are probably not ideal, really). Sucks, but there you are.

The good news is that the Sunday Stroll (using the same route as I designed a few weeks ago but was rained off) went ahead as planned. Which was nice.

[ Skating log: continues to be not a lot. Had planned to ride the bike on the LFNS, but it had mechanical troubles of its own (broken spokes) and by the time we'd got it back into storage from the start point - which involved carrying bits of it part of the way - the skate was pretty much finished. So, total for this week: Stroll RC yesterday ~ 12k; Half a stroll plus tarting in the park today: ~20k. Frankly, I feel worse now I've worked that out ]

I don't know what I've done to my hip abductors, but I'm really feeling it every time I snowplough. Damnit, I'm just falling apart completely, really.

Neufathlon#

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

It's funny how my perceptions have changed in the last year or so, but basically I've turned into a skate snob. Today I went to Club Blue Room and to Decathlon in search of something I might consider buying and wearing in Sardinia when the pain from the Simmons grows too great, and, well, couldn't find anything. Decathlon in particular are either winding down/scaling back their skate department, or have just had a run on all their high-end models (there were a fair number of holes in the display): I don't think they had anything in stock costing more than around £120, and practically nothing with wheels bigger than 84mm (there was some astonishingly large and lumpy Powerslide thing with 90mm wheels and that was it). And no FSKs at all: not that I had any intention of buying another pair of FSKs, but they are generally regarded as good skates in their field, and Decathlon at least used to carry DeeMax. Tomorrow I shall head out to Skate Attack and see if they can do better. The ideal, I suppose, would be Fila M100 or K2 Radical 100 or something like that. Or maybe even the Powerslide R2, which are supposed to be a lot more comfortable than most speed skates. If I do get customs it's apparently still going to take several months between order and delivery.

I borrowed some FSKs on Friday after it became obvious that the bike was bust but before we realised exactly how bust (about half the spokes on the back wheel) intending to ride it back to its secret hideout and then catch the skate up. Not that I got the chance, but I did skate for a mile or two back to the pub afterwards to meet everyone else, and it felt weird. Imagine wearing slippers with castors on the bottom: about that much responsiveness/feedback from the road surface, and about that much willingness to change direction on a whim. (Of course, anyone reading this who's wedded to their crossmax will be saying "hyperbole" about now, and they'd be exactly right too. I'm not proud of what I've become)

Knee deep#

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

I have fallen back into an old and no doubt irritating habit over the last month or so, of being unable to stand still while waiting for things - usually Tube trains - without standing on one leg, leaping from one foot to the other, working on my fall angle, and so on. Somewhere in that mix of random jiggling around, though, I seem to have found an exercise that strengthened my knee joint or hip alignment or balance or something, though, because as I noticed this morning, when I stand on the left leg and bend it, my knee now aligns over the toes instead of inwards as it was doing previously. It's also a lot easier standing on that leg than it used to be. So, that's good news. Set against that, the probability that many regular Central Line commuters have probably now identified me as "that weird guy who needs to learn to use the bathroom before leaving the house" is not really bothering me too much. This is London, after all - nobody's going to actually say anything.

That's the unalloyed good news, anyway. The "I hope this works" provisional good news is that Skate Attack had Powerslide (R2 boot plus 5x80 frame) skates in my size in stock, and I now own a pair. Haven't had much of a chance to try them yet - it's raining - but first impressions from a bit of skating up and down in the shop: softer (which would tend to imply less precise), a bit more cramped in the toe (though I expect the the boot will stretch a bit when warm and the padding will compress over time anyway) but entirely not-the-same-pressure-points in the ankle, so I can spend next week swapping from one boot to the other as necessary. And still lighter than crossmax, and they gave me a fiver off (when I asked) for being an LSST member. Sooner or later that jacket will pay for itself :-)

Pear tree. Contents: 1 (one) partridge#

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 12:18:55 +0000

#sardinia

There's a certain feeling of virtuousness one gets from having finished a hard workout: on top of the endorphins (or maybe caused by the endorphins) one comes away thinking "that made me, in some way, a slightly better person".

I've never really had the same experience from getting up early in the morning. Sure, you get to see the sun rise, and everything is fresh and bright and clean and lovely (well, everything except Bethnal Green, perhaps). And then the clock ticks around to 8 or 9am, the normal day starts, and all you have is the memory.

