This highlights a point that I keep coming back to in discussions about technique. A car’s tires are its sole interface with the ground. Everything that the car does in relation to making it move has to go through those tires. At a defensive driving course that I did once, the point was made over and over again that putting the best tires that you can afford on your car (and having the correct tire pressure) was the most effective way to make your car safer. And so is the case in running, as well as speed skating that the point at which ALL technical analysis must begin is the point where your foot, or your blade (in the case of speed skating) comes in contact with the ground.

The reason I say this is that, in my new role as a coach, I have had a chance to interact with a lot of other coaches and hear a lot of opinions on things related to elite sports performance. I’ve been an elite athlete long enough to know that very good coaches are extremely rare, although I did expect a slightly higher standard. What I am really trying to say is that I have heard a great deal of nonsense.

Even after a lifetime of experience, no coach can be “perfect”, and that is the rub.

Of course, nobody can or should expect a coach to be “perfect” right out of the box, nor should anyone expect such perfection after many years. Even after a lifetime of experience, no coach can be “perfect”, and that is the rub. An ideal coach’s attitude (as it should be for an athlete) is to always be improving, and to always seek it out. Now if everyone in the world were genetically identical, then it is conceivable that such perfection could be attainable, at least in theory. But people are not identical, conditions are different everywhere, and sports themselves evolve over time.

World records should be evidence enough of this. Take a sport like running – humans have been running for millions of years, our bodies are designed to do it. People have been competing in running races for at least a few thousand years (possibly more), yet world records are still being broken. Why? There are always very small refinements in technique, as well as technology, such as the clothes and shoes that runners wear. There are also constant developments in training methodology, and the pool of eligible athletes is always expanding.

The sum of all those complex parts is a gradual improvement in the overall standard of the sport, and an indicator of that is the fall of world records. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it angers me when I hear a coach say something along the lines of “if you want to do this time, then this is what you need to do” where “this” is usually a very specific set of instructions and technique where the athlete is basically a machine simply in need of having certain buttons pressed.

I like to take a more first-principles approach to coaching. Luckily there has been a lot of good research on the subject which allows me to stand on the shoulders of giants. It still surprises me how much the literature obviously isn’t being used by everyone. More esoteric still is the approach to technique.

Running is pretty much the only sport where you can tell an athlete to “just run a lot and what you feel to be the best technique will be it” and expect good results. Even then, most runners can benefit from small adjustments to their running technique, especially sprinters. This is because running is a very natural thing to do, and evolution has tuned our bodies quite well to do it. Just about every other sport must come up with what is necessarily “artificial” technique.

Strangely enough, the history of technique development in most sports indicates that the approach described above for running has been the one applied. Technique development has been a haphazard mix of trial-and-error (mostly error), and chance innovation, usually by sportspeople who train in isolation, or who come from other sports.That doesn’t mean that every sport other than running has rubbish technique, far from it. Those who have innovated have usually been the very best elite athletes, and they have often been very coordinated and possessed good natural biomechanics, which allows them to better feel when their own bodies are acting efficiently or not.

However, many example exist where technique has taken a very sudden leap forward because someone, usually a coach, stopped for a moment and thought about a movement, and how it could be different. The Fosbury Flop is a good example – there’s no way anyone decides that jumping backwards over a pole is a natural way to jump high, but Dick Fosbury realized that the arching of the back allowed a high jumper’s center of mass to be lower than the bar as it was being jumped over. Planting the front foot in a discus throw to get a little extra speed from the “whip” at the end of the spin, and kicking the front foot prior to throwing a javelin in order to take advantage of tendon-tension across the front of the body are two more subtle examples of deliberate technique development which yielded results.

there’s no way anyone decides that jumping backwards over a pole is a natural way to jump high

Not surprisingly now, I turn my attention to speed skating technique. I previously did a preliminary breakdown of skating technique in an attempt to understand the differences between ice and inline skating technique. In that article I concluded that the main reason that differences existed was because of the differences in the way ice blades and inline wheels behave when subjected to changes in force, and changes in angle (relative to the ground).

