Racing: An Overview

People used to ask me all the time when racing season started and in this regard, ice speed skating is that much stranger.  Outside of a few events that nobody cares about, there really isn’t a racing series except for the top skaters at least not in the United States.  They skate World Cup and World Championships (both the overall and individual distances) and there are a handful of other events at most.

For everybody else, here’s how it works:

You train your brains out to skate practice time trials.  Once these started they were usually held at least twice per month from about October to March.  Typically you sign up for two distances (you really can’t physically do more than that) and go race to post a time butt-early on Saturday. The only goal of skating these is to meet a qualifying standard, either for World Cup Team Tryouts or National Team Trials/National Championships in December (which doubles as Olympic Trials in the December before the games).  There is also an end of year finale that is about the only real race that you do outside of practice time trials.  It’s weird.

But if you don’t qualify for World Cup or National Trials, there is no race circuit to attend.  It’s just a grind of training to do time trials to train some more to do more time trials; if you qualify for something you race that.  If you don’t, you just keep training and time trialing.

This is capped off by the finale at the end of the year where you’d taper and try to end on a high note with PR’s in all of your events before you start the next cycle of summer training, winter training and more time trials.  I’m told there is more racing (and pack style has more races) back East.  But we were in Salt Lake City.  There were no races in the classical sense.  Just practice time trials.

.How We Race: Part 1

There are actually several different types of ice speedskating races.  Short-track speedskating is the one folks are the most aware of (it’s what Apollo Anton Ohno skates).  It’s skated on a hockey sized rink with 4-8 people on the track around a 111 m track, it’s the one where they put their hand on the ice and lean over like maniacs.  There’s lot of passing, sprinting, crashes and the first guy across the line wins. I didn’t race that.  It’s this and for the first 3 years I did it for training, it scared the absolute crap out of me.  I’m better at it now and it still scares me.

Wheeee

There are also ice marathons either held on canals (when they freeze), big lakes and occasionally maniacs will do 100 laps on the big 400m oval.  I never did any of that.  These guys are nuts.

Brrrrrr

On the long-track, which is what I skated, there are two primary types of racing.  The first is pack-style.  Like short-track, it’s 4-8 guys on the line and the first across the line wins.  There is a lot of drafting, tactics, end sprints, that kind of thing.  I never raced that.  It looks kind of like this.

No witty caption.

I was drawn to ice speedskating since it was an individual sport.  Though I retired from inline mainly due to overtraining, I also didn’t like where the team tactics were going.  I wanted to win or lose on my own merits without having to rely on a teammate to help (or hurt) me.

What I raced is called Metric Style Long-Track Speedskating which is raced on a 400m ice oval (think a running track made out of ice).  Races are contested at distances of 500m, 1000m, 1500m, 3000m (officially only for the women), 5000m, and 10,000m (offically men only).  They are respectively, 1, 2, 3, 7, 12 and 25 laps around the track after the start.

World record times for the men are along the lines of 34 seconds, 1:07, 1:43, 3 minutes and change, 6 minutes and change, 12 minutes and change from shortest to longest.  Rather than another picture, here’s a video of one of my awful 500m races.  It not only will give you an idea of just how boring watching racing is (this is a sprint and it still looks slow as hell) but shows you my absurd two-handed down start.  I’m the short guy in the black suit.

Each race has a different start position (the 3000 and 5000m are the same) with three of the races starting in the corner. After the start you simply race the number of appropriate laps and skaters switch laps on the backstretch every lap (if you’re in position you can get a draft off the skater in front of you) with the skater in the outer lane having right of way if he’s in an overtaking position (since he’s travelling faster).

If you forget to make a lane change and skate in the wrong lane, you get disqualified.  This is what happened to Sven Kramer in the 10k in Vancouver when his coach had a brain fart and yelled at him to make an illegal lane change at the last second, costing him the gold medal.

That might have been the singular mistake I didn’t make in my entire career (I made the rest): I never forgot to switch lanes.  And I never got DQ’ed from a race.  I did almost get in a fight after one of them though.

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How We Race: Part 2

There are traditionally two different ‘types’ of skaters: sprint and all-around.  Sprinters skate the sprint program which means skating the 500m and 1000m.  They skate each distance twice starting once on the inner lane and once on the outer; each has a slight advantage and the switch is to make it ‘fair’.  The scores are totalled up with something called a Samalog which I won’t even try to explain.  Lowest score (indicating fastest overall time) wins.

The other type of skater is an all-arounder and you skate 4 distances.  Men race 500m, 1500m, 5000m, and 10,000m.  Women race, 500m, 1500m, 3000m, and 5000m.  Apparently women are too delicate to skate 10,000m; their ovaries might fall out or something.  I’d note that my friend Eva Rodansky set and holds the official track record for the women’s 10k at the Utah Olympic Oval even if they won’t post her time anywhere because they are a bunch of dicks.

The overall all-around winner of the few races that exist is determined by the same Samalog score that I’m still not going to try to explain.  This is also how the overall World Champion is crowned: by the best Samalog score over those 4 distances.  So you have to be competent from 500m (34 seconds) to 10,000m (12 minutes and change) or that range depending on your skill level (for mortals it’s more like 40 seconds to 15 minutes).  It’s like that old 400m/800m/1500m/5000m spread in track and field that so many have dominated. Wait, what?

There are also single distance events including the Olympics and the World Single Distance Championships and World Sprint Championships. There it’s once race, one winner (except the 500m which is raced twice and totalled; lowest total time wins).   This is how Eric Heiden won five gold medals, by entering and winning all 5 major distances at the Olympics : 500m, 1000m, 1500m, 5000m, 10,000m.

In recent years, a new event called the team pursuit (taken from track cycling) has also been added.  In it, 3 skaters work together and two teams are on opposite sides of the oval. Women skate 6 laps, men 8 and the goal is to either catch the other team (never happens) or simply skate the fastest time.

Teams switch off lead every lap or so and the total time is determined by the last skater of the group crossing the line.  This is how the US Women managed to lose a bronze medal, Catherine-Raney Norman fell off the back and lost just enough time to lose the women a medal because the other team stayed together.  An injured Chad Hedrick cost the men a gold in the same way.

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How We Race: Part 3

During metric style, two skaters race at a time. Technically you are racing the clock.  The event is structured so that the entirety of the skaters racing (anywhere from 10-40 or more) are paired according to approximate ability (and from slowest to fastest in terms of the order you skate) and then go race two at a time.  At the end of all the pairs, whomever has the fastest time wins.  While you obviously have to beat your pair to come in first overall, beyond that beating them means nothing.  It’s you versus the clock: best time wins.

The way I describe it is like this: imagine auto racing but if you raced the cars two at a time and whoever had the fastest time at the end was the winner.  How boring would that be?  Well that’s metric long-track speedskating.  It is a lot like watching paint dry (unless you’re Dutch) but without the inherent excitement of paint.  I think this is a lot of the reason Americans have no appreciation for it.  It’s boring and doesn’t make sense to the American mindset.

There are no crashes (rarely anyhow and then it’s just some guy sliding into the pads when he catches an edge), no exciting passes, just two tall guys in lycra racing on a big sheet of ice two at a time against the clock.  It doesn’t even look that fast even though the top guys are going 35 mph; this is a weird optical illusion due to the length of the ice, the slowness of the push.  Only seeing it from the side view camera gives you a sense of the speeds involved. Or my behind the butt video from yesterday.

There’s not even the risk of anything blowing up like in auto-racing, not more than metaphorically anyhow.  To be honest, it’s pretty boring to do.  I think it’s boring as all hell to watch.  Unless you’re Dutch; they love it for some reason.  I think there’s something in the water over there.  Maybe paint.

In that vein, I can think of a lot of good ways to liven it up for the non-Dutch.  They just need some alternate types of racing.  I could see fusion with competitive eating: skate a lap, eat a hot dog.  The track would get slow after 15 laps or so.  Or how about skate a lap, take a shot of Vodka?  The Russians would dominate but the distance races would get fun about 12 laps (shots) in.

Jumps, landmines, jousting, make a figure 8 track and make people skate corners to the right; let’s see who the real all-around skaters are.  Rex once suggested bringing back barrel jumping.  Let a guy dial it up to 35 mph and I bet he clears a lot of barrels.  Before flipping over the pads anyhow but you could score extra points for style on the crashes.  But I’m getting off topic.

There is also a conceptual issue for most people who are used to seeing the winner as the first guy across the line.  In metric style, you can skate the race of your life and destroy your opponent and still come in next to last because everybody else in the event skates a better time.  You can have the best time up until the last pair and if the last guy pulls out a magic trick or skates an amazing race, you can lose. There are few guarantees unless you’re near the bottom; then you know you have no chance.

If you skate early in the pairs, you basically have no chance of doing anything but horribly in the standings, everybody ahead of you is faster.   Not that it really matters.  Unless you’re towards the end of the pair list, or simply have some massive breakthrough, you always know exactly where you’re at.  It’s both freeing and a bit demoralizing.

You never have to worry about your ‘opponents’; everyone is usually within 5-10% of their best at any given time trial.  No tactics, no come from behind racing, no amazing tricks because you can predict to a great degree where people will finish by the pair list.  It makes for an odd environment but at least you can control your expectations.  In a racing sense, the ideal is if the person you’re racing is just a little bit faster than you; that will often pull you up to the next level as you chase them down.

But it can be really demoralizing.  If you race first pair, you can basically be assured of coming in near last unless you have a huge breakthrough or someone falls or gets disqualified.  Even there, at best, you might move up a few spaces with a big breakthrough of a second or two or whatever.

You’re not going to jump from last to first overnight, nobody comes out of nowhere (well, maybe Chad). It just doesn’t happen.  Rather you try to march up the leader board as you get better and hope the folks at the top aren’t improving at the same or a better rate.

Of course, little of that mattered for me, it was clear early on I’d never be near the top.  I had resigned myself about year three that simply qualifying for the Olympic trials was my only realistic shot.  But that was enough.

But it can be hard to get motivated when you know what’s going to happen on any given race day.  Hopefully you PR but usually you’ll be within a few percent of your best.  You’re not technically racing your pair, but rather the clock.  You just want to post a time to meet a qualifying standard to race another event where you might actually be in competition with someone (for a spot on the team).

Oh yeah, in metric long-track speed skating there are no style points, no judging, none of that subjective crapola.  It’s a pure time-trial sport (my friend Eva would disagree but read her book Winter of Discontent if you want to learn more about that) and there are only a few things that get you disqualified (impeding the other skater on the crossover, missing a lane change, stuff like that).  It’s pretty rare although some skaters simply stop in the middle of a race and get a DNF (did not finish).

This is unlike short-track where races can be decided based on a judging call about an illegal pass or cross-tracking or whatever (this all happens after the race on video replay), which leads to all kinds of silliness and argument about who really won.  Readers may have seen Apolo’s luck finally run out in the 500m final in Vancouver when he got disqualified for impeding.  That’s short-track.

In metric long-track speed skating it’s simple: whomever has the best time after all the pairs skate is the winner.  But only in the few events that matter.  In practice time trials it’s you against the clock to set a time to qualify for trials to…..

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How I Raced (aka Inline to Ice Part 4)

During my years racing outdoor inline, I always raced well. I had an uncanny ability to redline it right at my threshold without blowing up and always raced at my best.  It was an aerobic sport without much importance on corners and even though my technique sucked, I didn’t have to think about it.  I could just go.

As I joke now, I’m built for being aerobic and going straight and the ice is about being anaerobic and turning left.  And with a 20 minute race, there is no pressure to get off the line fast or go all out.  You can settle in, find a pack going your pace and just go.  It was great.

On the ice I had none of that.  My technique was awful and unstable and I was pressuring myself to race well.  I wasn’t just skating, I was trying to go fast.  And that’s when the badness happens.   I absolutely detested racing for the first 4 years.

As well, when you’re starting out, your technique isn’t stable enough for the longer stuff.  So I was always racing the 500m, 1000m and 1500m early on and I’m simply not built as a sprinter: mentally or physically.  My coach trains everyone as an all-arounder (even sprinters need some endurance) in the beginning but you race primarily as a sprinter for the first couple of years.   And I hated it, especially the 500m.

There is this sense of ‘I MUST GO FAST BECAUSE I ONLY HAVE ONE LAP’ and you tighten up and skate like crap.  This is especially true when your technique is unstable and moreso when you have no corners, which I didn’t.  You’d go faster skating at 90% and actually skating well than trying to go at 100% and skating terribly.  I did the latter.

Even in the 1000m, you figure that you’ve got two laps to get it right and relax.  I’d often skate a faster first lap in my 1000m than in the single lap of my 500m.  Because I’d relax and skate; less effort, faster speeds.  Go figure that one out.

The 1500m was actually my favorite race.  It was long enough that I could settle down and skate but short enough to be over before I fell apart technically.  I’m also a bit of a masochist and the 1500m is like the 800m in track: it just hurts.  It’s short enough to be all out and long enough to hurt like hell.  You have what’s called the 1500m hack for the rest of the day.  I think you kill lung tissue.

Some will hurl after it because acidosis is so high; I never did that.  I did have a little sit down in the last 50m of one of my first races.  No clue what happened.  I was skating the final straightaway one moment and then everything slowed down and my knee hurt and my butt was cold and I was sliding into the warm-up lane. I apparently just tipped over as my left leg collapsed underneath me.  Everyone was yelling at me and I got up and finished the race, which I did.  You always finish the race.

I skated a bunch of 3000’s and a couple of 5000’s.  I never manned up and raced a 10k officially (they actually won’t let you if you’re not fast enough because it takes so damn long) although I did one hand-timed one year.  I did it because I wanted to say that I had but I would never want to do that again.

About lap 20 your low back locks.  If you skate through it, it just goes numb; I suspect nerve death.  You just keep talking to yourself “If I just don’t stop moving, I can do this.” When you’re done, you can’t stand up straight because the nerves in your low back are dead (I may be exaggerating slightly).

But for the first 4 years, racing was always anxiety producing for me.  I’d never sleep well the night before, get to the ice and fumble through warm-ups.  I’d rush on my starts, slip, try to make up for it and just skate badly, rushing my strokes, not building pressure, reverting to old habits.