It's especially bad when catching planes. This morning I was up at 5:10am to leave the house and get the first Central Line train of the day; as we left Victoria on the train to Gatwick we could see the early morning sun and pink clouds. But by the time the plane was taxiing out it was 8:30 and, really, anyone can get up for 8:30. Even me, if I try.

Flight landed more or less on time in Olbia, and after Customs we were met by Enrico and driven to the hotel. After lunch we went for a skate around the bay (23k, I think) while waiting for the other participants (the Germans) to arrive on a later flight. Boots not hurting yet.

Turtle doves#

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

The first full day kicked off with a short lecture about the basics of skating technique - mostly useful as a way to learn the German for words like "setdown" and "push". Since it started raining during this, the planned skating exercise following was cancelled in favour of "imitation" - some form of dryland training including low walking, jumps, extended crouches in "skating position", etc. "I must be doing this wrong, it doesn't hurt enough", I was thinking (in retrospect I was wrong here: see later entries). We also had our assignment into groups: I'm in group 2 - along with all the other people with 1:20-1:30 marathon times.

In the afternoon, filming for the first video review session. This is quite cool: skate behind a minibus with a big mirror on the back (so you can see yourself) and a video camera mounted underneath it (so posterity can see you). That said, it was so short that I more or less forgot everything I should have been concentrating on and just skated "normally". Which may have been the intention. Plus some drills, in which learn that I can't steer. Well, this is not really news, but it's disappointing to learn that it's so unusual: everyone else in the group (some on much longer frames than me) can.

The video review itself happened in the evening. Seems that Sebby has two commandments: (1) thou shalt set down underneath the body; (2) thou shalt be on only one skate at a time. Apparently I'm still skating with both feet on the ground. My setdown, though, he says, is good - which I guess means that I've adapted to my experiments in tabbing.

Usually when I get videoed I spend ages replaying the footage in single-step, but this one I've only seen once. Should have it on a dvd sooner or later, I expect, then I can go through it looking for a new LSST forum avatar.

French hens#

Sun, 12 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Obviously that low walking does seem to have done something after all. It's near-crippled me: the muscles in my thighs don't seem to work any more. I am still just about able to run up the stairs to my room, but it's definitely less pleasant than it was yesterday.

am: Sassari track. It's a short banked oval - I don't know what kind of traffic it's is intended for, but it makes a very nice skating circuit. First we worked on "fundamental" drills: skating position, push, d-shaped recovery, etc - but only on the straights. Then into the middle for some work on ankles^Wedges.

pm: Amadula, 32k in rolling hills. I think there were about three groups on this route, and I decided to play with the fast boys. On a scale of "too much fun" to "way too much fun", this is somewhere at the high end. I was grinning like a scurvy victim by the end.

Skating in a paceline is in some way much easier than solo (esp. in a headwind) and in other ways much more demanding - e.g. when the guy in front isn't keeping a consistent stride. Downhills in a tuck are a new experience too: it's all fun and games until the lactate hits (usually at about 70 seconds) and you have the distraction of pain along with the spectre of speed wobble and the idle musing about what might be around the corner.

Ankles fine (maybe a little sore, but nothing that won't have gone by morning). This all goes to reinforce my earlier hypothesis that it's not the skating that hurts, it's the tarting.

In the evening, a lecture on training and recovery: periodisation, increase in intensity, appropriate recovery after exercise. Marcel summarises the difference between training and practice as "training is goal-oriented", which sets me off to thinking that I don't really have goals as such, I just have a shopping list of stuff I'd like to do - not really the same thing. Mind you, this is not unique to skating, this is just my life in microcosm. But without goals, what am I training for?

"To defeat the enemy, see him run before me, and hear the lamentations of the women"

"Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper"

Something to think about, anyway

Calling birds.#

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

It seems that some of the rolling hills on Monday occasioned the wrong kind of rolling for some of my teammates, so in a rearrangement of the original program our hosts decided that we would spend the morning on "skating safety" - this was supposed to happen on Saturday instead of the silly walks, but was rained off. We skated out around the bay following the same route as we did on Friday, and stopped near the far end to practice and/or learn some speed control: slalom, t-stops, snowplough. I still can't perform any move that involves scissoring left - though I think I'm getting there.

But hey. Uncontrolled speed is much more fun anyway.