So you have these points on the ground. Actually they’re curvy lines and they aren’t very big. They provide lateral resistance and are effectively frictionless along their direction of motion. We push against these points in order to move forwards. We begin by simply pushing against them while they’re not moving (i.e. in a standing start), but doing this limits our speed to how fast our muscles can move. Then we start to use the lateral resistance and directional flow, but even this has limitations. Eventually, we use the curve of the blade to generate centrifugal force to give us extra force in our push. This is discussed in a previous post to some extent.

But what are those forces? Perhaps more importantly, what forces are required? Well, anecdotally, since us speedskaters are always being told to feel for “pressure” in the push (that pressure is the angular acceleration perpendicular to the direction of motion of a blade describing a curve on the ice) I will use the most obvious place where we find this “pressure” to come up with a suitable starting number – the corner. The corner radius in a long track is anywhere between 25m and 31m depending on which track you’re skating on, and which lane you’re in. Unsurprisingly, maximum pressure is found in a corner of the smallest radius, so we’ll take 25m.

Next we need some speed. The fastest skaters can skate a lap of a 400m oval in about 24 seconds, which comes to 60km/h or m/s. The cornering force that the skater must overcome is given by:

a skater skating a 24 second lap would be pulling 1.13 ‘g’s around the inner corner

This gives F to be 11.1ish (actually ) multiplied by the skater’s mass in kilograms. Just to give you a sense of scale for these forces, the force of gravity is about 9.8N per Kg of mass, so a skater skating a 24 second lap would be pulling 1.13 ‘g’s around the inner corner. Just for reference, you have to skate a 25.55 second lap to be pulling exactly 1g. This is significant because the lean you need to get in a corner to overcome a 1g cornering force is exactly 45 degrees.

As you can see, 45 degrees is actually quite a steep lean, and a 24 second lap would require even more. Just how much more is a matter of  remembering our sine and cosine rules.

Why is determining the angle important? Because it allows us to calculate the forces acting on the skater. We already have the force of gravity (9.8N) and and the centrifugal force (11.1N), but as you can see from the diagram, a skater doesn’t push directly down, or directly to the outside of the corner. A skater necessarily pushes along a line from the point of the center of mass to the point where the blade comes into contact with the ice, and this is where that angle becomes important. For the 25.55 second lap, when the cornering force and the force of gravity are equal (and the angle is 45 degrees) we simply add and which is about 13.86N per kilogram of bodyweight. When we go a little faster  we have to add and which comes to 14.52N per kilogram of bodyweight.

In other words, that extra 1.55 seconds of speed is worth just short of one extra newton of cornering force per kilogram of bodyweight. If you weigh 70kg, then that’s the difference between 970.2 newtons (the equivalent of lifting 100kg) of cornering force and 1016.4 newtons (the equivalent of lifting 104kg). Not forgetting, of course, that you’re doing this “lifting” with one leg while balanced on a sliver of metal 1.1mm thick, and travelling at 60km an hour. I’m sure anyone who’s ever done a 1-rep max test can tell you how much difference just a few kilograms can make when you’re right on the limit.

don’t forget that you’re doing this “lifting” with one leg while balanced on a sliver of metal 1.1mm thick, and travelling at 60km an hour

Of course, this is not the whole story, it is only the starting point. This is only a force requirement. Ultimately, we would like to calculate the “work” requirement (force distance), and the “power” requirement (the rate of work, or more precisely ). If you’ve been paying attention, you will realize that the force requirement says nothing about movement (which is, sadly, a rather inescapable element of speed skating). I weigh 72kg, so 14.52N per kilogram of bodymass is equivalent to the force that a 107kg weight would exert on me. I’m pretty sure I can’t do a 107kg one-legged-squat, but if I stand up straight, I can probably hold much more weight. Of course, if I skated with my legs straight, or close to it, I wouldn’t go very fast because there are other forces to overcome than cornering forces.