It didn’t help that I was under a tremendous amount of pressure to improve my times.  I’d try to race fast and forget to skate; when I would settle down and just skate, I’d go fast.  It’s easy to say and tell people to relax; it’s real hard to do when the gun goes off.

Ultimately, I wasn’t built for this and, as I noted in the technique section, this is still my biggest disagreement with my coach: I shouldn’t have been racing so early.  His argument is that newbies need as much race experience as they can to get used to it.  I don’t disagree but until you have decent technique dialed in, you can’t race well and all it does is break you down mentally.  You can’t keep having bad races without getting really discouraged.  Failure starts to beget failure and the way he had us racing just wasn’t setting us up for a lot of success.  Not me anyhow.

It didn’t help that we trained afternoons and raced mornings.  There are circadian rythms involved and you tend to perform best at the time you habitually train.  I wouldn’t even be warmed up by the time we started racing on Saturday morning because apparently playing on the Internet all morning was required for me to skate well in the afternoon.  I didn’t even have time to check email on trials mornings, much less argue with Internet people to ramp up my CNS.  I never felt ready to race.

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Almost Hanging it Up/Always Finish the Race

I came to dread racing, it would not only mean another lost workout (two actually as we’d lose a normal workout for ice prep during the week) but another day where I’d post crappy results and feel terrible mentally and physically.  Still, I’d dutifully go and give it my best.  Except for one time.  One Saturday morning, I walked away from one race about 3 years in. I had raced another terrible 500m, was already questioning why I was wasting my time with this crap, and I scratched from the 3000m.

I knew it wouldn’t go well.  I couldn’t face it, I couldn’t hurt that much for another poor time.  So I decided to withdraw from the time trial.  I didn’t even tell Rex who was on the far side of the oval.   I let the race organizers know since it affects scheduling and walked out of the oval in tears, nearly throwing my skates in the trash and leaving SLC right then and there.

I’d never done that before.  I never quit, I never stop in a race no matter how much it hurts, I never stop in a workout unless I’m physically injured.  Sometimes not even then.  Because every time you quit, it gets a little bit easier the next time; you know that you can just stop when it gets hard.  You can’t let that habit develop.  You always finish the race.  If you fall, you get up and finish.  If you feel like you’re doing to die, you keep going until you cross that line.  Or you die.  But you don’t quit.

My attitude extends to workouts, mind you.  You race how you train and I never quit in workouts.  Rex used to joke that a good workout was one where you called out your god’s name for help.  And a great workout was when you asked him/her/it to take you from this mortal coil to make the pain stop.   In speedskating, this isn’t a joke.

In 5.5 years I think I failed to complete maybe 2 sets given to me the entire time.   That’s like a 99.8% completion rate.  I missed less than a handful of workouts and that was always due to reasons out of my control (e.g. I had to buy a new car one day because mine was about to explode).  Because you always finish the workout.  Always.

One summer I fell on right hand circles, had my left arm underneath me and cracked a rib plowing into the pavement.  Rex asked if I needed to go to the hospital.  I asked him to give me the main workout set though I could barely stand up straight or breathe without pain.

It was a gruelling hour of lap on/lap off  (skate on lap hard with a full circle at the end, rest a lap without the full circle) at 160-170 HR on the work lap.  Skating didn’t actually hurt but standing up between laps was excruciating.  I finished the entire thing and never missed a day of training.  You can’t do anything for a cracked rib anyhow.  You suck it up and go.

One workout I did not complete was when I feel on the ice in the corner and cut my ankle to the bone with my own blade.  Multiple stitches later, they had put me back together.  I was on the ice 2 days later and didn’t miss a single workout beyond the one where I fell.  It left a really cool curved cut where the blade got me.  But I’d have finished the workout if I could have.  You never quit.

Owww

Cool

And that trials day, for whatever reasons, I had just walked out on a time trial I was signed up for.  This was the first time in my life I’d ever quit (I had missed a previous set of trials with food poisoning, mind you, but I couldn’t even get out of bed).  It was devastating and, as I noted, I almost walked away from the sport completely that day.  I don’t really know what was going on, maybe depression, maybe something else.   I probably shouldn’t have added soy to my diet as part of a nutritional experiment I was trying.  I don’t know that it hurt, but it didn’t help.

But I manned up, got my act together and got back to training and racing.  It never happened again.

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Progress or the Lack Thereof

Progress in both racing and training came in dribs and drabs.  A nice thing about being a newbie is that PR’s are easy to come by. But it doesn’t last.  I’d make a jump on the ice but it wouldn’t always translate to racing.  Under stress and such, you revert to old habits and that’s what I’d do.

I would set PR’s in training but they wouldn’t show up in races.   It would take 4 years until what I was doing in training would carryover to trials and I’d relax and just race.  When you try to go fast, you tighten up; relax and just skate, and you go fast.  Easy to say, hard to do.   I talked about this a bit in Goal vs Process Oriented Training.

It was a real struggle at times.  This was the only activity I’d ever done where the harder I worked, the slower I got.  Every year my technique was changing and that meant another season to try to become efficient at the new technique again.  And when you’re having to think about technique, you can’t go all out or your technique falls apart again.  I’d note that I was always improving on sub-maximal sets of laps or intervals because it wasn’t at 100% and I’d skate well.

But my top sprint lap was mired at the 30 second mark.  Mind you that’s 30mph and I had brought it down from a pathetic 47 seconds my first season. But I couldn’t crack through it.  For some reason, this seems to be the cuttoff where getting past it determines where you ever get.  Once you’re past it, you seem to make faster improvements. I think it means your technique is finally solid enough to get really good.

But getting past it was a stone bitch.  I skated exactly one 29 second lap (a 29.88 to be exact) in my career somewhere in year 4, skating behind Caleb (who would eventually do a 26.9) and not even trying to go that fast.  I just relaxed and chased him down.  But then I started trying too hard and never did it again.

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Being Surrounded by the Best is not Always a Good Thing

I was constantly angry and frustrated with skating, racing was going badly and training at this particular venue was disheartening.  Even as I improved and got my times down it seemed irrelevant.  My coach told myself and Caleb that his and my times would be right at the top at any club back East.  Which would have been great if that’s where we were training.

But the Utah Olympic Oval is the official training center for the US National Speedskating Team.  The best US skaters train here and a 30 second lap seems pointless when they are throwing down 25 second laps on sprint day and skating sets at 30-32 seconds per lap.  They warm up with your max as the old joke goes.

The trolls on my forum loved to poke fun at my placing in time trials because I was always down near the bottom.  But coming in last when the 15 guys ahead of you are National Team, World Team and Olympic level really isn’t that bad if you take the time to think about it (which trolls don’t).  I already mentioned that, like swimming, this is a sport where a 15 year old can hand you your ass because he’s already been skating 8 years and simply knows how to move on ice.  Of course, I can buy beer.

It wasn’t that I sucked completely so much as the folks around me were just amazing.  But it was sure disheartening at times.  No matter what you do, when you are surrounded by folks who have been skating since they were 6 and are the best in the world, you suck by comparison.  Try to maintain your motivation in that scenario.

But progress was coming little by little as my technique caught up with my fitness.  The question is whether or not it would be good enough.  As I mentioned above, Metric Speedskating is both nice and horrible in that you always know what you are.

I knew what the qualifying times for the Olympics Trials (my only semi-realistic goal at this point, making a team was never more than a dream goal) would be, I knew what times I was skating.  You always know exactly where you are.  And there’s only so much improvement you can make in a given amount of time.

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Ending the 2009 Season

The skating season runs from Mid-April to Mid-March with a month break in-between; the finale is Mid-March.  The entire final year there was a lot of question of whether or not I’d skate out the final part of the 2009-2010 season to try for Olympic trials for a number of different reasons I won’t go into here.

Rex still thought I had an outside shot but this is a place he has problems handling people.  He won’t be honest with them.  He’d said in one breath that he thought I had a chance of making trials.  And in the same breath that he’d only ever seen most people improve by one second per lap per year.   It was simple math and the math didn’t work.

At this point in time, my only  realistic shot was in the 5000m and the qualifying standard required something like straight 34.3 second laps for each of the 12 laps.  At the time my fastest lap was a nice consistent 30.1 when I didn’t skate like an idiot on sprint stuff.

Now, like many sports, there is something of a relationship between your top speed and what you can do for reps or laps sub-maximally. Clearly if you can only skate a 30 second lap in practice you can’t skate a 29 second lap in a race.  But if you can skate a 29 second lap in practice, you might be able to hold a 35 second lap or whatever for multiple laps (depending on endurance and such). There seemed to be about a 6-7 second differential between people’s best sprint lap and what they could hold for the 5k.  It’s in that range and I’m sure the Germans have endless data on this.

Realistically, to meet the qualifying times, I figured I’d need a 28 second top lap to have a shot at a 34.7 for 12 laps.  That would still be pushing it but was at least within the realm of possibility.  My best was a that single 29.88 and a low 30 was more consistently what I’d do.  If the best improvement Rex had seen was 1 second in a year, it was impossible.  And we didn’t even have the full year going into 2009.

When I told him this contradiction between saying I had a shot and saying he’d only seen 1 second per lap per year rate of improvement on average he said “You never know what might happen.”  Damn it, Rex.

But things can get weird in the distances, sometimes you find someone who doesn’t have the top speed but can crank it out sub-maximally because of their endurance or whatever.  I had a teammate for a little while like this: 30 second top lap and could do repeat 32-34 second laps as long as you’d let him.  Sadly, I wasn’t him. He had raced pro inline and beaten Colorado pros in bicycle time trials; he had a motor that I lacked.  And better technique.  It actually wasn’t so much that he was great at submaximal laps as that he was bad at sprinting, he hated it and wouldn’t do it.

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In All the Way

In any case, I had to make a choice at the end of that March whether or not to keep skating.  I could tell that my ice feel was coming and my corners had finally locked in that February, I was as fit as I’d ever been.  The times I needed to skate were daunting but I felt that I had a maybe shot at it.

At this point, I was pretty much all in and while there were reasons that would have made me quit that March (which aren’t relevant to this story), I sort of had to see it through.  Come December 2009, I was done regardless.  Whether I made trials or not, the journey would be done so it was only 9 more months anyhow.  I had to see what I’d started through to the end.

I showed up for summer training 4 weeks later and we began the final push.  At that point Caleb was effectively a lock for trials, I was an outside shot, my coach had a couple of other skaters who were still developing and weren’t even close.  So it was me and Caleb.  We’d started this together and we’d end it together.

Or would we?

To be continued in No Regrets Part 7.

I’m actually going to accelerate things as this is getting long; I could detail what happened for every year of the 5.5 I skated but it’s really not relevant except in overview.  I’m going to be updating every day this week until Thursday to keep each post shorter and try to cover everything.  Yeah, I know, I’m wordy.  It’s worth it.

I’d note that it became abundantly clear that my original plan of only 1.5 years in SLC (I had planned to stay through Torino trials and that was it) was little more than an amusing pipe dream; I was no Chad.  That came and went before I’d even learned to skate.  But since I still had doing something I needed to accomplish and nothing else going on, I signed on for the next 4 year cycle.  So I’ll be talking about 5.5 years for the rest of this series.

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Fixing My Technique

I knew that I’d have to rebuild my technique from the ground up to get anywhere in the sport.  And that was a problem.  With nearly a decade of doing it wrong, my body had a lot of patterns ingrained and they were all wrong. I’ve fixed people’s technique in the weight room and it takes endless, endless repetition and practice.  And the body always wants to revert to old habits when you’re tired, stressed or trying to go all out.

I do NOT want to make it sound like I’m blaming my coach for the end result but, quite factually, if there was one place I really disagree with what he does/did it’s that he let me race and do speedwork with poor technique.  I feel that I could have learned technique faster had I just done drills for 2 years (of course, initially, Rex was under the impression that I was there for 1.5 years until Torino and then done).  Every time I raced, every time I tried to go fast I just reverted to old habits and locked them in deeper.  But that’s water under the bridge.

Rex is a technical perfectionist and I am the same when it comes to learning.  As I realized how bad my technique was, we started to rebuild it from scratch.  I asked endless endless questions, he gave endless explanations and demonstrations and I did more drills than I care to think about.

On-ice, off-ice, I was always doing drills.  I’d be in line at the post office or grocery store and be practicing dry skating or crossover mechanics.  I didn’t care what people thought, I needed as many repetitions as I could get to fix this.  Every repetition I did correctly was one more away from doing it badly for years.

Let me tell you how insane I was about this, I mentioned this weird concept of internal rotation that happens when you skate.  Well, due to years of high-bar squatting, my position of strength was with hips turned out into external rotation and toes out.  Not only did I not squat during my training (many skaters can’t translate the flat backed, toes out of squatting to the round backed toes in of skating), I would walk on the treadmill with my legs internally rotated for an hour multiples times per week my first season.  It not only helped with body comp but taught my body to be comfortable and generate force with the hips in internal rotation.  Yes, I am psychotic.

Every time I’d get something locked down, Rex would give me something more difficult to do.  It kept my ego in check by giving me something new to suck at every time I thought I had things figured out.  More seriously, it kept me on the high edge of the learning curve.  As I talked about in Becoming an Expert-Deliberate Practice, always working a little bit past what you can do comfortably is what keeps you progressing.  I’d learn something new, figure something out, and he’d give me the next step.

In that aspect of skating, Rex is a virtuoso.  He knows exactly when to show you the next skill, the next piece of this horrible puzzle called speedskating.  But better than that he knows how to teach, explain and demonstrate each step.  And the next one and the next one.  He had a technical ideal, built over 3 decades of obsession, that he was moving me towards little by little.

It didn’t help that many parts of skating are like this: to do part A correctly you have to be able to do part B.  But to do part B correctly you have to be able to do Part A in the first place (and you’re doing this while doing a half-dozen other things at the same time).  It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever learned to do in my life.

People who knew skating would watch video of me and go “It looks like you are thinking about skating instead of just skating.”  Yup.  I’d be in a lap thinking about a half-dozen cues all at once and it made me skate like a robot.  It looked horrid and felt worse.

Mind you that this process occurred over 5.5 years, I’m making it sound like it was quick but it was not.  There were endless setbacks.  I’d learn something, figure it out, then lose it for 3 weeks and revert to old habits.  Then it would come back and stay.  It was never ending but this is where my particular brand of obsessive psychosis comes in handy: I can focus for years at a time on stuff that’s important to me.  I don’t get bored.  In this regard, Rex was the perfect teacher, and I was the perfect student.

