Charlie Brown On Skates

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.

Lately I’ve been working on what I’d call “sustainable speed.” Anyone can skate fast for a few moments, but that isn’t speed skating, that’s sprinting. A speedskater is one who skates fast for the duration of the race, and in my case, it’s endurance races e.g. marathons. As usual in speedskating, it comes down more on the technique side and less on the fitness side.

Most speedskaters I know are relatively fit. Over the last three days I’ve skated over 30 miles and spent something like 16 hours building a retaining wall and working outside - fitness isn’t an issue, but technique always is. So how do you generate and sustain speed in speedskating?

There are two things that were introduced to me last year that I am working on this year, and both have helped me already. The first is interval training. I have been doing Tabata (Hight Intensity Interval Training or HIIT) intervals for the last month, once or twice a week. Interval training is crucial for the speedskater to train one’s body to adjust to rapid changes in speed - closing a gap, chasing a flyer, or just adjusting to the pack speed. Intervals help train you to be able to make those bursts of speed without killing yourself, it allows you to train yourself to recover.

Intervals also help increase your speed. Team Rainbo uses interval training both individually and at team practices. All our top skaters use interval training as part of their training regimen.

Secondly, hip and knee drive are crucial to getting and maintaining speed. It’s kind of hard to show in a blog post, but essentially you drive your hip forward after the recovery stroke while “throwing” your knee ahead. This generates momentum helping you get and maintain speed. This one thing is often the critical factor for me on whether I can hang with the faster packs or not. And it’s easy to forget when you start getting tired. My goal this year is to train myself to do this so automatically that I don’t have to think about it.

And, speaking of speed - I was a hugely freakish Speed Racer fan as a kid, and the movie comes out in three days. Oh yeah, I’ll be at the matinée early! Here’s me as a 5-year old dressed as Speed Racer - think I should wear it to the movie?

We weren’t happy with our original logo (which I had made) - it was not flexible enough, especially for the t-shirt design. So I began a new design, and we worked together to come up with a better logo. Here it is below. Hope to see lots of you there!