There is also air resistance. I covered this aspect of the sport briefly in this post, mostly to highlight what I perceived to be incorrect decisions regarding selection, which were impacted by not taking into account the importance of the altitude at which times were skated. In short, altitude makes a difference to air resistance, and air resistance is such a significant factor in speed skating (some say as high as 80%) that even small difference in air resistance can have a measurable impact on times. In that previous post, I introduced this equation:

is the force, is the air density is velocity is area is drag coefficient and is a direction vector for the velocity. Using some fairly simple mathematics, I was able to show that going from sea level to 1400m (the elevation of the Utah Olympic Oval) reduces aerodynamic drag by about 15%. I say “simple” because at no point did I actually have to calculate the force, I only needed to calculate the difference between two forces. But now that we are trying to calculate force requirements, it is time to get our hands dirty.

I thought a skier was a reasonably good aerodynamic approximation to a speed skater so I used their wind tunnel data

Let us begin at a typical indoor oval at sea level with favourable conditions of about 5 degrees ambient temperature. The air density would be 1.269kg per cubic meter. For velocity, we’ll take our 24 second lap (60km/h), for frontal area I’ve ripped off some approximate numbers from journal articles that variously discuss skiers and cyclists who have gone through the trouble of wind tunnel testing. For frontal area, I’m using 0.45 square meters, and for drag coefficient I’m going to use 0.6. When you plug all these numbers into the formula you get 47.59N. That may not seem like much, but when you consider that it is the force required simply to stay at a constant speed, it is significant. Look at it another way, in a frictionless vacuum, 47.59N of constant force would push a 72kg mass (me) in a straight line to 60km/h in just over 25 seconds and do it in just over 200m.

Which brings me nicely to my final point of this post (which seems to have ballooned out into something much bigger than I anticipated). The force required for a skater to actually accelerate. Without exception, all individual skating distances begin with a standing start. So far this analysis has only looked at the forces required to maintain a speed of roughly 60km/h (which is certainly at the high end of what is currently possible in the skating world). Getting there is another matter entirely.

all skating distances begin with a standing start – this analysis has only looked at forces required to maintain speed – getting there is another matter entirely

When calculating the acceleration required, we encounter a strange dilemma. The very best sprinters in the world can skate a standing 100m in about 9.5 seconds. We’ll round up to 10. Assuming constant acceleration over that 10 seconds (which would carry the requirement of the least amount of force), a skater would have to accelerate at 2 meters per second, per second (i.e. at the end of the first second, they would be traveling at 2m/s, at the end of the second second, the would be traveling at 4m/s etc.) This gives exactly 10 seconds for 100m, and the force required to achieve this is exactly 2m (so for a 72kg mass, a force of 144N is required (which is the same force as a 14.7kg mass exerts due to gravity). This doesn’t seem like such a big deal until you realize that acceleration isn’t constant because, for reasons explained above and in previous articles, there are technical limitations. Also, a 2 meter per second per second constant acceleration leaves you traveling at 20 meters per second (72km/h), well above the top speed of any skater.

Luckily, we have an easy way out of this. We know that our 60km/h-capable skater can exert a force of 14.52N per kg of body mass which is the same as saying that our skater apply force to accelerate at 14.52 meters per second per second which can take us up to 16.6 meters per second in well under two seconds, and since you only have to travel at 16 meters per second for 6.25 seconds to cover 100m, we have easily solved our original dilemma, and are now left with the question of why standing 100m splits are so slow, given that fast skaters can apply so much force. After all, if you can accelerate at 14.52 meters per second per second, it takes you 1.15 seconds to reach 60km/h. Assuming this is your top speed, you would only have to skate at this speed for another 5.7 seconds to cover 100m – that’s a standing 100m in 6.85 seconds!

so many things are wrong with this graph!

Obviously the curves are much smoother, and the fact that force isn’t the only variable to consider comes into play. Remember that our figure of 14.52 is the force required to keep everything in balance at a certain speed, as soon as your body moves, the numbers will be different because there are physical limitations to the rate of work you can do (power), and even if there weren’t there are physical limitations to how fast you can move parts of your body.