I’d note, to break up the dense blocks of text that I did finally get it.  Rex had told me early on that only three skaters of his had ever become technically perfect in terms of meeting his ideal of technique.  I told him I’d be the fourth and while I never corrected a few minor technique issues (you can see me toe out my right skate a bit in the corner), I did ultimately get it.  This may also make some of the text descriptions I gave in Part 4 make a little more sense, you can see the weight shift on the straightaway, the carve of the skate as I push out and into internal rotation, the crossover.  And my butt.

This is video of me (in the black suit) skating with a teammate who joined us later, Jamaal.  This is an easy 800m or something with a guy with a helmet cam following us, probably about 24 mph or so.   It took me over 5.5 years but I learned to skate with technique that would hold up anywhere in the world.

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A Primer on Speedskating Training: Summer Training

But it was a slow process and while this was all going on, I was handling a training load that was literally 10 times what I’d done in my 20’s.  On average, we did 8 training units per week across 4 days (with 3 days off) and probably 18-20 hours per week.  And it wasn’t easy training.    I won’t have space to detail how speedskaters train in detail (if readers are interested, let me know and I’ll write something up), I’ll simply say that it’s one of the most unique sports out there in a lot of ways.

For example, for the first 20 weeks of the year, you don’t generally touch the ice.  Instead it’s off-ice training.  We did inline skating in a parking lot on a track we set up, gruelling dryland (skate imitations for both technique and conditioning), weights and the bike. There was also jumping and something called turncable, an exercise that skaters use to mimick skating mechanics off the ice.  I couldn’t find the picture I wanted but this more or less shows how it’s done.

The dude in red is holding a band (the one we used was made out of rubber tubing to give more extension) while the skater does crossovers; the band lets her lean into it (on the ice centrifugal force plays that role) and you can practice crossovers.  The guy in the black track suit is the head coach; he’s mainly yelling.

I know these people

My coach was awful to us and would just keep pushing the distance covered up.  He figured that if you could turn cable for a couple of minutes, a race would be easy.  And we were supposed to do it all at sprint depth.   At one point I covered the entire 100m of the track doing this and my technique was perfect on it at the end.  Still didn’t help me on the ice.

We used inline for technical and conditioning work.  As long as you recognize a few differences, you can learn the same things on wheels as on the ice.  If anything, here I had a slight advantage, being on wheels was like walking for me and I was more comfortable on inlines than one the ice.  I made huge technical improvements there because I didn’t have 20% of my brain going “Oh crap, ice, slippery, ice, slippery, pads, ice, slippery, oh crap.”  I could put 100% of it to skating.

Dryland is a hellish workout alternating periods of 1-5 minutes of skating imitations (various drills that skaters came up with to keep from going insane in the 6 months they used to not have ice) with the bike or jogging.  At one point I did a solid hour alternating sets of 4 minutes in the skating position in some form or another with 1 minute easy on the bike. Good times.

There is also an explosive variant we did sometimes where you do 30 repetitions of explosive drills (dry-skating or the horror of crossbacks, a corner drill I’d have to video to show you what it is) with 20 seconds all out on the bike.   And you do that for about 8 minutes straight pegging your HR at around 180.  More good times.

Here I dominated in training, I perfected my technique over several years on every drill and could out dryland just about anybody.  When they have the dryland Olympics, I’ll medal.  Sadly, it didn’t help me on the ice any more than anything else did.  Chad’s dryland technique is actually awful to watch.  But he can skate like a maniac.

I mentioned having disagreements with some of my coach’s ideas about conditioning.  Mind you, the first year I shut up and swept dojo.  I didn’t know enough at that point to have an opinion on the matter.  He was the expert and I did it his way because I wouldn’t have hired him if I knew what in the hell I was doing.  I’ll rant about this particular peeve of mine in a later article.

But with each year, I would modify his program as I got my head wrapped around the sport, both on the bike and in the weight room.  I’d make suggestions about on-ice training from time to time but there he was the master and I was supposed to sweep dojo.  Which I did, mostly.

As I came to realize that I was overstrong for where my technique was, I would start to focus less in the weight room.  If anything, going heavy all the time was hurting my progress even if I loved pushing big weights; I was too sore and stiff to skate or train effectively.  So I started cutting it back and cutting it back.  I did not enjoy this.

One year I skipped weights entirely. That didn’t work so they came back in at essentially maintenance loads for the remaining 1.5 years of my career.  But doing 30 minutes of maintenance work twice per week for a year on a bunch of basic exercises is not my idea of fun.  The part of lifting that I had loved when I pursued it previously was gone.

It didn’t help that everyone I was coaching/training were weight room athletes (three Ol’ers and one strongman).  The thing I was training them exclusively for was the thing I was doing little of.  It killed me to train people for the thing I had used to love when I was doing none of it myself (well, nothing satisfying anyhow).

About year three we’d add short-track in the summer which I’d manage to be even worse at than long-track if you can believe it.  But short-track builds good corners (and makes you want to poop your pants at first) so it was a beneficial addition.  It also helped develop ice feel by at least putting us on the ice more frequently; I wish we’d added it sooner to be honest.

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A Primer on Speedskating Training: Ice Training

After that summer block you get on the ice and try to convert whatever you learned in the summer onto the ice.  Every year I’d have to go through a learning phase switching back and forth from ice to inline and back but it got faster every year (eventually took about 5 minutes).  Inline and ice speedskates handle a bit differently so that’s another learning curve.

Once on the ice, after a brief introduction period, we were basically doing a lot of everything on the ice.  Speed work (sprinting), laps (for endurance), race pace (tempo) work, and lots of other stuff to build the skills needed for racing.  Including starts, something else I was just horrid at.  My coach has been coaching for 27 years and I came up with mistakes on starts he’d never seen before.  Just awesome.  I’d also eventually invent the two-handed down start, something only I do.

And every workout on the ice is HARD.  You actually can’t do a particularly low-intensity speedskating workout on the ice.  If you bend your knees to the right angle, lactate goes up over 4 mmol/l.  You can’t do traditional endurance work at low intensities as per the Methods of Endurance Training series.  A single set of 20 laps (taking perhaps 15 minutes) is grueling and hard to repeat more than once.  Especially when your technique is bad.  You fall apart.

You can’t do true endurance training on the ice for that reason.  Nobody can skate for 1-2 hours straight; ok, maybe the Dutch.  But nobody else does it.  In this respect, skating is also a lot like swimming; the training is all interval based.  You skate a lap or laps, and come in to get feedback and rest.

There’s a lot of sitting around and in a 2 hour ice workout, on a sprint day, you might do 5-10 minutes of actual work (5 lap warm-up, drills, 5 standing starts, 4X400m sprint laps with 10′ rest, 2 lap cool-down).  It’s  real bad for body composition because the cold makes you hungry and you burn squat all calories on the ice. And there’s lots of candy in SLC.

Instead we continued to use cycling for general endurance and weights and jumping and…..It was tough. And the schedule didn’t help.  The Utah Olympic Oval has different ice times but you have to qualify for them.  Only the fastest skaters can skate morning ice from 9-11, the next tier skates from 3-5pm and the club is later than that.

We’d skate the 3-5 pm high performance session but since skating was all important, conditioning always came after that.  So I’d be at the Oval from 2:15 to 5:30 (workout plus warmup/cooldown) and then have to ride the bike or lift weights after that.

I’d try to get an hour or two of rest and a snack but had to train early enough to be able to sleep.  Except Saturday morning when I would have to get up at 6am for either training or time trials/racing.  But would at least get 6 hours before the afternoon workout.

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Inline to Ice: Part 3

I’d note that during this time I completely avoided the one activity that I had originally loved, that got me into this: outdoor inline skating.  We trained on a track in a parking lot as I mentioned above but that was it.   And I never really enjoyed or loved the ice (in the way that my friend Eva does).  This was a task to be overcome, a goal I had to pursue.  I didn’t love it.  In many ways, I hated every minute of it.  Maybe that was part of the problem.

But the skating I’d done for hours every day for years just around town, on my skates, enjoying the activity of skating, I did none of that. I skated on my street skates exactly twice in 5.5 years and would actually come to hate skating a bit.  More accurately, I had forgotten the parts about it that I had originally loved.  Inline skating was now a tool to be used to reach a goal, rather than something I did for enjoyment.

But I couldn’t risk reverting to old habits, the goal was all-important and all-consuming.  I’d have time to have fun after this was over.  During my time in SLC, everything was about having no regrets about what I was doing.  That meant 100% focus on what mattered and 0% on what didn’t.  Skating for fun wasn’t part of the program and could potentially cause harm to my progress.  So I avoided it.  I was there to train and train to the best of my ability.

Of course, you don’t just train to train.  You train to race.

So how did that go?

To be continued in No Regrets Part 6.

A Primer on Skating Part 1: Are You Serious?

As I mentioned in No Regrets Part 2, there is a small tradition of inline skaters successfully making the switch to the ice.  I had assumed that my years skating inline (and recall that I did fairly well in my last season) would make my switch easier.  Oh how wrong I was.  Quite in fact, if anything it did more harm than good.  My years doing things wrong would make reprogramming my nervous system that much more labor intensive.  I’ll come back to this at the end of today’s installment.

As I quickly found out, my technique absolutely sucked.  I mean everything I did was wrong.  I was fit as hell and strong as hell but it didn’t do me any good on the ice.  Without technique, nothing happens; you can’t muscle the ice.

Let me try to put the above in perspective, it’s really not me making excuses.  At one point in the time I was in Salt Lake, I was able to out train Caleb in everything.  In the weight room, despite being 60 pounds lighter than him, I could outlift him.  I don’t mean pound for pound, I mean in absolute terms.  I could destroy him during dryland and if we hadn’t ridden at different times, I suspect I’d have killed him there.  And on the ice?

On the ice, he was 3-5 seconds faster than me per lap.  He had come from downhill skiing and ice hockey and between knowing how to move on ice and knowing how to lean over without pissing himself, he was faster than me despite lesser fitness levels. Because he could skate well and I couldn’t.  All my fitness and strength just didn’t make an iota of difference.  Because if you can’t put it into the ice, it’s just irrelevant.  It was very frustrating.

The same would happen with Eva Rodansky when she joined our group in my final year.  I could keep with her on inlines (and on smaller wheels meaning I was putting out more power), could out dryland her, was stronger muscularly, etc.  She was 2 seconds faster than me per lap because she knew how to put it into the ice better (she was a natural, having made essentially the Junior National Team with only 4 months on the long-track; she had done sporadic short-track prior to that).

There is a thing in skating called ice feel, it has to do with knowing how a blade moves on ice so that you can build pressure and generate force. Some people supposedly have it intuitively, some get it after years of training (many skaters said it took them at least 5 years) and some never get it.

It’s one of those ephemeral things: it can’t be taught, it can only be learned.  Wooooooooooooo………

In many ways, skating is a lot like swimming and this is one of them.  There, you hear about water feel.  Good swimmers know how to catch the water, feel the pressure across the surfaces of their body, streamline, etc.  Some have it intuitively, some get it after years, some never get it. It’s also a sport where, between water feel and technique, you get a situation where being strong and fit doesn’t mean all that much at a certain level (at the highest level you need both).  And where little kids will hand you your ass because they know how to swim better than you.

Ice speedskating is like that.  I got my ass handed to me by younger kids quite a few times, because they had been skating 10 years already and I hadn’t and they could skate better than me.  I’m not ego-driven for the most part but that was tough to deal with at certain points in my career.

Amusingly I saw an interview with Clara Hughes (one of Canada’s most decorated Winter Olympians) two nights ago about her switch from ice hockey to speed skating and she said the same thing: she was 18 and strong as hell and little kids were outskating her because they knew how to speed skate and she didn’t.  And it took her years to change that fact.

But the long and the short of it was that my technique sucked and all my strength and fitness was irrelevant beyond allowing me to train at full tilt on the ice from day 1 (i.e. I had an ungodly work capacity and could handle any training load).

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A Primer on Skating Part 2: Basic Technique

Technically, skating is simply bizarre.  The movement patterns are completely unique and nothing like anything you do in normal life.  Ideally your knee is bent at 90 degrees with your back rounded like a cat.  You push directly to the side while moving the pushing leg into internal rotation. While this is going on, you bring the recovery leg through to enter the glide phase, sitting on that skate for about 1 second before compressing and then pushing to the other side. It’s the only activity where you push sideways to go forwards; sailing is actually similar, you tack against the wind which pushes sideways to move you forwards.  Newton would be appalled.

The picture below shows me in perfect basic position: back rounded, head down, reaching through with my swing-arm, knee at a 90 degree angle with the recovery leg hanging down (you may marvel at my gray shorts at your own leisure).  Imagine pushing hard from this position.  The push is actually down into the ice (it looks like the push is sideways since you’re falling away from the skate) while pushing the leg into internal rotation (carving the skate around) and essentially falling sideways.  Yeah, right.

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This is me.

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And that’s just the straightaway.

Then there are corners/crossovers which are literally all-important to speed skating.  It’s an asymmetrical movement where you push through with one leg as you crossover the other leg (the right), and you do this with your back rounded, shoulders out of the corner, head turned in, while falling into the corner sideways due to gravity (this is where you get a lot of the acceleration). It looks like this on long-track and we always turn left.

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This isn't me.

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The skater above is just finishing his left leg push; at this point, you begin to push with the right leg as you bring the left leg through.  Corners are not only where you get your acceleration; they also give most skaters back problems.  You generate huge strength asymmetries because of the differences in left and right leg pushes and are effectively round backed and twisted both out of (shoulders) and into (head) the corner.   Your spine corkscrews.

Basically, if you have good corners, the rest really doesn’t matter; if you don’t have good corners, you can’t go anywhere since that’s where you get all of your speed and acceleration from.  I would get straightaways figured out fairly soon on the ice but they did me literally no good at all.  The only real point of the straightaway in the sport is to get a little bit of leg recovery and try not to lose too much speed before you re-accelerate in the corner.  Every lap is skated in this weird interval style where you relax on the straights and then build the corners like a bear is chasing you.  An ice-bear.