In the afternoon we headed to the go-kart track for some more technique work: mostly on crossovers. I found it interestingly slippery, to the point that I could feel my wheels slipping (and hear them squeaking) if I put a lot of power in my push - but really that's just an excuse for having fallen twice trying to be clever. Total damage: small rip in legwarmer (right knee), bleeding graze on left elbow, top layer of skin lost on right elbow, very sore right hip.

They also rearranged the groups a bit today. I put myself back in group 2 (of six) on the basis that I know I'm significantly slower than at least two of the people in group 1 and if they're typical then I'd struggle keeping up. Impressions so far: I'm quite a bit faster than the average group pace (certainly have a lower cadence than we collectively achieve in a paceline) but am correspondingly more crap at the technical stuff than many of them. It all evens out.

I'm still in Simmons boots! Ankles felt tender when I first put them on this afternoon, but after a few minutes when the boots had warmed up and I laced them properly, no more problem. With luck (and a morning off tomorrow) I might make it through the week without having to break out the powerslides. Let's see how it goes.

In the evening we were supposed to have a dance class in the bar. I fell asleep with a beer in front of me (there may also have been some previous history of alcohol abuse), waking only when the place closed, went to bed, fell asleep again and stayed that way until about 8am.

Gold rings#

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Today we had the morning off before heading out to the hills after lunch. This was a great opportunity to stay in bed until midday and rid myself of the sleep deficit caused by having woken up at 4am every day so far this week.

The hill skate was, if I'm honest, a bit of a disappointment. The climb was hard but not a killer at the group's speed, and the downhill I tackled rather more cautiously than I probably need have done. Although that did make it easier to cope with the herd of cows in the middle of the road halfway down, which Fred in group 1 apparently had a near-death experience with. Someone commented afterwards that they had never before seen a T-stop performed while the leading foot was speed wobbling.

Total around 18k horizontally and 250m vertically. Max speed 53km/h which admittedly is higher than I've yet managed in London, even if it didn't feel that fast.

After the skate, and still in the hills, the authentic Sardinian Evening. A restaurant on top of the hill (we had to walk up the last ten minutes as the coach couldn't climb it safely) serving locally produced food (mostly pork: vegetarians might be advised to stay at home if the sight of quite recognisable bits of pig - heads, ears, etc - at table bothers them). And locally produced wine - hic - and grappa ditto. Then back down the hill holding flaming torches to light our way, via a short and accidental excursion into a drainage ditch (I stepped backwards and suddenly the ground wasn't there underneath me. It was very very funny at the time, but you had to be there and you probably had to be slightly inebriated too)

Quads a little sore but quite a lot less so than they have been (walking downstairs I notice it still, but not really any other time). My hip hurts a bit. But it feels so great to be well-rested for a change that I'm just not worrying about the rest.

The best-laid eggs of geese and men#

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Today was supposed to be another session at the go-kart track and then a video analysis session in which each skater skates behind the mirror van while Sebastian gives them advice on what they're doing right and wrong. For me the programe was slightly altered at the last minute: morning at the go-kart track, coach trip to the road where the video was being done, some skating up and down while waiting for my turn (an opportunity to practice some slalom and parallel turning to the left, which almost seems to be coming together) then an unscheduled visit to the local hospital.

I was dialled in. I was focused. I was cruising happily along the straight flat well-surfaced road with no other traffic (actually it's a slight decline, but it's a long shallow one) concentrating on carving every stride nice and early and - I don't know how fast I was going, but it felt fast. I felt great. Then I saw the people from my group that I was looking for, started to think about slowing down, and suddenly I'm not sure what happened but points of contact with the road included my right thigh (scratches), right wrist (slightly sore, but no lasting damage), right knee (graze, big hole in tights), back (rip in jacket), left elbow (luckily this was cushioned by the compeed I put on it after Tuesday's fall) and face (cut lip, nosebleed, broken tooth). Sonja from Experts in Speed applied emergency first aid to the lip, then took me into town where the nice man in the hospital cleaned it up further and changed the dressing, told me I didn't need stitches, and there was nothing he could do for the tooth that my own dentist couldn't do anyway.

I feel so stupid. Really. It wasn't even as if I slipped on anything or hit something: I just ... fell over. I'm also gutted to have missed the video van - although clearly "don't fall over so much" is probably the best advice anyone can give me about my skating at the moment and it doesn't need an expert in speed to tell me that.

