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Eddy's coming back to Greensboro for his legendary skating workshop!  April 9-11.

Sign up now, before all the spots are taken!  The announcement email is below, with all the links you need...

We managed to get Eddy Matzger to add us to his schedule again this year (thanks to Skatey-Mark for the boost). in between trips to China he'll take the 2 and a half hour journey down from Floyd, VA for a roadshow outdoor inline speedskating workshop in Greensboro NC this year!

As previously noted, at A2A I was totally unprepared for the scathing speeds most experienced racers attain. I'll do A2A again if I think i can do it sub-6 hours...But I need to know what that speed feels like, and how to work to generated it.

I recently found (duh....) that there are indeed inline speedometers, some of which combine with heartrate monitors. Any recommendations as far as good deals, reliability, and durability go?

With this year's outdoor inline training season ahead, I've been wondering how I should best spend the precious time available to me and reap the best skate training rewards later in the year.

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Hi everyone!

I am teaching the next SkateStrong workshop on Saturday, July 19th, 2008. Normally, I'd point everyone to the website for details, but the power supply on my webserver (which was just replaced 4 months ago) has died again! So, rather than wait for the replacement to be shipped to me, I thought I should get the word out now so that people can plan accordingly.

Thanks to a skating newsletter from Londonskaters Mike, here's a link to a video about Cornell University's ice hockey training 'treadmill'. Huh? How'd they get the ice to wrap around like that? ;-)

I wonder why they need a harness to skate uphill? And sure, pavement/wheel friction complicates things, but a pair of inlines plus a hill would probably be cheaper.

Location

Come learn from the master teacher and ultramarathon king of Athens to Atlanta. Eddy comes back to Greensboro again to get us back on the street, back into the drills, and back into inspiration....

(For those who don't relate to the world entirely in terms of song lyrics, the title of this post alludes to "Caldonia," originally recorded by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five but redone by many others since.)

Anhedonia is defined as "the absence of pleasure or the ability to experience it." I encountered the word a month or so ago, hearing someone on the radio talking about addiction and recovery.

I had a chance to hang out with eebee a bit while she was working on a project to promote skating a bit. We both took our cameras to see what we'd get, ill equipped as we were, without some of my fun lenses. We got to see some new folk and some fellow Athens to Atlanta and US10K veterans as well. I was mostly chilling and hoping to capture a photo of the day or two or more. Anyway, here's a sample that's not likely suitable for print but it sure is fun the ghostly way it turned out.

I guess the thing I'd like to see happen for me in 2008 would be for double pushing to just be a natural part of my skating whenever it is the most efficient way to go. Making it more efficient and thus more useful more of the time would be the key. I'd like it to be a tool, or a couple of tools, that I can use involuntarily, I guess you'd say. I'd like it to be like shifting gears in the car without thinking.

Andrewinnc brought up an interesting approach to skate (or anything) training, in his article "Winter and Skating Technique". He had read about a theory that it takes 600 repetitions of a movement for the muscles to learn it. Assuming that also means 'for the brain to learn it', I wanted to apply this technique and take it a step further....

Some interesting self-assessments after taking a break from any kind of exercise for 2 months (except climbing the 40 or so steps to my apartment about 4-6 times a day!), and after throwing all caution to the wind regarding healthy eating :-0

There are some interesting posts on www.pickthebrain.com, offering advice from a feelings-to-common-sense perspective. One article entitled 8 Moves to Make When you Feel Like Giving up, mentions hitting a plateau:

"In some cases you might feel like giving up even though you’re doing all the right things. This is called “the dip” — the plateau that separates the average from the best in the world"

Come skate the green, rolling hills of the North Carolina Piedmont Triad for the weekend this September!

Both days:

I'd like to start getting an idea of how many people will be taking my next workshop. It will be held on Saturday, August 18th. The location will most likely be the same as last time -- Reedy Creek Elementary School. The feedback from the first one was pretty good. I'd encourage anyone that attended the first one to post their thoughts so that others might sign up...

Saturday was my first foray into over the road skating in a couple of years, and hey, it felt wonderful. I'm retraining my body to relax and go with the pack flow on the downhills, still some trepidation there. If I don't fill comfortable, I just backoff and go into solo aerobrake mode.