This is part of why short-trackers like Shani Davis are so good on long-track; amazing corners.  In that vein, the Korean skater who took silver in the Men’s 5k in Vancouver had only been on long-track for something like 3 months; he had skated short-track his whole life and having great corners got him a medal on long-track.

It’s also why indoor inliners (whose sport is all corners) often transition to the ice better than the outdoor guys (whose racing is mostly about straightaways and endurance).   I actually saw one world class indoor inliner skate one of the fastest flying laps ever (24.3 seconds which is about 37 mph) on the big oval.  And he had no straightaway technique at all, his feet were turned out about 45 degrees.  That’s how important corners are.  And how irrelevant the straights.

This would be another source of frustration about the middle of my career: I’d see skaters who I could outskate on the straightaway, my technique was better than theirs.  But it didn’t matter, they had better corners than me and I couldn’t keep up.  On sprint laps, I could even stay with Caleb on the straightaways.  And he’d drop me like a bad habit in the corner.

So that’s the basics of speed skating technique.  It’s like no other human movement, you push sideways to go forwards and corners are just completely bizarre.  One coach I demonstrated them to said “That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”  Another I had asked “How would you train someone for this?” said “I can’t do anything with that.”  These are guys that have trained athletes in every sport; speedskating just made them go “Huh?”

And that doesn’t even get into the odd physiological demands but I’ll save those for either a later part or another full article if readers are really interested.

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Inline to Ice: Part 2

I mentioned in No Regrets Part 2 that there is a small tradition of inliners switching to ice succesfully and specifically mentioned KC Boutiette, Derek Parra and Chad Hedrick.  It’s worth looking at their backgrounds in terms of making the switch from inline to ice.

KC is claimed to have made an Olympic team after only 2 weeks on the ice but this isn’t entirely accurate.  Not only had he spent some prior time on the ice, he worked with an athlete that my coach had taught to skate.  Meaning that he had been taught classical ice technique already; he also had a huge endurance motor from his years racing pro inline marathons.  As well, and this is not meant to take anything away from his accomplishment (he’s an amazing skater and just a super nice guy who was always friendly to me), but the qualifying standards were lower and, at the time, there was one US skater sort of qualifying for the 10k by default.  So KC jumped in and took the spot based on his fitness and having already developed very good technique.

Derek Parra started skating indoor inline at a young age and also raced outdoors on the track.  This gave him a lot of corner exposure even if inliners do some things differently (due to differences in wheels on pavement vs. a blade on ice); then he raced pro outdoor inline which gave him a motor.  But he had no previous ice experience.  It took him 8 years to break through and win his Gold medal.  Because that’s how long it took him to get ice feel and really perfect his corners.

Finally there’s Chad Hedrick.  Chad’s parents owned a skating rink and Chad probably knew how to skate before he could walk.  He skated indoor inline which means tons of corners.  He played ice hockey his whole life (a little known fact is that he invented the double push, a different skating technique used by inline racers, while playing hockey) so he had ice feel (and starts).  And he dominated outdoor inline so he had a huge motor.  As I said, he had the full skill set to go from zero to World Champion on the ice in 1.5 years.

Basically, all three had previous skill-sets that allowed them do make the switch to ice and succeed.

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And Then There’s Me

I had assumed I’d be in a similar situation to the above guys (going from my final year competition results) but I was utterly wrong.  My 8+ years of inline did nothing to help me on the ice.  If anything, they hurt me.

I think I had ice skated like twice in my 20’s (home from college and wanting to ‘train’ for inline in some fashion).  I’d skated indoors once when I was about 8 and actually touched an indoor racing track for the first time 3 nights ago in Austin, Texas.  Rather, all my race experience was outdoor 10k’s; while there were some corners, it was mostly straightaways.

And my technique on everything was simply awful.

On the straightaway I skated with a flat back, stayed in-between my skates (no outside edges), and pushed back instead of sideways.  It was awful and whatever power I had didn’t push me forwards very effectively.  How I skated as well as I did in my 20’s is beyond me: I guess I got by on youth, strength and stupidity.  Inline is also a bit more forgiving as a sport, you can bypass some technical issues by just being strong.   But that doesn’t pay the bills on the ice.

Most inliners have bad corners (they tend to look in since you never know what’s around the next corner when you’re skating outside) but mine were flat-out awful.  I turned my shoulders in, flattened my back and would step in with my left foot to come into balance, I was never falling into the corner or letting gravity help me pick up speed.

And I thought I could make the jump in 1.5 years. Yeah, right.  It would take me until February of my next to last year to finally get anything approaching decent corners and really lock-in perfect straightaway technique (which again, doesn’t really matter).  Sadly that wasn’t long enough to get good/efficient at them.

As I mentioned above, if anything my inline experience made it worse rather than better, I had burned in a staggering number of bad habits that I’d have to break.  And that takes time.  But Rex was a technical master and I was an attentive and obsessive student; he would give constant feedback and I’d work like hell to get it right.

It was going to be a long 5.5 years.

To be continued in No Regrets Part 5.

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.

In dire contrast, the majority of the white folks from Wisconsin who made up the sport well….unless you were as fast as them, you weren’t worth even saying hello to or talking to unless they were yelling at you to get out of the way.  They would happily stand in the middle of the track while people were trying to train and felt that they owned both the oval and the ice although neither were true.  If they wanted to ignore ice etiquette, that was fine; if you got in their way, you wouldn’t hear the end of it.  That kind of thing. That was if you were slower than them.

And if you were faster than them (never an issue for me), they hated you for it because it meant they actually had to do some work to keep their spots rather than just getting by on the lack of competition and having friends who were higher up to vote them onto the team.  What a bunch of miserable pricks (please note: this wasn’t ALL of them, just the grand majority).

This made the oval a very unfriendly place to be; everybody was more concerned with being competitive than anything else.  Now, I’m all for competition, it’s kill or be killed during a race.  But afterwards, chill the hell out.  My soon to be teammate Caleb mentioned repeatedly that it wasn’t like that in skiing, everyone competed like hell during races; and then had a beer when it was all over.  You can do both.

That the Utah Olympic Oval is the the official Olympic training center didn’t help mind you.  There is just that ‘We are elite athletes’ mentality where you’re better than the rest of the world.  Except that you don’t work, get supported by your parents and chase this little obscure hobby which entails skating in a circle for hours at a time.  And yet fail to realize that ’skating fast in a circle’ is not really important to the functioning of the world at large.  Or a job description.

Outside of our group, nobody seemed to be having much fun there.  I can’t work that way and was a constant comedian during practice and workouts.    Make no mistake,  when it was time to train, the joking stopped and I was as serious as a heart attack. But there’s a lot of sitting around in-between sets and laps in skating.  Have some fun people.  I had fun.

In any case, this attitude had apparently trickled down to the club level as well: in the first few weeks of attending club sessions, I don’t think a single person said so much as “Hi”.  Now, I can be difficult to approach, I look perpetually pissed off.  But if some random new guys suddenly showed up and started skating (at a session where there are maybe 15 people there) in this little niche sport, you figure that at least someone would ask what he was doing there or something.  Nope.

But I didn’t care, I was here to train, not make buddies.  I’d go up there three times per week, do the drills I thought I should do, try to skate laps, then do conditioning afterwards. I actually talked to Derek Parra (he was preparing for Torino) early on, he saw me doing dryland with my weight vest and came over to talk to me.

Like a good fanboy, I told him that reading his book is what made me pursue this and he was nice enough to take my blades and straighten and sharpen them for me.  I know some people have real issues with him but he was never anything but nice to me (he was an inliner AND had brown-skin so he got double points).  Later on, he’d give me one of my top compliments, telling me he was impressed by how I attacked my corners.  He had struggled endlessly at this sport and saw me working my balls off to get better.  That was nice.

But that was my first month in Salt Lake.  No coach, no friends, no nothing.  Even the strip clubs were just horrible (I had to go to one).  I was in a fairly miserable city where I couldn’t even get a decent plate of fajitas (I missed Tex-Mex).

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Caleb

At some point, one club skater finally introduced himself.  His name was Caleb and he’s The Big Kid I talked about in Training Secrets.  He had moved to SLC from Vail to chase the dream and was equally lonely and unhappy and sat down to say hello to the other weird outcast at club skate.

As it would turn out, we’d end up as teammates for nearly the next 5 years and form the core of my coach’s group.  I can’t say we were exactly friends, he’s not the kind of person I’d probably hang out with outside of training.  But we got along, he had a big heart and he was a hard worker (usually).  Over dinner one night he mentioned off handedly that there was this guy, a coach named Rex that I should talk to.  And that he’d be coaching at club the following session.  So I looked for him.

And found him, an older guy wearing a blue jacket, he was working with an athlete trying to make Olympic trials.  I introduced myself and he gave me a couple of pointers on the ice that immediately helped.  After skating, I was doing dryland and he gave me some more tips that also worked.  I asked him if he had plans for dinner that night.  He did not.

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Rex

Rex and I went to the Panda Express in my ‘hood for dinner where I proceeded, for about 2 hours, to interview/interrogate him.  Due to my own experiences with coaching, I have some rather strongly held opinions about certain things and had to make sure we were on the same wavelength before I took him on as coach. We were.

The long and the short of it is that he’d made the Olympic trials in 1980 but was too overtrained to make the team.  So he became a coach; I have always felt that he was trying to make up for his own previous failings by getting others to surpass how far he got.  As I talked about in How to Be Your Own Coach, a lot of good coaches usually found out what not to do the hard way:  by screwing themselves as athletes.  What they learn is passed down onto their charges who benefit from their mistakes.

For the last 30 or so years he’d coached and obsessively taken apart every aspect of speed skating in the way I take apart every other bit of training and nutrition.  He’d gotten many skaters like myself to Olympic trials and put at least one on the team.  He always seemed to get older skaters who had a limited time to reach their goals and his entire program was based around that singular goal; he had pared it down to the essentials. It was all specificity all the time since his athletes usually didn’t have time to dick around with warm-up soccer or the agility ladder.  I could get behind that completely.

So he had the results to back it up and his and my philosophy of training (technique first, quality over quantity) were right inline (har har).   We clicked instantly both in terms of our attitudes and obsessiveness as well as our sense of humor and personality.  I hired him on the spot.  I told him my goals, he told me what I’d have to do and it was on.

I joked that night that “Just so you know, if I succeed, it’s because I worked so hard.  But if I fail, it’s because you coached me wrong.”  I was joking (genuinely despite something I’ll mention in a later part) but told him that I figured most athletes operate that way, I just wanted to let him know up front.  That was when he knew he’d found a kindred (read: smart-assed) spirit in me.

Make no mistake, over the years Rex and I would have our ups and downs.  We became good friends but there were various blips during the 5.5 years I worked with him; at one point in year 2 or 3 I actually walked away from training for about 3 weeks due to a personality conflict with another of his skaters that was not getting dealt with.

She perpetually tried to start conflict with me as I just tried to ignore her and I warned him that if she started with me again, I’d walk.   She mouthed off one day and I walked.  He fired her (sort-of) and I came back to practice.  I simply trained on my own and I’d note that I didn’t miss a single workout.

We also had some disagreements about training, mostly the conditioning aspect since I didn’t know enough about skating to have an opinion about technique.  But he was the type who would discuss things with me, he knew and respected my background and was as willing to learn from me as he was to teach.  Over the years, many aspects of my training would be adjusted based on my own input (as I figured out the unique demands of skating).  I’d note that my teammates also got to take advantage of the Super Secret Project that I was developing.

If I had to sum up Rex briefly as a coach, I’d put it this way: when it comes to the technique of skating and how to teach it, I’m not sure there’s anyone better in the world.  He’s dissected every millimeter of the sport and can teach it effectively.   His conditioning and nutrition stuff is a bit out of date (this is where he was really willing to learn from me) and he fails completely in handling people or his skaters well.

The latter wasn’t an issue for me personally (I was always there to work at my best) although it did affect me when his flaky other skaters would interrupt my training with their bullshit (being late to practice, missing weeks and then bitching about being out of shape, etc.).  But he knew skating technique and that’s what I was mostly interested in.   I needed to learn to skate and he was truly a technical master.  I’d be lying if I didn’t also point out that, realistically, he was the only one willing to work with a late-starting 34 year-old wannabe. It was just a happy coincidence that he was as good a technical coach as he was.

Now, one month into the journey it was truly on.  I had skates, I had a coach, I had years of background skating inline.

How hard could this possibly be?

To be continued in No Regrets Part 4.

2004: Ice Camp

By the summer of 2004, my fitness was improving but I was still without a race circuit to attend.  I wasn’t sure what to do. I was biding my time in Austin, not really doing much with my life, books were selling, I was dating a very crazy girl.  And in poking around the Internet, I came across a used pair of ice speed skating boots (that turned out to be six sizes too big) on Ebay.  What the hell, I thought, let’s pick them up.  You know, just in case.

Part of me must have been thinking about the ice because, somehow, I then managed to stumble across an Introduction to Long-track camp being held at the Salt Lake City Olympic Oval.   I signed up immediately.  If nothing else, I wanted to be able to say that I had at least tried the ice once.

I flew in that Thursday night, got a room at the extended stay hotel and showed up for camp first thing the next morning.  It was awful and I mean that very seriously.  I figured it would be a bunch of older folks like me; instead it was me and a bunch of 8-10 year olds who had all been skating for 5 years and who’s parents apparently saw this as great daycare.

I felt like an idiot and I looked like an idiot.  I was this older guy with gray in his beard playing warm-up tag and soccer with the 8 year olds (all while the national team was training on the big oval watching me be an idiot on the track).  But I was there to try the ice and that’s all I cared about; I’d do the goofy stuff to get to the real stuff.

The camp was meant to be a full introduction to ice speedskating and what that entails. We did some dryland training, a bunch of off-ice skating imitations that skaters do to get in shape in the summer when they aren’t skating. We went into the weight room where I just kept my mouth shut and hoped the ‘coach’ wouldn’t hurt the 10 year olds by making them do very heavy leg presses.  There was also a sharpening clinic that I skipped; I went and had lunch with Bryan Haycock instead.  I mean, why learn to sharpen skates?  I wouldn’t ever be doing it, right?

