A blog about skating and cycling, or vice versa

re medial arch#

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:06:59 +0000

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 ]

Mountain a la maison#

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 00:10:31 +0000

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.

Dog/vomit#

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 02:44:06 +0000

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.

Kneecap recap#

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 02:46:05 +0000

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.

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 not to reject spam at SMTP time#

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 01:09:37 +0000

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
Doh. Although it's nice to know that spamassassin is doing anything at all, of course.

I think I am back#

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 12:40:39 +0000

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 ]

"What's a spline?"#

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 02:53:41 +0000

content moved to [["What]]

#

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 02:58:39 +0000

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 ...

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.

The Tooth will Out#

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 01:09:27 +0000

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 ...

Drills and skills#

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 01:53:27 +0000

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.

Drills and, er, fills#

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 17:47:54 +0000

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

Still with the drills#

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 02:32:54 +0000

[[Yesterday => Drills and skills]] 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.

Putting a sok in it#

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 12:58:49 +0000

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

Cool as cucumbers#

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 12:05:40 +0000

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

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.

Nose knees toes (pick any two)#

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 12:05:20 +0000

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)
Almost exactly wrong. I now have the video, and if there's a problem[1] it's that my upper body is twisted leftwards. On the left foot setdown I have vertical knee/toe alignment and my nose is somewere off to the left, on the right foot I have nose/knees, and the toes are setting down somewhere off to the left.

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.

Extending the glide, volume III#

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:52:39 +0000

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 => happy christmas]] 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...

Ever-decreasing circles#

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:31:58 +0000

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.

The fall#

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:45:38 +0000

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.

Outside edge setdown#

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:45:56 +0000

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)

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

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

Lies to children#

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 00:46:28 +0000

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.

From 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".

non-blog#

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:15:10 +0000

[[insert article index]]

"training" log#

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 12:28:00 +0000

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.

Hill simulation#

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 23:15:39 +0000

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

8 Great#

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 23:20:05 +0000

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...

Huge wastes of money, #1: the XBox#

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 01:32:44 +0000

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.

Crossed over#

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 16:39:10 +0000

I wrote:

It would be ironic but not altogether surprising if I come out of this with right crossovers better than my left.
Um, no comment. I have a slightly better underpush turning left, and I suspect that I'm still more comfortable going into the turn, but turning right is so much smoother. The problem with left turns is still in getting the left foot setdown in the right place and on the outside edge

Thames Festival 2006#

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:15:42 +0000

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:

Noch keine doughnuts#

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:30:38 +0000

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 => Drills and skills]] 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.

Le Mans Aid#

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:47:43 +0000

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.

Rashional analysis#

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:53:47 +0000

It's curious how the body works. After I fell on Sunday my only thought was to catch the pack up, and i didn't even look at my knee until after I'd finished. By yesterday there were large areas of partially-scabbed road rash on and around my knee that made bending it painful and I'd even started taking the lift between floors at work instead of running up the stairs. And standing on the escalators at Tube stations instead of walking. I feel so ... weak.

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?

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

Parklife#

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 13:55:53 +0000

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.

Scraping by#

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 14:20:50 +0000

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

Owed a Cologne#

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 19:22:22 +0000

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.

Glut'on for punishment#

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 16:27:36 +0000

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.

⟪Aug 2006 Oct 2006⟫