Charlie Brown On Skates

Haven’t posted for awhile since I’ve been busy both working and training, so a quick report is in order. We’re getting into the heart of the outdoor season now, which is great, and we have our own race (The Chicagoland Inline Marathon) coming up in July.

I was going to skate the Baxter Inline Marathon to open up my summer race series, but alas, nature had other ideas. We left in the Team Rainbo van with high hopes, however those were dashed in Madison, WI when large stretches of I-94 were closed due to flooding. The traffic was building, there was talk of a dam breaking, mudslides, and an even worse return trip. Unfortunately, we had to bag the whole thing.  We basically spent 10 hours in the van to go nowhere.

The next race is the Badger State Games in a couple weeks, let’s hope there’s no more rain for WI because things can go sour there too.  In the meantime I have been training pretty hard trying to improve and meet my goals for this year. Last week I did something close to 100 miles including some tough intervals with the team on Saturday. I’m also trying to lose the last of the weight I need to, and making some progress.

I’ve also been skating on the new Bont G4 wheels and finally got my hands on a set of Am-Wings in 22mm width. The Bont wheels are okay, fairly fast but they wear quickly. I don’t think they have quite lived up to the hype. The Am-Wings, on the other hand, are great. Light, fast and grippy and the 22mm width is nice, if not requiring of a bit more edge control.

Lord willing the weather will be nice and I’ll have a Badger report in the near future.

This weekend was The Great Race in Elkhart, Indiana - a 10k criterium and 1/2 marathon. As always, I was looking forward to the race, especially since it was a new one for me, and I had never done a 10k crit.

Although I had been training fairly consistently in the week leading up the event, I did not get any skates in 8 days before the race, and that proved a huge, huge mistake. Sunday was the 10k, 10 laps around a 3 block oval. Unfortunately the pavement was not in good shape in many areas, so that didn’t help matters for anyone, but hey we all skate the same course.

It became apparent quite quickly as the early laps unfolded that I simply didn’t have it. I started off at a good clip but didn’t find a good pack, and skated solo mostly until a teammate jumped on for the last 4 laps. I had nothing and I finished back in the pack, feeling awful, having nothing in my legs. That was the 10k.

Monday morning was the 1/2 marathon. I had hoped that having the 10k the day before might wake me up, but alas, it was not to be. I dropped off the advanced pack by mile 3ish, along with another teammate. We skated together for some 6 miles before a long pull on a hill did me in - I told them to just go on. Skated the last part solo.

Again, the story was simply dead legs. And worse, I honestly felt like I forgot how to skate half the time. I was getting no hip/knee drive no matter how hard I tried, and finding my correct edges was impossible. There were parts that were enjoyable, thank goodness - especially the social aspect of the event and the team dinner, etc. so at least I had a pretty good time other than my results. Speaking of which:

Great Race 1/2 Marathon Results:

Time: 49:04.6
Pace: 3:44
Avg Speed: 16+ mph
Place: 32 out of 48 in the Pro/Open division

I had hoped for sub 45 minutes, but no way was that going to happen. In addition to just not having it, the course was challenging in that it had a couple tough hills and some really rough spots.

I’m not sure exactly what happened other than not skating enough, but I need to re-evaluate my training and figure out where I fell off track. Plus, I’m dead serious about dropping the rest of this extra weight. I have to be lugging a good extra 20 pounds around, and I can’t stand it anymore.

Team practice today, we had some of our faster guys show (Jim R. and Murphy Quinn is back from school) so the pace was fast. I dropped at my usual spot on the big hill at around 23 minutes but picked up with Margo and Sadie Grace, an excellent skater who has trained for the Olympic team (her sister Mary is on the team) it was her first time out this year with us. She has skated very, very well in the past for Rainbo.

I think I have mentioned before that our training area at the Sears Centre is great, lots of slow tough grades and a couple of nasty hills (one challenging hill in particular). Thanks to Margo (one of the greatest training partners ever) I got my butt out for a second full lap today. So double the hills, double the fun right? I tried to push hard on the hills today and I think the interval training helps with that. I’m also really concentrating on my weight transfer and hip/knee drive which seems to be really helping me to maintain speed.

Hopefully the training will continue just like this. I would have liked to have done a full marathon today, but we were pretty beat at the end. We ended up doing 21.59 miles in 1:27, not too bad with all the hills and with getting a butt kicking early on with the fast pack - it’s hard to make the initial recovery from that.

Tomorrow I’ll try and take it fairly easy and do a recovery skate. Starting to seriously consider doing the Belle Isle Marathon, will have to see what the schedule looks like.

One more Speed Racer post for you. As I said I was a huge fan. When I was learning Hash Animation:Master, I decided to do a 3D version of my favorite car ever. Hash ended up putting it on their application demo CD and I got a free jacket out of it. Here she is, if only it was real and in my garage!

Edit: Found a bunch of renders in various states of progress, including a final one done with some “show models” by a John B. where he took my model and mixed it with his girls. I’ve added those as well.