At some point on Day 1, they put us on the ice and it was an absolute nightmare.   I was skating on short-track skates which are completely inappropriate for the big oval.  And I was clueless about what to do.  The little kids, all of whom had been doing this for years were zooming around me as I tried not to die. I sort of hacked around for a while, the coaches were not great.  In fact, one of them, in response to a technical question I had simply blew me off  “Oh, don’t worry about that.”  What an asshole.

I woke up the next day almost unable to walk but I was there to do camp so off I went, soreness be damned.  I had gone to an extra open-ice session and attended every session on the ice that I could.  I wanted to know that, no matter what happened going forwards, I had gotten on the ice and done everything at camp that I could.  I had made the trip and, dammit, I was going to do it all.

Early Sunday, camp ended and I went back to Austin.   On the way out of the Oval I picked up a copy of Derek Parra’s autobiography “Reflections in the Ice” which I’ll talk about in a second.  I devoured it in its entirety on the plane.

Arriving back in Austin, I sat and thought.  And thought.  And thought.  The reality was that I had been there for years not doing much beyond selling books, playing on the Internet and spending too much time at strip clubs.  As noted, the girl I was dating was completely nuts.  It wasn’t a terribly fulfilling life.  There was still the issue that the only inline races available were marathons (40-50km) and I didn’t want to race those.   Without 10k’s to race, it looked like my return to skating was going to come to a rather abrupt end.

Summing up so far: I was 34 years old, Torino was 1.5 years away, I had a brand spanking new pair of ice speedskating boots and no inline circuit to race.

Can you see where this is going?

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Regrets

Now, I have many things in my life that I can look back on with regret. Girls I should have talked to, girls I should have slept with, things I should have done very differently at various times in my life.  I also have a personality type that tends to ruminate on the past a little bit too much.  Unfortunately, constantly stressing over what you should have done or could have done is useless; focus on what you can do now.    You can’t change the past, you can only learn from it and not make the same mistakes going forwards.  Well not more than a half-dozen times anyhow.

And the more I thought about it the more I realized that I would look back on my life with great regret if I didn’t chase this one dream.  That is, going to Salt Lake and trying to speedskate, make an Olympic team.  Something.  I knew full well that the odds of me doing anything were slim.  But let’s face it, folks who start when they are 5 have no guarantee of success.  I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.  I had enough prior regrets without making this one another one.

So I made my decision: I was going.

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Inline to Ice: Part 1

There is actually a small tradition of inline skaters making a successful switch to ice. KC Boutiette is, so far as I can tell, the first to do this. He switched from pro-inline to ice and made an Olympic team his first time out although the rapidity with which he got good on the ice is a bit exaggerated.

I mentioned Derek Parra above, after being a world-class inline skater, he switched to ice.  Although it took him 8 years to do it, he won a gold medal and set a 1500m world record at the Salt Lake City, Olympics.  But reading his book on the plane ride home is a big part of what gave me the belief that it was at least worth making the attempt.  He had started relatively late and won his gold medal at 32 years old which at least gave me some hope that an old fart like me could do it.

Chad Hedrick is the most recent example; arguably the best inline skater ever, he switched to ice and won a World Championship 1.5 years later.  What is often under appreciated is that he had skated indoor inline and played ice hockey his whole life in addition to dominating inline skating.  This gave him a complete skill set to adapt to ice speedskating quickly.  His teammates call him “The Exception” and his ability to go from zero to World Champion in 1.5 years is an example of that.

In recent years, indoor inliners have made the switch, they have the corner skills that lets them succeed on the ice.  In fact, US Speedskating, for lack of their own development program, has started trying to recruit more inline skaters; probably in hopes of finding the next Chad.  Unfortunately, he was a one in a milion athlete.  Most inliners who have tried to make the switch give up after 2 years of frustration. It’s tough going from best in the world to just another skater in a new sport and most have quit.

In any case, between not doing anything in Austin and inliners showing that they had the ability to make the transition my decision was made to go for it.  I think my biggest hangup was that I was still training my girls for powerlifting, this was the one thing that I truly got some type of meaningful enjoyment out of at that point.  I didn’t feel good leaving them.  I dithered in telling them but when I did, as I should have expected, they supported me 100%.  They understood completely what I needed to do.

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Are You Crazy or Just Stupid?

I made an announcement on a message board and, shall we say, reactions were mixed.   One of the common reactions was “Are you out of your mind?”  Well, yeah, probably.  But that wasn’t really news.  People often ask me if I suffer from insanity and I tell them “No, I enjoy every minute of it.”

Another common reaction was “Do you really think you have a chance of making an Olympic team?”  I had trouble explaining my mentality about it but, essentially I went with the intention of succeeding, but I accepted the reality that I would probably fail.  I didn’t expect to fail but I fully recognized that as the most likely possibility; does that make sense?  But as I noted above, I could have started when I was 5 years old and the odds of making a team were slim.  How many thousands of athletes in any sport dedicate their lives and don’t make a team?  My chances were even slimmer given when I was starting.  But they would be absolutely zero if I didn’t try at all.

Perhaps the most overwhelmingly common reaction was from people expressing how they wished they could do what I had to do: just pack up their lives and go chase a dream (albeit a crazy one).  Either they had family or work obligations or were simply too scared to take the chance.  The fear of failure was too much for them to even try at all.  For whatever reason, I sensed an element of jealousy that I was doing this and they couldn’t (or wouldn’t).

The final reaction I got had less to do with skating and more to do with Salt Lake City.  “You’re moving to Utah?”  “Seriously?”  “Why?”  I won’t go into the whole SLC thing, it’s not worth the energy.  I’ll only note that the specifics of long-track speedskating make facilities difficult (it’s essentially a full-sized running track made out of ice, it covers 7 acres) and there are three US facilities.

The first is in Lake Placid which is outdoors.  No thank you.  The second is the Petit center in Milwaukee (or Wisconsin depending on who you ask).  Miserably cold and I hate cold weather.  The final one is the Utah Olympic Oval.  SLC is cold but dry and at least tolerable.  It was the best of the worst in terms of where I could pursue this.

But succeed or fail, my attitude was this: I knew that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t try.  Sure, I might fail utterly.  I could live with that.  What I couldn’t live with was the life of regret wondering “What if I had tried?”  Of not knowing what might have been.  I knew that years down the road I would have yet another regret to add to the list if I didn’t do this.  I couldn’t face that, it scared me far more than failing to reach a nearly impossible goal.  I had nothing holding me in Austin except the girls I was training, everything to gain and nothing to lose. So I was going.

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Wrapping Up the Austin Caper

I had been in Austin about 7 years at this point, having moved down shortly before finishing my first book.  I’m not one that handles change well but, at this point, the fear over change was less than my desire to go chase a dream.  I had a bunch of stuff to wrap up before leaving Austin and threw myself into my training in preparation.  I’ve written about this in a little ranty piece called Training Secrets.

I had foregone weight training for inline but realized after my time on the ice that it required a great deal more strength.  I got back in the weight room, worked through the soreness and threw myself into the most intense training I had ever done.  At one point I was training legs 6 days/week, 4 weight days and 2 jumping days.  That was on top of maintenance aerobic work, technical work and some GPP (walking in a weighted vest every night).  I trained 3X/day most days.   I might not have a clue what I was doing on the ice but I wasn’t going to lack for fitness.

A month later, I had gotten rid of everything but the essentials: my computer, my books and my skates (I should probably add my PS2 and a tv to play games/watch movies on). I left Austin for Salt Lake City, with a quick stopover to visit a friend in the Fort Worth Area.  I knew literally nothing about Salt Lake City beyond where I’d stayed for camp.  Two days later, I pulled in and went to the same Extended Stay Hotel.  I was in Salt Lake City.  To speedskate.

Now what?

To be continued in No Regrets Part 3.

Now, I also don’t usually write articles like the one I’m about to write.   Back when I had that separate blog, I talked more about myself since I tend to think of blogs as a place for people to chatter inanely about themselves.  I don’t consider this a blog (it’s a website, dammit!) and try to keep the content simply informational; I don’t like babbling about myself.

But this piece, while being a bit of chatter about myself does actually have what I think is a relevant point.  It’s also a bit out of my normal style since I also don’t usually do a lot of rah-rah motivational type stuff.  Anyhow, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Introduction

For the past 5.5 years, as many of you know (and some of you probably don’t), I’ve been living in Salt Lake City training full time at the Utah Olympic Oval (aka the Fastest Ice On Earth).  I moved up here in the late summer of 2004 to pursue a singular goal which I’ll get to in Part 2.

The speedskating season ends around mid-March anyhow and, in past years, about this time I have often written something that related to an end of the season kind of thing.  The article I wrote on Goal versus Process Oriented Training was related to that. This year is different.  This year I’m done ice speedskating.  As in done done.  I mentioned this in Methods of Endurance Training: Putting it Together, I’m moving back to outdoor inline where I belong.  My ice career, such as it was, is done.

To understand what I want to talk about, and you may have an inkling of where I’m going with this by the title of the article, I need to back up a bit.

.Where This All Started

I only vaguely remember watching the Olympics as a kid, it rings a vague memory and I’m sure I watched speedskating. I was 10 when Eric Heiden won his 5 gold medals, I vaguely remember some of the Dan Jansen stuff.  I don’t recall it really grabbing me (in the way that most athletes are grabbed by their sport at a young age) at that time.  Maybe looked cool but that was it.

I went to college at UCLA to study exercise physiology in 1988; I was involved in recreational gymnastics at the time.  The entire group I worked out with was into this new fad of a sport which was inline skating.  While inlines had been around since the 1970’s, the late 80’s was when the first boom hit.  All my friends skated and played roller hockey every Friday.

At some point I finally got around to getting a pair of skates.  To say I sucked is an understatement of vast proportions.  I had roller skated maybe twice as a kid and had no clue what I was doing.  But something about it grabbed me and grabbed me hard.  I was determined to get better and the way I figured this would happen was by skating a lot.

So I skated every day.  I literally lived on my skates and it sort of became a running joke, I was never without them; either on my feet or hung over my shoulders.  I’d skate to class, to work, between classes and I remember with fond memories skating the giant concrete playground that was Los Angeles for hours at a time.  The whole place is paved and you can literally go from the ocean to downtown and never stop.  It was paradise.

My closest friend and I would go on these epic multi-hour skates.  Just cruising, or riding stairs.  All day all the time.  Usually to build up a big appetite for all you can eat Sushi (skating home after that was always interesting).

In the early 90’s, a race circuit developed.  My friend had ridden bikes competitively for years and it sounded like good fun.  So we went to some 10k races.  And I was hooked.   I had competed in triathlons briefly in high-school and loved competition.  I eventually got my first pair of racing skates and that was all I worked towards.

At some point during college though, I had gotten the idea to do ice speedskating.  Probably a function of watching the winter Olympics or what have you; I genuinely don’t remember what put the idea in my head.  Problem was I had no clue how to get into it.  I’m still not sure in hindsight how I expected to get started.  Magic, I guess.

In any case, I went back to Nashville after school and raced for another year or two.  My final year of racing, I placed top 10 overall or top 3 in my age group of every race I entered.  I couldn’t ever break through to the next level but I was right there.  Then, in trying to get to that next level, I burned myself out and overtrained myself straight into the ground.  I got to the point that I couldn’t face training anymore and I hung up my skates.  That was about the time of the Bodyopus experience and I went from one extreme to the other; from 20+ hours/week of endurance training (with far too much at far too high of an intensity in hindsight) to the weight room exclusively.

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Time Passes

I spent years rather futilely pursuing strength related activities.   I had always enjoyed lifting weights, did so all through college and did quite a bit while I was inline racing both in college and afterwards in Nashville.   I did a powerlifting meet and put up decent raw numbers but around 2002 I came to the stark realization that I’d never be more than mediocre in the weight room or in any form of competition.  Make no mistake, I loved pushing weights.  But I didn’t have the hormones or the talent to be great at it (some would argue that I wasn’t even good at it but I think my numbers disagree).  And I missed competing.  Especially in something I might actually be decent at.

So I decided that I was ready to go back to the one thing I’d ever been good at and that was inline skating.  I broke out my old equipment and started redeveloping my aerobic base and doing what I thought was technique work (based on various resources I’d gathered).  It didn’t help that Austin was a horrible town for skating.  Just awful.  I was very limited in what I could do.

But there was another large problem: the 10k circuit that I’d raced in my 20’s no longer existed and I didn’t really want to do marathons (40-50 km races).   I emailed some race promoters to find out what had happened to my beloved 10k distance. Essentially, they told me that 10k’s were no longer financially viable.

The pros didn’t want to fly all that way to race for 15 minutes and citizen racers love a shirt with marathon on it; they wouldn’t come out for shorter stuff for the most part.  So everyone moved to that.  But I was locked into the idea of racing at the 10k distance.  I’d note that, even there, the inline race scene is dead in the US.  There are a handful of races but for all practical purposes, outdoor racing is a dead sport here. Even odder is that it’s still huge everywhere else in the world.

Discovering this really deflated me a bit, I had spent at least a year at this point working towards this goal and now it looked like that goal no longer existed.   I guess I could have done bike racing but it never really appealed to me the way skating did.  I wanted to skate and there wasn’t skating to be had.  I didn’t know what to do but the solution would be found shortly.

To be continued in No Regrets Part 2.

Quick note: I’m turning off comments for this series of posts.  The first reason is so I don’t have to delete the invariable trolling.  The second is that I’m also not interested in atta boys or whatever.  I spent the last 5 years pursuing this goal for myself.  Whether folks supported it or thought I was an idiot was never relevant to what I was going to do.  So neither positive nor negative feedback is needed nor wanted.

And today I want to look at something that, while not exactly ‘new’ (it’s been around for a few years at least) certainly has a lot of interest and questions about it.  And that is the Bodybugg/GoWearFit.  Now strictly speaking, both of these devices are different, but they are both made by the same company.  And are essentially the same device.  So far as I can tell the biggest difference is that the GoWearFit (hereafter GWF) uses slightly different software than the Bodybugg but, for all practical purposes, I’m going to consider them the same device.  This is what it looks like.

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The device is work on the left arm, around the middle of the triceps with the bit shown above facing backwards.   If you can’t picture that, I’m sure you can Google an image up.

.What is it/How Does it Work?

