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

• setdown under the body. "Outside edge" is not a holy grail - this is consistent with the conclusions I was coming to [[back in February => Mountain a la maison]]. I still have a bit of an undercarve on the right leg.
• one foot on the ground at a time. I seem to be pretty good at this
• for maximum speed, minimise the angle between the direction of the foot and the direction of travel. This is the purpose of carving, which should start as early as possible in the push. Yes, this is not controversial, but it's gratifying to see it spelled out like this. I get better at this as I get faster: if I slow down I have to open my foot much sooner and more. I'd consider this just to be the laws of physics and not worth worrying about were it to happen evenly on both sides, but my left foot is opening sooner than my right.
• a slow and relaxed recovery sets the trailing foot up much better to get the setdown right (see first point above) and to maximise time available for fall/push
• the cucumber. It's like a lemon (a.k.a swizzle) but unstead of steering the skates outwards from the toe, carve them outwards from the heel - thus, a much longer and thinner kind of fruit. This was originally just one of the drills, but, as comedic vegetable references are wont to do, assumed a much bigger role over the course of the weekend and is now a general shorthand for "carve more".

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.