It was Blake, Elizabeth, Melinda, Andy, and me in the group. Although Blake was suffering boot/foot problems, which as we all know can be agony, a good time was had by all over the pleasant route. Thanks to Blake for the encouragement to get on the road again.

If you need a break, no, I mean a brake, perhaps Cado Motus has what you need.  The former Mogema company has a brake that's supposed to work with 80mm-to-110mm-wheel frames.  Personally, I haven't seen one of these yet, but on www.nettracing.com there are pictures with installation instructions.

As many of you know, Tour de Lions is one of our favorites for a yearly visit with great people, exercising for a good cause, and getting to know a local community and its people as we work together on behalf of others and for the great feelings we get doing so. Sometimes we think we should save our money and skate where it's free, but then we go to Tour de Lions or Tour to Tanglewood and we know that even though the money means a lot to us, it can do even more for others in the right hands.

Thanks to a little extra encouragement from the Tour de Kale organizers when I was skating at Tour de Lions, and to the great feedback we had from other who had done the event, we decided to go this year despite our excuses. We're glad we did.

Tour de Kale is a charity ride that gets good reviews in the Piedmont. I met the guy who runs it at the Tour de Lions and he said we Roadskaters should come give it a try. Check out the info on

A couple of nights ago, we were talking about laps times and speeds on the 1.6 mile loop at Country Park and I remarked that you could find average speed in miles per hour just by dividing 96 by the time in minutes. But I guess this might not be so obvious if you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it.

What a crazy day. After a meeting in the early morning, I came back to check on an order I was trying to fill for a company who needed several dozen Robin Safety Boy Emergency Scissors. Changes in shipping, locations, quantities and availability had me trying to juggle a combination of calls and emails.

Here's a very interesting article by Sharon Robb on Olympic speedskater Jennifer Rodriguez and her switch to competitive cycling, her effort to reach the Olympic level in a the sport, and more. It mentions the Brian Piccolo velodrome where skaters and cyclists work out together on separate tracks. It is a great facility. For a brief movie of the place see my minimovie at:

Not sure of the details yet, but Ken's is always a nice ride. It has a couple of tricky spots for skaters, with a downhill into a busy road on the way back, and a long downhill with a sweeping right into a stop sign on the optional repeat loop.

What another satisfying, smooth and sufficiently challenging Tour de Lions event! We arrived for registration at 7.30am, grabbed some bananas and other carbs, plus coffee, all provided by the event and its volunteers. The weather was sunny but brisk at about 50 deg F.

Just a quick note of thanks to timv for coming out on his bike to sweep the GVC ride so I could skate safely. Without any other skaters, I likely would not have lasted long.

In fact, it turned out later that we found my rear right wheel was being torqued enough by my brake frame that the skate frame had rubbed much of the side of the wheel off. The logo text was mostly gone from the side of the wheel. I will have to keep an eye on that.

Here's a book to collect what we remember about Inline Speed Skating drills from Eddy Matzger workshops and other places (Barry Publow workshops, elsewhere). Please contribute! Feel free to ask questions.

 I've been knocking these rather trivial, large-scale thoughts around my head for some years now and wanted to write something about them. Last night, whilst watching 20/20, was the final straw! This post might complement KJG's questions in Monotony of Training.

I recently purchased a recumbent exercise bike to ride after my daughter goes to bed, as it is hard to get out as much as i would like with a 2.5 year old.  Its nothing fancy, a Proform XP110 from Sears.  I had a magnetic trainer for my road bike, but it's noisy and it just feels unnatural to be in that position on a normal road bike and not move for 30 minutes to an hour. 

Hi to all. Some have asked about the workshop in Greensboro and I wanted to share some brief details.

We don't publish locations in advance publicly for several reasons, mostly so the workshop can maintain a bit of privacy. We'll almost certainly be at our previous location but I'll be checking that site and some others as traffic patterns and building zones have shifted somewhat.

Here's a question for anybody experiencing somewhat warmer Spring weather (since it's all relative and the Northerners probably consider 50 deg F to be warm, while some of us wimpy Southerners won't skate below 65 Deg F) - what are you all doing, skate- and training-wise? Are you doing short laps around your local park or have you already embarked on full-fledged roadskates? Did you spend all winter chasing indoor skaters? Please let me know what you're doing, I'd love to know.