The GWF is actually one of several different recent devices the purports to measure caloric expenditure.  While things like heart rate monitors have claimed to this for a while based on heart rate, the GWF type devices got a bit further including 5 different sensors which measure acceleration, temperature, steps, galvanic skin response and heat flux.  It plugs all of those into an algorithm and calculates how many calories you’re burning on a minute to minute basis.  Some of that algorithm is based on your height, weight, age, gender, etc. that you plug into the system after you sign up.

The device is then plugged into a computer and the data uploaded to a piece of software that interprets it and shows your caloric expenditure over the course of hours or days or whatever.  I’d note that there is also an additional watch that can be purchased that will show you a more or less real-time (it’s actually averaging every 6 minutes) measure of caloric expenditure.  This can be useful if you’re tracking workouts to a ‘Burn XXX total calories’ goal.  But for measuring daily expenditure, you’ll generally use the online tracking software (which also stores previous days which can be nice).

From a technical standpoint, the GWF uses a standard USB cable and charges off of the computer itself (I think this was one big difference than the Bodybugg which used AA Batteries).  It lets you know what the battery status is and holds a charge pretty well.  If you get in the habit of hooking it up while you’re in the shower, it will stay charged for quite some time.

I’d mention that the device is pretty sturdy and you can sleep with it.  One of it’s more interesting features, which I’ll mention below is that it gives you an estimate of sleep efficiency, effectively the percentage of time that you’re actually asleep while you’re laying down.  I have no clue how it does this but it seems to be accurate (e.g. it’ll catch if you wake up and roll around or get up to pee or whatever); I honestly suspect a pact with Satan is somehow involved.

The online software is actually fairly good, even if their server seems to have issues with access more often than it should.  It will access the armband via a standard USB port and give you a lot of different data including caloric expenditure, sleep efficiency and others.   It also has some basic calculators for things like energy expenditure for different activities (e.g. enter that you ran 60 minutes at 6.5 mph and it will spit out calories. You can also get weekly average reports and such.

One thing I want to mention that the GWF does NOT do but some people think it does. On the site, they mention that they will let you track caloric intake.  And you can but you do it manually, by entering food records.  The device in no way actually measures what you ate in a day. And while a new device worn on the arm claims to do just that, apparently it’s only accurate to plus or minus 500 calories per day which is useless as hell.  But the GWF does not measure caloric intake, you can enter your food online manually and that’s it.

I would mention that their interface only works with selected Browsers and this can get irritating; the last time I looked for example, Safari 4 was not supported and neither was the higher build of Firefox for Mac.  When I updated my browser I lost the ability to access the online software.

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Is It Accurate?

A limited amount of validation data has been done on the GWF but has found that it is at least reasonably accurate. Certainly nothing is 100% and the GWF isn’t either.  It seems to mis-estimate certain situations more than others but, overall, seems about 90% consistent or so with other, more accurate measurements. Which is pretty good for the most part.

Speaking empirically, I’d note that I’ve played with the GWF in myself and one of my trainees and compared the values it spits out to other measures.  For example there are standard calculations for resting energy expenditure based on body surface area, the GWF hits them pretty much exactly.

I’ve also compared it to things like a heart rate monitor measurement of exercise energy expenditure, as well as the number that the machines spit out themselves.  The numbers are never exactly the same but they are always within shooting distance of one another.  Certainly the difference is never massive (and since these are all estimations, this is no surprise).

Since I’ve mentioned my Powermeter bike on the site before, you may be wondering if I’ve compared GWF values to the kilojoule numbers the bike produces.  And the answer is no.  One place where the GWF completely craps out is in estimating cycling energy expenditure.  Since one of it’s major determinants is the accelerometer, and that only works if the left arm is moving, the GWF does a horrible job with things like cycling (their site even acknowledges this).  I’ve seen it suggested to wear it on the calf while cycling but never tested this out to see if it gave better numbers.

I’d note in that respect that it is possible, in activities where the left arm is being moved vigorously for the GWF to produce absolutely insanely high caloric expenditure values. Just impossible values.  I’ll let the more dirty-minded readers do with that statement what they will.  Moving on.

I’d note that the daily caloric expenditures that the GWF spits out come awfully close to some of the standard estimations that I’ve thrown out on the site.  Which actually raises the question of what the GWF does that the method described in How to Estimate Mainteanance Calories – Q&A doesn’t do for free.  Which is a good question.

I’d also note, and this based purely on forum feedback, that the GWF seems to just be horrible at putting out good values for a small percentage of people.  I’m not sure why this is the case but a generality that seems to be showing up is that folks with thyroid issues don’t get a good measurement off the GWF, it seems to overestimate.

I’d note that this conclusion is being based on people looking at weight changes relative to what the GWF is saying their expenditure is and what the ysay their caloric intake is. This introduces a number of possible problems (not the least of which being thyroid mediated water retention that masks fat loss or problems with actual caloric expenditure).

But for the most part, I’ve found that the GWF not only correlates well with both standard equations and other measurements of energy expenditure, it can pick up changes in activity very reliably.  Get up and walk around for a few minutes, and the GWF will pick it up; go watch a movie and you’ll get a value that is not dissimilar from sleeping for the entire time.  It’s not perfect but it’s damn good.

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Why Should You Care?

Even with standard estimate equations like the ones I constantly talk about on the site, there can still be some real questions about total daily energy expenditure.  If nothing else, the GWF at least takes a decent stab at actually measuring it.  For people with either very high or very low activity (or simply activity that changes a lot on a day-to-day basis), having an actual number to put with that activity can be helpful.

So, in terms of who the GWF can be good for, one of those is the typical dieting obsessive compulsive.  For those people who just have to have a better value tahn what estimate equations provide, the GWF is worth considering.

As well, for people who have varying activity levels, whether in terms of work or exercise training, the GWF can help to get values on the different workouts.  Days off or very easy days may end up having very different energy expenditures than heavy training days. Athletes or dieters trying to really match intake to output can get data on those different days to better set their nutrition.

The GWF can also have a couple of other less obvious uses.  One of them is this: many people find themselves subconsciously trying to move more when they start using the GWF.  The graphs are kind of exciting and people start moving more to watch the numbers go up (one trainee who used it had a goal of hitting a 4000 cal expenditure day for example). It’s like when you make people start writing down their food and they start eating less spontaneously.  Something about knowing that the device is measuring energy expenditure makes people want to move more.

In that vein, one of the more intriguing things that the GWF shows is how much small bits of activity throughout the day really add up.  That is, the difference between someone who literally sits for 8 hours per day and one who gets up even a few times during the hour to move around can add up to a fair few hundred calories.  Over the course of a week or a month or a year this makes a massive contribution to energy output.

Related to that, many people are actually quite disappointed to learn that activities of daily movement often burn far more calories than formal exercise.  One trainee was distraught when she found that 3 hours of yardwork burned TONS more calories than 3 hours in the weight room.

A final effect (more than a use) of the GWF is that it’s done a good job of getting people who ’swear they only burn 1200 calories a day and have to starve to maintain weight’ to realize that their daily energy expenditure is actually much higher than that.  Many people on forums have found that they cna raise calories a lot higher than they had been eating without weight or fat gain. Basically, it ends the “Slow metabolic rate/low energy expenditure” claim because it gives objective data on what’s really going on.  Of course, people determined to believe that they are special will just ignore the data.

But in terms of actually getting a good estimate on what different days of the week or different activities burn on a day to day basis or what have you, the GWF is a step above using an estimation equation or trusting the caloric expenditure reading on the treadmill.

I should mention sleep efficiency.  As I discussed in Obesity and Inactivity: The Relevance of Reconsidering the Notion of Sedentariness sleep deficiency is not only fairly widespread in modern life but a real problem in terms of health and propensity to weight gain.  One thing the GWF does is give a measure of sleep efficiency, a simply percentage indicating how much of the time laying down was spent sleeping.

This gives users the ability to track how lifestyle changes (e.g. sleep hygeine, sleep supplements) are impacting their sleep so they can try to raise the total amount of sleep they are getting.  You can test different dinner meals or when you train or whatever and see what gets you higher efficiency numbers (my limited googling suggests that 85%+ is a good value, nobody gets 100%).  For people with sleep issues, the GWF might be useful just for that.

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What’s the Catch?

So the above section is sort of the pros of the GWF.  Let’s you get a more accurate picture of what you’re doing on a day to day or workout to workout basis, etc.  What are the cons.

The first of course is price.  The unit is not cheap (it’s not absurdly expensive), Amazon currently lists it at $179.00.  However, for reasons I’ll come to, you can usually pick up one on Ebay.  Unfortunately, that’s not the only cost involved.  To get the data off the thing you have to have a monthly account with Bodymedia to access the data.  And no you can’t use the watch to get around this, it will eventually fill up and you can only clear it out by accessing the website.

Admittedly the website isn’t expensive, like $12.95 per month or something (I can’t actually find the value on their site at the moment).  I’d note, and they go out of their way to avoid admitting this is the case, but you can transfer accounts.  So if you chose to buy a unit off of Ebay you can take over their account and change the user data and it will work just fine.

Also, the GWF can’t be purchased outside of the United States; I have no idea why but anybody who isn’t in the US will have to have a friend buy it and ship it over.

And that brings me to possibly the biggest issue with the GWF.  For most people, day to day and week to week activity doesn’t change massively.  You probably work Monday through Friday, weekends off, train certain days and you’re training is unlikely to change massively over time (this may be different for athletes whose training changes a lot during the year).

What this means is that after you’ve gathered data with the GWF for maybe 2 weeks, it becomes fairly useless. Unless your’e in that situation where your activity is highly variable, you’ll have every thing you need from the device after that short time span.  And that’s a fairly large investment for 2 weeks of use.

There are options around that.  One is to buy one used off of Ebay.  And then sell it again when you’re done with it.  As I mentioned, you can change the user data and transfer accounts even if GWF says you can’t.  Another option is to get together with a few like-minded fitness obsessives and buy it in a group. Split across 4-6 people, it’s fairly cheap and you can just rotate it through every 2 weeks as people use it and get the data that they need.

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Summing Up

So the GWF, is it worth getting?  Overall I say yes. It’s one of the more accurate devices and for people trying to optimize their overall nutrition and body recomposition can provide some rather invaluable data on what’s actually going on.  The problem being that, once you have those 2 weeks of data, it’s fairly useless.  You can keep using it, and if your training changes or increases drastically, it may have use beyond that.  It’s not super-cheap and the monthly fee to use the website is annoying but that can be gotten around with creative sharing or Ebaying.

As readers may or may not know, I have been in Salt Lake City, Utah for the past five years involved in long-track ice speedskating.  While that chapter of my life is coming to an end shortly (and I’m returning to outdoor inline racing as described in a previous article), with the Olympics currently in full swing and speedskating being of great interest, I wanted to review a new book that I suspect most would never be made aware of.

The author of this book is a skater by the name of Eva Rodansky who I have been lucky enough to become friends and teammates with. During my 5 years here, she was always sort of on the periphery, I knew her, we would joke around but we never really interacted beyond that.  During one awful summer, her coach and my coach tried to work as a team; it was a disaster because her coach simply overtrained and injured everybody (except me, since I wouldn’t do his idiot training).

She was told repeatedly by some of the best coaches in the world how great she could be and, much to my dismay, I watched her talent summarily wasted by incompetents who were more interested in their own glory than her success.  My coach and I spent years wishing he could work with her and train her properly so that she could achieve her vastly under-tapped potential.  Didn’t happen.

Last summer, on a whim, she came out to one of our inline workouts.  Something clicked for me that day skating with her and she and I pulled a set that I’d have thought impossible as much as a week before.  At lunch, my coach and I essentially browbeat her into considering a comeback and another run at the games.

She decided to come back to the ice and train and, to put her talent in perspective, after 2 years away from the sport, and perhaps 4 weeks back on the ice, she skated one tenth over the Olympic qualifying time in the 1500m going about 80% effort.  For various reasons, she decided that taking another run at the Olympics was not worth it to her emotionally or physically.  However, she continued to train and she and I became good friends (I also learned a ton from her in terms of skating).  Ultimately she capped off her career by setting three Master’s International records that I suspect will stand for quite some time.  Would have set a fourth if not for having been sick the week before.

Which is all a very long way of introducing Eva’s book, Winter of Discontent: An Athlete’s Experience of Speed Skating in America, which I’m actually going to review now.  The book represents several years of writing (and sometimes ranting, if truth be told) about her career and her experiences in speedskating.  While she was skating, she had blogged (sometimes quite angrily) about her experiences with skating.  That, along with many earlier experiences, had branded her as a troublemaker in the sport.

But, with all of those blog posts underneath her, and much more to say, she had wanted to write a book about her experiences in the sport.  She said that it was to get the truth out about US Speedskating.  While I think that was part of it, I think just as big a part was getting the anger out of her system; a catharsis if you will. Putting it all to paper let her get it out of her system while skating for fun with our group let her remember why she started in the first place.  She truly loves the sport of speed skating; it’s the federation and politics that are the problem.

I’ll tell you upfront that I am a bit biased towards this book as I helped her to edit it and bring it to fruition; and she is a friend.  Make no mistake, the writing is all hers.  I worked simply to clean up some bits and help her with the myriad details that make finishing a book of this scope monumentally nightmarish.  Even if that wasn’t the case, I’d still be saying the same things about it that I’m about to say.  My involvement has no bearing on what follows regarding her book.

In brief, Winter of Discontent is a very good book, telling essentially two separate but interacting stories.

The first is her personal story, how she got interested in skating at young age, made Category 1 (essentially national level) after 4 months of training, her two barely missed Olympic teams, her world cup successes and failures.  There’s much more of course, her retirement to get a masters in biology, her return to sport and training full-time towards the Olympics all while holding down a job in a lab.   Note that there isn’t the happy ending to Winter of Discontent that tends to be part and parcel of such books.  No gold medals, no world records, no parades.

Certainly she had her successes and with proper coaching could have been truly great but mostly she was simply dumped on by the federation and other, protected skaters, constantly all while being mishandled by incompetent coaching.  One person, a higher up in the federation, once said of her “No one cares about Eva Rodansky” but I disagree.  She has friends, skaters and non-skaters alike, that watched her immense potential ruined by a federation more interested in politics and personal grudges than in sending the best skaters the country has to offer to compete at the world level.  Those people care about her.  So do I.

