March 10, 2010
No Regrets Part 3
You’ll want to read No Regrets Part 1 and No Regrets Part 2 if you want the following to make any sense whatsoever.
It Begins
It would actually be about a week before I got a pair of blades for my boots so I couldn’t get on the ice immediately. My first task was to find a gym, I did this before finding a place to live. I found a fantastic one down the road about a mile and joined immediately. Sadly it would get bought out by Gold’s Gym a year or two later and ruined before being closed. But I could continue my weight room assault and cardio until I got my blades.
They finally arrived and I started going to club ice sessions. Now, the oval has a ‘coaching’ program in place, it’s run with about the same level of competency and organization as everything else they do there; which is to say, with less skill than the average little league soccer team. The head ‘coach’ was the guy who had blown me off at camp. After watching me do drills one night he told me “I don’t believe in drills, just go skate.” That’s when I knew he was an idiot. I later watched him overtrain every skater in the club into dust and they all got slower that season working with him.
But the long and the short of it is that I was going about this alone. And oh was I alone. I had been involved in road cycling in college and, let’s just say that there is an elitist prick gene that is common to that sport. They shun anyone without the right equipment, the right socks, etc.; then you’re a Fred and they won’t even talk to you.
Well ice speed skating, by and large, has that same elitist prick gene to about the 10th power. To be fair, two groups of skaters turned out to be friendly on average: the inliners and, how can I put this gently, the brown-skinned people.
Now, by and large, speed skating is one of those sports ruled by the lily white folks from Minnesota. But there are an increasing number of other ethnic groups starting to skate: Derek Parra was actually the first Hispanic American to win a winter gold medal and Shani is the first African American. And brown-skinned folks are starting to enter the sport in small amounts. Those two groups, the inliners and the brown-skinned folks were friendly.
