Blogs

Mirthful Danish Speed Team Video

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Somehow I ended up looking at skate videos on Youtube again. Here's more from Kevin Jagger (Mr. LongTrackLongShot.com) - the guy who jacked it all in with his day job to concentrate on trying to make it in the longtrack ice world. 

 

Speed Skating from my POV (with Phoenix)

 

Mr. Jagger Vs. Cindy Klassen 500m

 

And for comic relief, discover the Danish Speed Team's secret to success.

There's A Word For That

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I have been trying to find out if there exists a word or term for hearing a word or phrase spoken by somebody else at the same time I happen to read it. This comes to pass for me many times a day, and usually results in me exclaiming "Ah!". It's like some sort of audiovisual synchronicity.

Parallel to this has been my search for a resource that will help me find a term to describe a particular concept or situation, if a google search yields nothing. I found a reverse dictionary on onelook.com. This is effective up to a point.

There are many online articles with word lists describing concepts I never asked about, containing words I'm pretty sure I'll have forgotten when trying to impress people at a party three years from now. 

Fun Indoor Video

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Something to get your heart racing...or to get you wishing it were: The NSC Experience, brought to my attention on Speedskateworld.com. Not sure if this was taken with a helmet cam. At some point I lost the corners. Great song too - more suitable to this type of rink scramble than the usual adrenaline EDM. I'm not sure what those popping sounds are in the video towards the end - the camera skater dragging his wheels? Maybe he's about to lose a frame...or maybe he's wearing Bont Gen III's with cracked hubs :-D.

What else can I sit and watch instead of actually going to skate? 

Periodization and the Preseason - or: I Thought I Could Do Those Drills

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So here we are in the Preseason, per Rob Bell's Periodization article I referred to for the Offseason. This should be a six week block of low-intensity technique work (drills), and cross-training (if you like that sort of thing). 

Just as I feared, the Offseason threw me out of my routine and into a funk-and-a-half. So it's taking me some time to get into the Preseason groove. Although there is something alluring about having nothing to do for half an hour except focus on rolling on one skate around half the football field (paved track). 

Off the Couch and Into Invincibility: Cartoons of Depression, Angst and Triumph plus Skating and Biking Into the Wind

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Hello out there. Yes it's nice sitting with the laptop and reading all sorts of stuff, checking in with your efriends or ifriends, maybe even watching PBS or some awesome, enlightening movie from before you were geborn. And everybody needs some time off, but when you are tired of your time off spinning down the drain, let me repeat that there's something about the wind in your face when you're on wheels, or even skis or shoes. 

Superbetter & Cow Clicker: Games for Recovering From Injury or Just Getting Addicted to a Parody of Addictive Games

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Great weather outside in roadskaterworldplanet, if a bit gray/grey. We have had some really warm days of late, but I've only skated once as I am in that proverbial "off season," ha.

It's been good in some ways to take a break from always feeling I need to go to the park and skate, and not so great in others, of course. It helps confirm what I so often say, along with so many others, that exercise helps with life, not the least of which are eating well, sleeping well, and lots more. 

Meanwhile, as i delay going to skate today for the regular Tuesday attempt, here is something from one of my favorite radio programs (On the Media) that i can only hear by podcast now (afaik): an interesting idea for an online (somewhat social) game...to use for recovery from, for example, a bicycle injury, or other challenge. for this reporter it seemed to be a way to get out of a rut, so to speak. 

Go On! Get Your Clouds On! Send in the Clouds! Skaters Should be in the Cloud Appreciation Society and More

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Time for something off the sky. While looking for top ten items to include on the rest stop favorite foods survey, I ran across a great set of photos of and discussion about clouds. It mentioned the Cloud Appreciation Society. I want to be part of that! Here comes another Roadskater.net subteam! Here's that top ten cloud thing...

http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-unusual-but-fascinating-cloud-formations.php

Carolina Century, 2011

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<a href="http://bl2u.com/events/carolina-century-2011/">http://bl2u.com/events/carolina-century-2011/</a>

No pictures.   :(

Once again, I completed the 102 mile Carolina Century this past Saturday.  The family did the 31 mile option on their bikes.  I need to get my girls used to skating long distances...

Not much to say, the skate was drama-free.  So I'll just give some initial impressions.

What a great skate!  Just like last year, conditions were perfect.  No special difficulty, just a great day to skate.

Four skaters this year: Blake, Elizabeth, Bob Harwell, and me.  Bob and I left Blake and Elizabeth fairly early in the skate, around 5-7 miles in (?).  In Blake's defense, it sounded like he was on his phone quite a bit still working out some issues with other event organizers and volunteers.