Ultimately, the answer lies in biomechanics, which I hope to cover in a later post.

Continuing from where the previous post “left off”, the weekend right after Enschede, I found myself in Inzell, Germany coaching and preparing for the ESDP training camp. (The ESDP is the East Scandinavian Development Project – a partnership between Sweden, Finland and Denmark to pool resources and develop our junior skaters). There were some races and some pretty HUGE personal bests by many members of the team. All in all, a total of 4:49.37 worth of PBs were attained, which averages out to about 36 seconds per skater. In my entire ice skating career, I think I’ve taken a total of about 15 seconds off all my PBs, so these kids are doing very well.

As you would expect, I took a lot of video during this training camp, and I present some of it here, enjoy.

Last Friday I was fortunate enough to be present at my girlfriend’s Ph.D. thesis defence at the University of Copenhagen. In case anyone is wondering, it went very well, and all the opponents spoke highly of her work, and now we can all call her “Doctor”. I have incidentally included a small photo gallery from the day of the defence at the bottom of this post. However, what I really want to talk about is the subject matter of the thesis itself.

As you may have guessed from the title, the thesis is concerned with fluorinated compounds. The full name of the thesis is Polyfluorinated surfactants in food packaging of paper and board. The research investigates the implications of fluorinated compounds when they are used in food packaging. After the high-profile banning of BPA from water bottles, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to come up with ways in which other chemicals in food packaging might have adverse effects.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) I have had the privilege of reading through the thesis many times, at various stages of its development. It is written in English, and being a native English speaker, I have some amount of usefulness in spotting odd uses of grammar, and finding better choices of words in certain situations. To be honest, I didn’t have to correct very much. Most Danes speak English quite fluently, and unsurprisingly, Danes who have been in educational institutions for long enough to get a PhD speak and write better English than many of my Australian friends for whom English is their ONLY language. (I also drew the molecules for her thesis, including the cover image above).

Anyway, while many (indeed most) of the more technical points of chemistry went straight over my head, I was able to quite easily follow what was going on in the thesis, and I write about it here not only because I find it interesting, but also because I find it concerning from a public health perspective.

So what are fluorinated compounds? They are chemicals with the chemical element fluorine in them. The ones being investigated are ones that have long chains of CF2, that is a carbon atom with two fluorines attached. The carbon acts as a backbone while the fluorine attaches to the outside (they’re the orange blobs in the drawing above, the carbons are black). They’re very useful because the bonds don’t break down easily, and they have the property of being both hydrophobic and lipophobic, which means that they repel both water-based solutions as well as oil-based solutions. Teflon (polytetrofluoroethylene) is a good example of a commonly used fluorinated compound.

Imagine a popcorn bag. In the past, simple popcorn bags were coated with wax so that the paper in the bag wouldn’t degrade too quickly after coming into contact with the butter in the popcorn. This was all well and good until we invented microwave popcorn. Regular wax breaks down in a microwave, so you have to coat the inside of the bag with something that will withstand the heat, and this is where materials like fluorinated compounds come in.

So what’s the problem? As mentioned above, they are useful because the carbon-fluorine bonds are strong and don’t break down easily. It is also for precisely this reason that these compounds accumulate in nature. It gets worse though, these compounds are bioaccumulative – they accumulate in living organisms. It was at this point where I was surprised to learn that most people living in the western world live with significant amounts of chemicals and plastics in their bodies that have slowly accumulated over time.

Many of these substances are mostly harmless, but the long-term effects of most of them are unknown. There is mounting evidence now that fluorinated compounds fall into the category of being endocrine disruptors, meaning that (like BPA) they can disrupt your hormones. That has a number of bad effects, notable among them being lower sperm counts (leading to infertility) as well as babies being born with underdeveloped genitalia.

So this was the crux of the thesis – do fluorinated compounds used in food packaging contaminate our food? It turns out that finding an answer to this question requires some impressive instrumental trickery and knowledge of chemistry. I used to think that you just put a bunch of samples through a very large and expensive machine and then it would tell you if what you were looking for was there, and how much there was. Turns out that there’s quite a lot more to it.