What I don't feel much of is pain. The tooth is a bit tender: I think I lost about a third of it. The knee smarts a bit. My hip hurts when I move it, though - probably the cumulative effect of Tuesday's fall, this morning's fall, and this afternoon's crash. At times like these I think I should revise my goals for the year:

Learn to skate!

Perhaps I'm beating myself up too much. I don't know.

[ Edit: I was told afterwards that what actually happened is that I stood up to snowplough a bit, and one of my skates decided to grip the tarmac quite a lot harder than the other. So, surface imperfection is an almost-valid excuse, but don't try that again from that speed. The slope probably meant I was going quite a lot faster than I realised ]

Swansong#

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

So when I woke up I realised that I didn't actually hurt - or at least, not more than I had any other day this week, and in the absence of any medical advice not to (perhaps the doctor thought I wasn't stupid enough to consider it) I might as well get out and skate a bit. Today was the all-day tour to Stintino - the minibus was scheduled to meet us at lunchtime with our bags and picnics.

Got up, carefully ate some breakfast (scrambled eggs are soft, and experimentation shows that in fact most things are OK if I only bite them on the left side), wandered around a bit, put skates on and essayed a couple of loops of the hotel driveway. OK, that's easy. Looked around for my group, who were nowhere to be seen. Oops. Found Merten, who would usually have been in it but had dropped to another group for the day. He thought it had left already. Right. Hmm. Bet I can catch them up, though - off we go. There's a paceline, they're not moving too fast, I can catch them on the uphill.

As I draw nearer, I see there are three LSST skinsuits in the line. Ah. But Merten and I are the only LSST members in our group, so this must be <fx: scary organ music> the fast group. Oh well. I managed to catch them (I expect they were just taking it easy while they warmed up, but still) and I'm here now, let's see how we go.

Important lessons learnt

The minibus met us at lunchtime with food; a full-sized bus met us at Stintino to take us back to the hotel (although it transpired that it was a very ill bus and a replacement had to be sent out for that purpose), and after lots and lots of photos we eventually clambered aboard for the trip back to dinner.

Last day. Boo. Hiss. Have to wait another eight months minimum before I can do any of that again.

The tooth will set you free#

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

I'm back (from the Experts in Speed Sardinia camp, for anyone unaware that's why I've been silent for a week). Day by day reports to follow over the next few days when I have time to see if my notes make any sense and are worth reading anyway: they will appear below this one as I'm faking the dates to make it look like I posted them when I wrote them. In the meantime - Thanks to Ray, by the way, for the photos in the day-by day entries. You can see the full-sized pictures in the LSST gallery

Seven days like Christmas#

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

The day-by-day reports from Sardinia are now all up. The picture of the flaming torches was taken from the DVD given out at the end: all the other photos were by Ray Descombes: thanks!

Since then, what? No skating Friday or Saturday. Sunday, when my mood had improved slightly, I decided to give the powerslide boots their first real outing marshalling the Stroll, and I have to say I am so glad I didn't need to use them in Sardinia. It may be the wheels (which are 80s and feel quite soft) or the extra weight (they're noticeably heavier than my Simmons) or something else (they rub on my ankle) but after the first 8 miles or so I really really dislike them.

Last night I went to the dentist, who replaced the missing part of my tooth using composite - it looks pretty much like the one next to it.

My lip is healing nicely - by yesterday morning it was already back to the point where my colleagues didn't notice anything was wrong with it

My right hip and upper thigh is a mass of yellow bruising. Which, I guess, means it's well on the way to fading altogether, and not a moment too soon.

Nutshell summary of what I'm carrying forward from the week

Upon this blasted heath#

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Route check tonight for the LFNStm took us up and down Hampstead Hill - just like Sardinia, except for being cold, dark, on crappy surfaces and with arsey traffic. It's going to take me a while to readjust to skating in London, I can see. 18k plus skating from and back to office - call it 21k for the day, for the sake of argument.

[ Edit: Junker says he'll be in Berlin. /me bounces ]

Brief semi-techy interlude#

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

I found and turned off the Blogger option for "convert linebreaks to paragraphs", in the hope that it'd make it less work to compose blog entries in Emacs. However, it also works retrospectively, so has also removed all the paragraphing in my past entries - not totally impressive. If you're browsing the archives in the next few days, expect to see some large blocks of text where previously there were gaps. Sorry. Normal service will be resumed eventually.