And that brings us to the second story in this book: the story of the US Speedskating governing body.  And it is not a particularly nice story.  With the Olympics at full tilt, most of the stories people hear are about the good, the athletes, supported by their federation who overcome great odds to take home the gold for their country.  Sadly, much of that is smoke and mirrors.  People don’t like to hear about it but the amount of corruption that goes on in sporting federations is immense.  From politicians on the take to bribery to countries buying their way out of failed drug tests, the games are big money and that means corrupt people in a position of power who use the athletes to their whim. And the athletes often have no choice but to go along with it; it’s that or be kept from pursuing their one solitary goal.

In terms of US Speedskating specifically, the problems range from  unqualified individuals running the facilities to coaches  and bureaucrats who misappropriate money.  Having rescued US Speedskating from ruin, perhaps Stephen Colbert will follow by looking into where that money ultimately went; because it sure wasn’t to the athletes.  One of whom had to pay his own way to the World Cup with the understanding that he would be reimbursed if he placed high enough. Had he not had the money, he couldn’t have gone to the event.  How that facilitates his long-term development is beyond me.

More specifically to Eva, a good example of the type of thing that goes on was used as part of a grand overtraining experiment (in an Olympic year no less); half the team was deliberately allowed to fall of the edge to gather data.  Data that already existed and was never used.  The coaches did this knowingly, without the consent of the athletes, all while telling the athlete it was their fault for not being able to handle the training.

There are also plenty of stories of athletes being singled out; either put on the team when they didn’t deserve it, or kept off the team when they did. It goes on and on.  And every time you think it can’t get worse, it does. Like a coach who had a long-term romantic relationship with a skater on his team, making sure she was protected and kept on the team when she didn’t deserve it. It just goes on and on.

And that’s the second story in this book as Eva ran into all of it throughout her career.   She was tagged as a troublemaker from the get go and this caused the federation to work against her in almost every way, from denying her ice time, denying her therapy and all other manners of behaviors that kept her from having a chance at meeting her potential.  Simply because they didn’t like her.

Never mind that she could have performed at the highest levels.  Nevermind that at Torino, one particularly petulant skater decided that she wouldn’t skate the 1500m, leaving the US team with no women to compete.  Had Eva not been left off as alternate, she’d have at least been able to step to the starting line to represent her country. But because of a personal grudge, and Eva not being with the team, the US simply had no-one skate. Basically, the federation was more interested in politics than in seeing the US succeed in the sport.

Through Winter of Discontent, Eva tells both her story and the story of US Speedskating.  And it’s not always a nice story.  But I think it’s an important one for people to hear which is why I want to make people aware of it.  Whether you have an interest in sport in general or speedskating in specific, this book may make you aware of some of the things that really go on in high-level sport that you won’t hear about otherwise.

I’ll be blunt: if you’re the kind of person who needs their sports books to be full of happy endings and Rocky-esque moments, this is not the book for you to read.  If you want a true insider’s view of high- level sport in what is admittedly a niche sport (and make no mistake, I’m sure athletes in all sports could tell similar stories), this is a book you will want to read.  It pulls aside the veil of smoke and mirrors to let you see the real story of what goes on.   This is the story you won’t see on NBC between shots of Apollo Anton Ohno winning gold, it’s not the story you’ll see in the major news media.  Because it’s not a story people want to believe is true.  But it is.

At 400 pages length across 30 chapters of varying length and only $29.95, Winter of Discontent is a steal of a book; it can be purchased from Eva’s website at USSpeedskatingdirt.com. The book is written in a very easy to read conversational tone; Eva is a good writer which is part of why I encouraged her to finish the book even if it meant a lot of stress and late nights to get it done while the Olympic games were going on (almost nobody cares about speed skating the rest of the time).

And since I think it’s so important of a book (and I’d note again that I helped edit the book and Eva is a friend), I’m going to sweeten the deal. If you order Winter of Discontent within the next 2 weeks (between now and March 8th), simply forwards you sales receipt to wod@bodyrecomposition and I’ll send you a single use coupon (good for one year) for $10 off of any purchase you make through my store.

You can use it to purchase any of my current books (and the coupon will work with any other offers) or save it for upcoming projects (of which one should be ready to go in a few weeks).  Even if you don’t want the coupon or care about my books, if you’re interested in sports in general or speed skating in specific, I highly recommend this book.  It’s a story I think you should read.

So that’s Winter of Discontent: An Athlete’s Experience of Speed Skating in America.  It’s not a happy book at times but it is an important book in my opinion.  So go get it and read it (or let people you know who might be interested in it know about it).  You may not like what it has to say but sometimes that’s not a bad thing.  The truth may not always be happy, but sometimes that’s the best way to have your eyes opened.

In that context, a question I have gotten enough times to make it worth addressing is whether active rest or passive rest is ‘better’.  That is, is it fundamentally better to do something for active recovery or better to just take the day completely off?  Not surprisingly, not even coaches and top athletes can agree on this so today I want to look at both the concept of active and passive rest as well as some potential benefits and drawbacks to each.

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Defining Terms

First some definitions.  Passive rest should be pretty easy to understand, on a passive rest day you do nothing.  No training at all.  Some might allow for something like a brisk walk.  But basically this is a day completely off.  Sit around, do nothing, relax, recover.   I don’t have much else to say about passive rest beyond that for the time being but I’ll come back to it near the end of this article.

In contrast, active rest (aka active recovery) refers to a workout done at a reduced intensity and volume of loading (relative to a normal workout).  So a road cyclist might do an easy 45 minute spin on the bike at a heart rate of 130 beats per minute.  A weightlifter might use a light day of training, at 75% of maximum for sets of 3-5 (noting that 75% of max is a weight you could generally do 10-12 reps to failure with so this is very sub-maximal) as an active rest day.  Fundamentally, active rest is just meant to be a light/easy day.

I actually have some rules of active recovery that I’ll come back to at the end of this piece when I make some recommendations but, basically, an active recovery workout should not be fatiguing at all.  When I have trainees do an active recovery workout, the primary criterion is that they should finish the workout feeling better and fresher than they started.  If they are more tired coming out than going in, they did too much or worked too hard or both.  Again I’ll give specific guidelines at the end of the article.

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The Goal of Active Rest

As coaches and athletes came to the early realization that they couldn’t just train at 100% day-in, day-out without blowing up, the idea of having harder and lighter days came into vogue.  At least in the endurance world, the hard day-easy day approach is usually attributed to Bill Bowerman of Oregon.  Other sports including weightlifting found out early on that alternating harder and easier days helped avoid problems and this eventually evolved into various cycling schemes (including the fairly popular heavy/light/medium approach).

Eventually, this idea was taken a bit further and easy days were taken to be active recovery days.  Even there nobody can seem to agree what the exact purpose of active recovery days are.  In the endurance world, it’s often argued that active recovery days sort of ’stimulate the metabolic pathways of recovery’ without contributing fatigue; basically it helps you to recover more quickly.

In contrast, others argue that active recovery has no truly active role in hastening recovery, rather it simply doesn’t add training stress (while allowing the athlete to get some light work in) so that the recovery that will take place anyhow can take place.  Essentially, the active recovery is passive in terms of its effects on recovery; for what little sense that makes.  Personally, having trained both ways, I probably tend towards the second interpretation.  I can’t say that easy workouts really seemed to help recovery. Rather they were a way to get in some training, burn a few calories, maybe work out a bit of soreness without adding to the overall stress while recovery from the previous heavy day went about it’s business.

In some sports, it’s often argued that active recovery training helps to repair damage from high-intensity days.  This seems to be the most prevalent in swimming theory where concern about metabolic damage from acidosis (which occurs during high-intensity swim training) can be countered with recovery/regeneration training.  Basically, you repair any damage to things like mitochondria with lots of recovery swimming.  I’m not sure this idea has been adopted by other endurance sports to any great degree.

In the weight room, the same basic arguments could probably be made.  Some would argue that getting a light workout in the weight room (perhaps a Tue or Wed light workout after Monday’s heavy day) pumps some blood through the tissues, helps to remove waste products, etc.  Some advocate drinking a carb/protein drink during this type of training as the increased blood flow from even light training should help to carry nutrients for growth and recovery to the muscles (the same idea can apply to endurance training, as well).  An old idea in bodybuilding was to perform ‘feeder workouts’, high rep light workouts meant to pump blood and nutrients to worked muscles a day or two after a heavier day.

Frankly, I can’t recall seeing any real research on the topic one way or the other; in a practical sense, I’m not sure it matters whether active recovery training is having a direct impact on recovery (hopefully positive) or is simply allowing fatigue to dissipate while getting the person training.   Of more practical relevance are the potential benefits of the training.

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Pros and Cons of Active Rest

I’ve actually already described some of the purported benefits of active recovery above even if nobody can really agree on what active recovery actually does: from actively promoting recovery (by activating metabolic processes) to simply letting recovery happen without adding training stress to regenerating damaged mitochondria or whatever; these are all potential benefits of active recovery.  But there are more.

For sports with a technical component (which is most of them), active recovery can essentially double as a technical workout.  Since the intensity is low, the athlete can focus on some aspect of technique (either to correct or perfect it depending on where they are in their learning process) and do it under conditions where proper performance should be achievable.

While this is generally true for all sports (with a very few exceptions), it’s especially true for sports with a huge ‘feel/groove’ component.  Activities such as the snatch in Olympic lifting or most swimming technique require that athletes keep in touch with them almost daily or they lose their feel for the movement (and the more precise the movement patterns are, the more this tends to be the case).  Doing them for light work on active recovery days allows the athlete to keep their groove; that’s in addition to any extra technical practice benefits that are gained.

I’d note that this assumes that they aren’t so exhausted from the previous day’s workout that proper technique is impossible.  In which case, the potential benefit can become a negative; the athlete is so tired that they ingrain poor technical habits during the recovery workout.  This would be a situation where some sort of non-specific cross training (just to move some blood, etc.) might be a better choice.  After a heavy Olympic lifting day, for example, one of my trainees will often do a light recovery workout with pump work on machines.  It’s non-technical, moves some blood but doesn’t require coordination or mental focus.  She gets the ancillary benefits of some training without having to worry about the technical aspect of training.

But for athletes who can use proper technique during recovery workouts, active recovery is a good way to get in some technical reps and keeping their groove/feel while also getting any other benefits from active recovery (metabolic, recovery, otherwise).

As noted, athletes who sip on a dilute carb/protein drink during active recovery sessions can actually take advantage of increased blood flow to working muscles. Whether for strength/power athletes seeking growth or endurance athletes who need to replace muscle glycogen and resyntheize damaged proteins, that alone can help with recovery whether the training itself has any real benefit.  I’d note that if this is the explicit goal of active recovery sessions, then the primary sport needn’t be practiced. So long as the same muscles that are worked in the main sport are used, the nutrients will be carried where they need to be. So a runner can give his joints a rest by riding a bike or doing something non-impact will still getting increased blood and nutrient flow to fatigued muscles.

As an added potential benefit, athletes who have or are having body composition control issues, active recovery can be a good way to burn some extra calories to help keep body weight or body fat under control. An extra benefit in this regards is actually psychological; simply, some people stick to their diets better on days when they do some activity.  Day’s off invariably turn into a “I didn’t train so I’m not going to worry about good nutrition.” kind of day and an active recovery session may be the only way to keep them from blowing their diet.

I’d note that some athletes simply don’t do well with complete days off.  Some of this is specific to the groove/feel sports I mentioned above but even for other activities, some athletes simply don’t handle complete days off well physiologically.  For whatever reason, and this is highly individual, they come back flat and unable to perform after a day or two completely off.  Back in the day weightlifters and other strength/power athletes such as throwers used to talk about doing ‘tonic’ workouts, basically light days meant to keep their systems ramped up for heavy training days.  Again, this is highly individual but does happen.  The trainee mentioned above is like this, total days off flatten her out for Olympic lifting.  Some sort of activity prevents this.

And that brings me, at last, to the biggest potential con of active recovery days which actually has less to do with the active recovery concept per se and more to do with human nature.  As I mentioned in the definitions section above, the point of an active recovery workout is that it is a light, low-volume workout meant to either promote or allow recovery without causing more fatigue.  But humans often have poor self-control and that’s where I see active recovery going wrong.  All too often trainees go into the gym or start a workout with the intention of it being an active recovery day.  Then they start screwing it up.

If they feel good, they start pushing the intensity and turning it into a workout.  Or, because they figure that there’s no point in driving 20 minutes to the gym, changing clothes, working out for 20 minutes and then going home, they decide to go ahead and do a full workout. Volume increases, they push the intensity just a bit more than they should and they justify it for whatever reason.  And they turn what should be an active recovery session into a workout.

And, as I discussed in Keep the Hard Days Hard and the Easy Days Easy, they end up doing more harm than good.  Rather than ending up alternating a hard workout with an easy or active recovery day, every workout ends up in this middle intensity range because the easy days become so hard that the hard days can’t be hard enough.  In that case, where the person simply has no self-control, the concept of active recovery does more harm than good and they should just stay the hell out of the gym (or stick to nothing more than a brisk walk).  I’ll mention this again when I sum up.

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Pros and Cons of Passive Rest

For the most part, if you take what I wrote above and just reverse it, you have this section.  Honestly, the primary benefit of true passive recovery days (e.g. no training at all or nothing more than brisk walking) is for people with no self-control in the gym.  If you can’t keep the intensity and volume where it should be for active recovery, don’t train at all.  If you’re the type who simply must go hard or not at all, you’re better off staying out of the gym, off the bike, etc.  Or try learning some self-control.

I’d mention that even with the benefits of active recovery, most coaches advocate and most athletes take at least one day per week of complete passive recovery.  This is probably as much mental as anything.  It’s very different to know you have 6 days of training ahead of you and then a day when you can sit around and watch television compared to knowing that you have to train every day for the next 21 or more days straight.  Because anybody can make it through 6 days of training.  And going 21 days without a break tends to just make people lose it.  There’s something about blocking off the training into more manageable chunks that makes it more mentally survivable.