Loose Dogs and Driving Cars, Motorcycling, Cycling and Roadskating Don't Mix So Great

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OK. We've been missing from this ghost town for weeks as we completed the 90 miles in 2 days at Tour to Tanglewood, the 87 miles in 1 day at Athens to Atlanta (7h58m) and did the preparations for volunteers to put on the 102-21 mile Carolina Century ride and roll for MS, while we skated as unintentional sweep much of the day. Now it is on to wrapping up lost and found and website items and participant surveys and such. Plus resting off 102 miles (10h23m) on roadskates.

Meanwhile to amuse me I looked back at my unpublished Tour to Tanglewood 2011 photos and I got 6 photos (don't worry I just aim my arrm in that direrction and crop later) during the dog incident. 4 of him passing us, and 2 blank ones probably taken during the shoulder roll or after...they are just black except for some light around the edges like a near death experience (NDE). 

Periodization and the Offseason - Or An Attempt Not To Lose It All

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Lose all what, exactly? I can't say that this year's training and peaking event season has left me particularly buff, but I would like to retain what little muscle-tone and muscle-memory I did achieve. After some digging around online, I found an article by Rob Bell on inlineplanet, uploaded a few years ago: Periodization Training, Part 1: How to Make the Most of Your Training.

Bell separates the training calendar into these phases:

 

 

Rat Has No Control: High Fructose Corn Syrup, Cane Sugar, Glucose, Sucrose

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Many years ago I saw a documentary on PBS. Something about stress in animals, including, supposedly, humans. Anyway, as they were interviewing some human, a sign on one of the cages in the background read, "RAT HAS NO CONTROL." I have almost never stopped laughing about the beautiful truth of those four words of homemade bumper sticker. This is the answer to the majority of the world's questions. 

To be fair, there must have been another cage back there that had a sign reading, "RAT HAS CONTROL." This was the point of the experiment, to show that rats with some control (and predictability of circumstances, as I recall) were much more able to handle rat stress induced upon them by humans. Anyway, great show, and one I've remembered for a long time, eh? 

This site mentions the experiment (check out the base url!):

Location

Princeton University Princeton , New Jersey
United States
40° 20' 55.3848" N, 74° 39' 32.5692" W

Of Course a Fatigued Brain Might Just Want to Give Up and Stop Skating or Cycling Sooner

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This article reminds us of some simple ideas but with some testing to back it up. Even in sports requiring lots of sprinting, there are moments that depend on endurance. In roadskating and roadcycling, that's certainly true, especially in the distances we love, some of us. The basic idea was to test whether watching relatively neutral documentary shows vs. taking a fairly mentally tough test would produce an effect on subsequent endurance athletic tests.

Although the cognitive test didn’t produce any physical fatigue, the volunteers gave up on the cycling test 15 per cent sooner when they were mentally fatigued compared to when they had simply watched the documentaries.

So I'm OK to watch some PBS before long distance workouts it seems.

Sports Medicine: Science or Celebrity

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I'm not sure about access to this article for everyone, but the New York Times had an interesting piece on sports medicine, a booming segment of health care, and one in which roadskaters and roadcyclists are definitely interested. But how do we know there's real science behind the treatments and techniques on offer? The article is interesting on multiple levels, since the author received one of the treatments and wrote about it in an earlier article referenced within.

Fortunately, some people out there are trying to do the follow-up, but most of us wanna be like mike or whatever, so we are susceptible to celebrity ads or buzz. Anyway, not much to say, except this article seems worth a read as background for life on the road. I"m interested in others' thoughts and experiences. I'm certainly not saying that sports medicine has nothing to offer, but like most things that involve hope and money, it's hard to know what's real. 

36 Miles at Greensboro Country Park Thanks to Staff Who Kept the Road Clear After Hurricane Irene

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This weekend we hoped to do lots of miles roadish and as mentioned yesterday (http://roadskater.net/how-i-wasted-or-enjoyed-morning-danny-macaskill-tr...), we bailed on the training ride and ended up feeling OK about doing alternative activities. But we still needed to skate. So we went for Indian food, then went for a walk in the Dollar Tree, ha, then decided to check the weather.

It was windy with some threats of rain, but the radar was clear so far, so we headed up for Country Park. When we got there, we caught a ride on the tram, which was driven by Geoff, who played dixieland jazz on the CD player for passengers in the tram. We told Geoff we were thinking about inline skating but wanted to check out the road junk first.

Location

The 180 at County Park Greensboro, North Carolina
United States
36° 7' 28.7832" N, 79° 50' 22.0164" W
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