[ Edit: I think I've fixed up most of the posts now. If anyone ever tells me that computers are supposed to eliminate drudgery by automating tedious tasks, I don't know how I'll react but it won't be pretty. ]

Spring in the air#

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 12:00:00 +0000

This post fails to link together the following fairly disparate themes

In that order, then. Richmond this morning: station -> park -> roehampton gate, plus one lap, plus a bit of gentle wandering through the middle of the park. Quite pleased to be able to get out at all (and in the sunshine, too), but really wasn't feeling on top of things, hence the slightly piss-poor distance covered. Headwind not helping: lack of breakfast probably also a contributory factor. After about 11am (which is when I got there) there's a lot of traffic. Still, achieved the primary goal, which was to take the seam off my new wheels before I use them in Berlin

I can't remember quite how I talked myself into the idea of joining the Sunday morning masochists doing sprints on the Serpentine Rd tomorrow, and the thought that 9:30am will feel like 8:30 is not a welcome one either. But my acceleration sucks, and I still have no armswing worth speaking of, so it's sorely needed. Tatem Park on Tuesday I will probably do and ignore the argument that I should be tapering for Berlin: it's not as if the Berlin half-marathon (assuming I do get to race in it) is a major season goal, it's more of a chance to rack up some more racing experience.

Why we call our offskate training "dry land" I don't know, given that dry land is what we skate on anyway, but I suspect it's a hangover from ice. Anyway, went out on Thursday night to prance about a bit in Lincon's Inn Fields after work: the goal right now is to find a length/intensity that will do me some good but won't leave me hobbling, and I can safely say that the answer right now is somewhere between Thursday's session (which I coudn't even tell I'd done on Friday) and the Sardinia session (which I've already whined about at length).

I am oddly tired right now ("oddly" meaning I can't think of a good reason for being this tired, given how little I've done this week, not that I'm tired in an unusual way). Long bath and early night called for.

Non-specific post#

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 13:00:00 +0000

So on Sunday it turned out that we all felt unenthusiastic about maximal effort at 9:30 am, so did some technique work instead: starts, relay, and a bit of paceline stuff. Then the Stroll was cancelled due to rain forecast, but we went out for a suicide stroll instead until the rain actually started, then directly back to the park. There were a bunch of skaters down from Nottingham this weekend who thus got to see the sights - well - got to see Trafalgar Square and Westminster, anyway; I can't recall many other sights on our route. And a lot of the inside of the Vic, of course. During the day I also collected more evidence for my "it's not the skating, it's the tarting" theory of ankle pain: after an hour or so in skates pointing video cameras at Hans and Fred while they committed Sardinia drills to ccd, I needed to take them off and give my feet a rest before the stroll. So, don't do that again.

For one magic moment the other day skating down Oxford Street my armswing came together and really felt like it was helping. Not been able to reproduce that again since. I mention that more or less in passing, but recapturing it is something to aim for. On the other hand, the bright side is that my two-foot slalom (not what those coneheads would recognise as slalom; just wavey lines to scrub speed) is starting to feel natural sometimes - still lopsided, but not completely alien.

My sprinting is pants - or rather, my acceleration is pants. Well, my sprinting is also pants due to aforesaid armswing lack. I think my acceleration is pants because I'm trying to do it in too high a gear, so to speak - in the first few breaks on Sunday I was way behind, but with more more steering and taking shorter strides I was starting to get it together by the time we went onto the next exercise. I haven't worked on acceleration at all since I was skating in Crossmax, but it's still really quite silly that I'm so poor at this given that I spend so much time of my skating time marshalling, which is all about acceleration. Or 50% about acceleration and 50% about stopping, anyway. And 50% about guessing whether people are going to step out in front of you without warning and whether it'd be safer to go around the traffic island on the right or the wrong side of the road.

Today's Tatem session cancelled due to rain. In principle I could have done something else, but I spent the time tidying the flat and doing washing before Berlin this weekend instead - which also needed doing. I don't think I've seen the inside of this place for more than two consecutive waking hours any time in the past month. And I found my passport. I didn't even know I'd lost it, but given that it turned up in the pocket of a pair of trousers I was about to wash, I think we may consider that to be the case.

I have an LFNS lead in two week's time (Good Friday). Wonder if I can think of an Easter theme for it.