Finally, I’d mention again that for some individuals, complete days off seem to do more harm than good, they flatten out (and this is especially true for high-intensity sports like sprinting and weightlifting) and/or loose their groove and feel.  In that case, active recovery may be the better choice but again with the caveat that it must be kept under control.  In that vein, some Olympic lifters will actually break the ‘one day off per week’ rule and do a very short squat workout on Sunday, otherwise they flatten out between Saturday and Monday. When I say short, I mean short, 30 minutes start to finish if that and light and snappy.

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The Rules of Active Rest

Ok, those are the pros and cons of active and passive recovery, now let’s talk about the rules. I’m going to assume that you’re incorporating active recovery workouts and I’m going to assume that you have the self-control to keep them under control.   Here are the rules of an active recovery workout:

1. Volume should be 1/2-2/3 of a normal workout.
2. Intensity should be perhaps 60% maximum heart rate for endurance athletes and up to 75% of 1RM for weight trainers.
3. You should finish the workout feeling better than you started.

So say you’re an endurance athlete and your normal workout is currently an hour.  An active recovery workout for you might be 30-40 minutes (1/2-2/3rds of your normal volume) at a HR of 120-130 (~60-70% of maximum).  Some will push this up to the very lowest level of aerobic conditioning (130-140 HR for most activities) but even that may be pushing it.  If your typical workout were longer, your active recovery workout might be similarly long.

So if you normally go 2 hours, active recovery is 1 hour to about an hour 20 or so.  If you’re an elite cyclist doing 6 hours/day on the bike, well, first off you’re not reading this site for advice.  But your active recovery workout might be 2-3 hours.  As noted above, some athletes may benefit from doing cross-training activities for active recovery; runners especially can benefit from plugging in non-impact cross-training to give their joints a rest.

For weight trainers, the same basic idea holds although there are more options since intensity can be varied in more ways.  The percentages can either apply to the load on the bar (e.g. work at 60-70/75% of maximum), total reps done relative to maximum or both.  So an Olympic lifter who normally works in the 85-90% range for doubles might do light triples at 70% of maximum for a handful of sets. A powerlifter might do something similar, doubles or triples with 60%-70% of maximum for a few quick sets (almost speed work but don’t even think about using bands or chains).

A second approach is to use a percentage of the heaviest day rather than percentage of maximum; most heavy/light/medium systems work this way.  So if you work to a 5 repetition maximum on Monday in the squat, you might use 75% of that weight on Wednesday for 5 reps as the light day.  If you squatted 200X5 on the heavy day, you’d use 150X5 on the light day.  Alternately. if you were doing sets of 12, you might use the same weight as for a heavy set of 12 but only do 6-8 reps (50-75% of your maximum rep count).

Basically, there are a lot more programming options in the weight room and different people respond to different things relatively better or worse (some prefer to keep the same weight on the bar but do less reps, others prefer lighter weights with the same reps, some do better with lighter weights and less reps) with the only suggestion I can make being that you adhere to rule 3.  If you don’t come out of the weight room feeling better than you went in, you went too heavy.  Keep experimenting until you find the loading that keeps you clicking technically but doesn’t fatigue you.

And let me reiterate point 3 again: ideally you should finish the active recovery workout feeling better than you started.  At very least you should feel no more tired when you’re done.  If you’ve increased your level of fatigue, you went too hard, too long or both.  In which case passive recovery is probably the better choice because you have poor impulse control.

Finally, as noted above, some athletes like to consume a dilute carb/protein drink during active recovery workouts, the increased blood flow from training carries nutrients to worked muscles and can only help with recovery. I’d suggest perhaps 30 grams of carbs with 10-15 grams of a fast digesting protein (e.g. whey or soy) per hour of activity or so.  Enough to get some nutrients to the muscles without consuming so much that you counterbalance the caloric expenditure of the training.

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Summing Up

I was asked once on a forum whether active recovery was better than passive recovery which is waht led to this article.  I told the person basically this which sums up this piece “Done properly, active recovery is better than passive recovery under most circumstances.  But if you can’t do active recovery right, passive recovery is better.”

1. Macronutrients: nutrients consumed in large amounts (’macro’ = large)
2. Micronutrients: nutrients consumed in small mounts (’micro’ = small)

So macronutrient refers to protein, carbohydrates, fats and alcohol, those nutrients that, when they are consumed are generally consumed in gram or larger amounts.  The micronutrients refers to vitamins and minerals which are usually consumed in very small amounts (e.g. the DRI for Vitamin C is 60mg where 1mg is 1/1000th of a gram).  I’m not going to talk about micronutrients in this article and will only focus on the macronutrients, specifically protein, carbohydrate, fat and alcohol.

I’m also going to assume that you’re getting your nutrients through food and it’s going in through your mouth. Certainly nutrients can be given via infusion but this is usually done in a hospital setting (sometimes athletes will rehydrate and carb-load with IV fluids and glucose, mind you) and I’ll assume you’re not doing that.

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Digestive Efficiency and Your Poop

Clearly anything you eat has to go through the process of chewing, swallowing and into the stomach for digestion.  There a bunch of stuff happens where the nutrients are broken down to one degree or another.  And either they get absorbed (moving into special cells to be released into the bloodstream, or lymphatic system in the case of dietary fats) or not.  If you’re particularly interested in the digestion processes of the different macronutrients, I’d refer you to the specific articles:

A Primer on Dietary Fats Part 1 for fat digestion.
A Primer on Dietary Carbohydrates Part 1 for carb digestion.
What are Good Sources of Protein-Digestibility for protein digestion.

Nutrients that aren’t absorbed in the stomach move further down the intestine where in some cases (for example, certain fibers), they are digested by special bacteria and re-enter the bloodstream as short-chain fatty acids.  This is discussed in Fiber – It’s Nature’s Broom.

Nutrients that pass that stage eventually come out the other end in your poo and we needn’t talk about that much more. I’ll only note in this regards that digestive efficiency in humans is generally very high.  Fats are absorbed with about 97% efficiency (e.g. if you eat 100 grams fat, you’ll absorb 97 grams of them), animal source proteins are about 90-95%, vegetable source proteins can be in the 80% range and carbohydrates vary drastically depending on their form, fiber content, etc.  But for the most part, with the exception of high-fiber foods, you’re not losing a lot of calories in your poop.

I would note, having said more about poop than necessary at this point, that there appears to be slight differences (based on the gut bacteria present) in how efficiently individuals absorb calories from the diet but this only amounts to perhaps a 100 cal/day difference between the highest and lowest people.  OF course, in cases of specific disease where there is nutrient malabsorption, all these comments go out the window but I won’t talk about that here.  I’ll assume you have a normally functioning gut, etc.

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Fates of Ingested Nutrients: Oxidation or Storage

So what happens after nutrients get through the stomach and intestines and into the body?  Broadly speaking, there are two primary fates for nutrients at this point which are oxidation or storage.  A third that I should at least mention is that, under certain conditions, nutrients will sort of ’sit’ in the bloodstream either causing problems there or eventually being excreted in the urine.  Outside of various pathophysiologies (e.g. runaway diabetes where glucose is lost in the urine in large amounts), the urine excretion route is generally minimal approaching insignificant and I won’t focus on it further here.

Oxidation simply refers to the direct burning of fuels for energy.  This can occur in the liver, skeletal muscle and a few others places and all 4 macronutrients can strictly speaking undergo oxidation after ingestion.  So fatty acids from dietary fat ingestion can be used to produce energy, carbohydrate can be burned off, a little appreciated fact is that under normal circumstances as much as half of all dietary protein ingested gets metabolized in the liver via a process called deamination with some of it simply being burned off for energy.

Storage should be fairly clear and the nutrients (with the exception of alcohol) can be ’stored’ in the body for later use.  Carbohydrates can be stored as liver or muscle glycogen, under rare circumstances they are converted to and stored as fat.  Dietary fat is stored either in fat cells or can be stored within muscle as intra-muscular triglyceride (IMTG).  Under certain pathological conditions, fat gets stored in places it’s not supposed to go, a situation called ectopic fat storage.  In a very real sense there’s no true store of dietary protein although amino acids from protein digestion are used to make various proteins and hormones in the body. Skeletal muscle is, in essence, a ’store’ of protein in the body.  There is no store of alcohol in the body.

Which is the segue into the only real point I have to make in this piece: as it turns out, the size of a nutrient’s store in the body is inversely related to the body’s propensity to oxidize it after ingestion.  This is especially true in terms of the size of the store relative to the amount consumed on a daily basis.

Put a little more clearly, the better the body’s ability to store a given nutrient, the less it tends to alter/increase oxidize that nutrient after ingestion.  And vice versa, the smaller the store in the body of a given nutrient relative to intake levels, the more likely the body is to oxidize that nutrient after ingestion.  I’ve shown the implications of this in the table below and will make comments about specific nutrients below that.

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Fat
Body fat stores are effectively unlimited as individuals reaching 1000 lbs (and 70-80% body fat) have demonstrated.  Even a relatively lean male at 180 lbs and 12% body fat is carrying 21 pounds of fat.  Each pound contains maybe 400 grams of actual stored fat and that means about 8500 grams of fat stored in the body.  Contrast this to a relatively high daily intake of perhaps 100-150 grams per day and you can see that the body’s store of fat is much much higher than what you eat on a day.  And most people aren’t 12% body fat.

But for the most part, ingested dietary fat has little impact on fat burning in the body; that is, when you eat dietary fat, your body doesn’t increase fat oxidation.  One exception is if an absolutely massive amount of fat (like 80 g) is consumed all at once but even then the effect is fairly mild.  Some specific fats, notably medium chain triglycerides, are somewhat of an exception to this; they are oxidized in the liver directly.  Rather, the primary controller of dietary fat oxidation in the body is how many carbohydrates you’re eating, which I’ll explain momentarily.

Carbohydrate
For carbohydrate, the body’s stores are relatively close to the daily intake.  A normal non-carb loaded person may store 300-400 grams of muscle glycogen, another 50 or so of liver glyogen and 10 or so in the bloodstream as free glucose.  So let’s say 350-450 grams of carbohydrate as a rough average.  On a relatively normal diet of 2700 calories, if a person eats the ‘recommended’ 60% carbs, that’s 400 grams.  So about the amount that’s stored in the body already.

For this reason, the body is extremely good at modulating carbohydrate oxidation to carbohydrate intake.  Eat more carbs and you burn more carbs (you also store more glycogen); eat less carbs and you burn less carbs (and glycogen levels drop).  This occurs for a variety of reasons including changing insulin levels (fructose, for example, since it doesn’t raise insulin, doesn’t increase carbohydrate oxidation) and simple substrate availability.  And, as it turns out, fat oxidation is basically inversely related to carbohydrate oxidation.

So when you eat more carbs, you burn more carbs and burn less fat; eat less carbs and you burn less carbs and burn more fat.  And don’t jump to the immediate conclusion that lowcarb diets are therefore superior for fat loss because lowcarb diets are also higher in fat intake (generally speaking).  You’re burning more fat, but you’re also eating more.  But that’s a topic that I’ve not only addressed previously on the site but may look at in more detail in a future article with this piece as background.

Protein
The body’s total protein stores (and note again that this isn’t a true store in the sense of body fat and glycogen) is maybe 10-15kg or so when you add it all up.  Which is pretty high compared to an average daily intake.  The DRI for protein is only about 50-60 grams per day for the average person and even folks eating 200-300 grams per day are still eating far less protein than stored.   Which is why protein oxidation rates can change with intake.

As I mentioned above, an under-appreciated fact is that about half of all ingested dietary protein is metabolized in the liver (details on this can be found in The Protein Book).  Some of it is oxidized for energy while others are converted into other things (including glucose and ketones) for use elsewhere.  But, protein oxidation rates do change in response to intake.  So, when protein intake goes up, oxidation will increase; when protein intake goes down, oxidation rates decrease.  This change isn’t immediate (as it more or less is for carbohydrates) and takes 3-9 days to occur but mis-understanding of this process has led to some goofy ideas such as protein cycling.

But it also explains one other issue of importance to protein which has to do with speed of digestion. Early studies, including the oft-cited study on whey and casein by Boirie find that fast proteins are burned off for energy to a greater degree than slower digesting proteins.  Since the body doesn’t have anywhere to store the rapidly incoming amino acids, it simply burns off more for energy.  This, along with differences in handling (e.g. the fact that fast proteins are absorbed by the gut as discussed in Casein Hydrolysate and Anabolic Hormones and Growth – Research Review) are a big part of why slower digesting proteins invariably lead to better overall protein retention in the body; not only does more make it into the bloodstream but less is burned for fuel.

Alcohol
And, finally, as noted above, there is absolutely no store of alcohol in the body.  None whatsoever.  Effectively, alcohol is seen as a sort of metabolic ‘toxin’ or ‘poison’ to the body.  And this means that alcohol oxidation is 100% perfect, that is, the body will effectively do everything in its power to get rid of the alcohol increasing alcohol oxidation to maximum (which means decreasing the oxidation of other nutrients consumed with that alcohol) so that the alcohol can be gotten rid of.

I’m going to ask readers not to read anything into the above paragraph, don’t infer or try to draw conclusions about how alcohol might or mightn’t fit into the diet in terms of anything.  As it turns out, alcohol is an oddity among nutrients with seemingly contradictory effects on things.  I’m going to address that in detail in a forthcoming article and, for now, just take the above as some much needed background information.

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Summing Up

And that’s that.  After consumption and digestion, nutrients have a couple of primary fates in the body which are oxidation (burning) and storage (for use later).  And, as it turns out, the propensity for the body to store or oxidize a given nutrient is related to the body’s built-in store relative to intake.  In the case of dietary fat, where stored fat is much higher than daily intake, the body tends to store incoming fat and burn very little.  Fat intake per se has very little impact on fat oxidation rates.

Rather, the rate of fat oxidation is related to carbohydrate intake as the body is able to precisely alter carbohdyrate oxidation to changing intake.  Eat more carbs and burn more carbs (and less fat); eat less carbs and burn less carbs (and more fat).  Protein is somewhere in the middle, oxidation can increase or decrease relative to intake but the effect takes time (3-9 days).   Finally is alcohol, with no storehouse in the body, alcohol oxidation will take 100% precedence over everything else when it is consumed.   I’ll discuss the implications of this in an article on alcohol (and it’s rather schizoid effects on body weight and body composition in a later article).