The short answer is yes. In most cases, there was significant migration (that’s what they call it) of these compounds from the packaging to the food. We should all be concerned. Since this result would be considered quite recent, there has not been sufficient time to develop and implement regulations on fluorinated compounds in food packaging materials. In the meantime, we should make an attempt to avoid exposure to them wherever possible.

But how? First we have the droplet test. Since fluorinated compounds are very strong surfactants, they have a very high surface energy. This causes droplets on the surface to form into tight balls. In particular, pay close attention to the angle of contact between the droplet and the surface. In the diagram above, the droplet on the right would indicate that fluorinated compounds were being used.

The next test is called the “tear test”. Since these compounds are used to impregnate paper and (card)board, the materials can be torn. When the packaging material is torn, pay close attention to where the tear takes place. If there is a separation, that is – if there is one layer of paper and a separate layer of clear plastic, then there’s no need to worry about fluorinated compounds. In this case, you have a plastic coating, and plastics have been around for longer and have regulations in place. If, however, you find that there is no separation, then you most likely have yourself a fluorinated compound.

Don’t despair though, there are varying degrees of badness. The greatest amount of migration tends to occur when the packaging is used on wet, and especially greasy foods. Also of concern is when the content of the packaging is intended to be heated with the packaging still in contact with it (remember those bags of microwave popcorn). Thirdly, more flexible packaging materials, like thin paper, are worse because they require a higher amount of fluorinated compounds to effectively impregnate them. For reasons that should be obvious, the longer something is in contact with its fluorinated compound-impregnated packaging material, the worse you can expect it to be. Dried foods and frozen foods are often ok though.

So there you have it, advance notice on the next widely-used chemical that will probably eventually get banned. Just the tip of the iceberg in the slow chemical contamination of our biosphere. And now, as promised, photos from the day of the thesis defence (click the images for a larger view):

“Don’t call me that!” was the reply. “In fact, you can take out the G altogether,” he tacked on.

“But dude, without G I could only asp instead of gasp, rab instead of grab and oogle instead of–”

He paused to think for a moment

“Hmmm. . . maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

There was an awkward pause.

“Seen any good. . . sorry, ood movies recently?” he said quickly, trying to change the subject.

“Yeah, I saw something about codebreaking.”

“What was it called?”

“Umm, can’t remember. . . name a few movies.”

“Mercury Risin?”

“No.”

“Enima?”

“What?” he said, looking puzzled.

“Oh, enigma. . . sorry, took out the G. . . hahaha. . . ”

“You’re an idiot! No, it wasn’t that, it had something to do with a message from outer space.”

“Independence day?”

“No, the aliens were peaceful and the message was about building some kind of machine.”

“What did the machine do?”

“It transported people to–”

“Contact!” he cut him off.

“That’s it.”

“That’s not a movie about codebreaking.”

“Bollocks, the code was great, it was three dimensional and the key was in the code itself”

“Contained within the code? What a novel idea.”

“Oh my, look at the time, I’d better go now, what’s your number?”

“Ummm. . . here it is: 64, 127, 105, 197, 111, 76, 12, 181, 113, 3, 201, 30, 41, 109, 85.”

Recent events have caused me to reflect on things, one of those things is the death penalty. Those who’ve known me for a long time know that I’ve been a fairly active member of Amnesty International for a long time. Anyone who knows Amnesty’s work well will know that they are opposed to the death penalty. Does this mean that I am also opposed to the death penalty? As a matter of fact, I am, but it was by no means an automatic following of Amnesty stance that led me to oppose the death penalty.

In my younger days, I was considerably more conservative than I am now on certain things. I believed that if you were poor, it was probably because you were lazy, if you were in jail, you probably did something very bad, and if you were on death row, then you probably killed someone. Wait, that’s not quite true – go through that last sentence and take out all instances of the word “probably”.

