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 -

• It was really good fun. To be honest, the skating tours around the island alone are worth the price of admission: technique sessions on top are just gravy. Almost every road has a really nice surface - not mirror-smooth, but evenly surfaced, without London's complement of manhole covers, scar tissue from utilities digging bits of them up, and other random lumps - and there's practically no traffic. One car every few minutes, sort of thing - and they always slow down and pass carefully.
• Despite previously published concerns, I did the whole week in Simmons boots without real discomfort. I hypothesise that this is because we spent more time skating and less time stopping (except, see below) and it's the continual deceleration and/or the standing around talking that are wearing my ankles, not the skating itself.
• Nor did my knees give way. This is probably something to do with warming up properly. A take-home lesson right there.
• Bodily damage that did occur:
  1. I overdid the dry land trainig on the first morning, and from the second day until the fourth, it hurt to walk upstairs. Actual skating was OK, but the warmup was very very necessary
  2. I stacked a couple of times by losing traction on the go-kart track while practising crossovers - lost skin on elbows & knee, bruised hip
  3. Oh, yeah: the stopping. On the last-but-one day I executed a perfect faceplant stop - skating in a straight line on a dry road and I still don't know what happened (most likely a dip in the road where I wasn't expecting it, or something). Road rash and swelling on upper lip, broken tooth, nosebleed, some kind of wrist hurtiness (not broken: just strained) sundry bruises and grazes elsewhere, and a small rip in the back pocket of my team jacket. (No, I don't know how I managed to do that, but when I stopped spinning there was water from my water bottle on my glasses - which I was still wearing). But was still able to skate the following day, and am basically fine provided I am careful how I eat cold things - the remaining part of the tooth is somewhat sensitive.
• total distance on the order of 24+33+24+18+65 = 184km plus whatever we covered in technique classes and up and down the road while waiting for the video review.
• Having a couple of days (today and tomorrow) off to recover, I think.

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