In the bubble I grew up in, you had to be very lazy to be poor (and even then, poverty was not guaranteed). I didn’t even know anyone who went to jail, that was something that happened to other people. But those bubbles burst, and your horizons expand, and you realize that there’s a lot more to it than that. You eventually insert the word “probably” into those sentences, then you realize the implications of a world where not everything is clear-cut, black-and-white.

Consider the fallibility of the justice system. Nobody likes to admit that they’ve made a mistake, but that doesn’t mean we should pretend that it never happens. When I was in high school, I acted in a play called “Twelve Angry Men” which, you might have guessed, is about a jury deliberating on the innocence or guilt of a man accused of murder. Two films have been made of the play, but the superior of the two is the black-and-white 1957 version.¹ I encourage all of you to go watch it. The play begins with a vote of 11-1 in favour of “guilty”, and as the discussion develops, inconsistencies are found in the evidence, prejudices are found in the jurors, and slowly but surely reasonable doubt wins the day, and they vote for acquittal. This probably doesn’t happen every day, and I think part of the point of the play is to show how easy it is for a jury to make a wrong decision. The point is that it is not so hard to imagine that an innocent person might be convicted, even with the allowance of “reasonable doubt”.

these developments cast a dark shadow of doubt over the conviction which I believe goes a long way past “reasonable”

The recent example of Troy Anthony Davis (pictured) is a good one. He was convicted of murder mostly because of eyewitness testimony. There was nothing else to link him to the murder. No murder weapon was ever found. Since the trial, seven out of nine eyewitnesses have either changed or recanted their testimony. Now, I don’t think he’s guilty, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that these developments cast a dark shadow of doubt over the conviction which I believe goes a long way past “reasonable”. In a flawed system, there is always a chance of punishing an innocent man, and the death penalty is irreversible.

How many innocent people are wrongfully punished? One for every ten guilty? Maybe one for every hundred? There probably is some ratio that society would deem to be “acceptable”, and I should hope that it is very high. However, when it comes to final and irreversible punishments, we could simply avoid it ever happening by abolishing the death penalty.

But what about the guilty ones? On the same day that Troy Davis was executed, another man named Lawrence Brewer was also put to death. His crime was the murder of a black man by chaining him to the back of a truck and dragging him until the body was so disfigured, that it was mistaken for road kill. In this case, he was convicted using DNA evidence which matched blood found on him to the blood of the victim. Surely people like this deserve to die?

Maybe they do, but it is not for us to decide. It is not the role of a state to kill people. The whole point of the law is to protect people, to guarantee our equality and freedom. Killing someone achieves none of those aims. Removing a dangerous individual from society can be accomplished just as easily with imprisonment. I believe the real reason we seem so keen on killing people is that we feel a need to satiate our desire for revenge. It is dangerous, and quite barbaric for a society to give into those feelings.

“…this is the point where I would have to abandon my support for the death penalty – it simply doesn’t work”

Maybe the death penalty could act as a deterrent. If this was the case, we would see a significantly lower incidence of violent crime in places where the death penalty is practiced when compared to similar places where it is not. If I really wanted to believe in the death penalty, if I really wanted to ignore all the wishy-washy philosophical and moral arguments about why it is wrong for the state to kill people, and concentrate on the facts, then this is the point where I would have to abandon my support for the death penalty – it simply doesn’t work.

Curiously, and counterintuitively enough, places that still practice the death penalty have a significantly higher incidence of violent crime than places that don’t. I don’t know why, but I can hazard a guess. If the state thinks it’s ok to kill people, then that sends a message to the population. People probably don’t even realize it on a conscious level, but the message probably goes something like “it’s ok to solve problems by killing people”. It certainly doesn’t act as a deterrent.

So we have a form of punishment that is irreversible, brutal, and final. There is always the chance that you accidentally punish someone who is innocent. In terms of protecting the rest of the population, it can be easily substituted. And to top it all off, it doesn’t even work as a deterrent. I understand that it used to be very common during medieval times (as was torture, but that’s another article), and maybe it worked back then, though I doubt it. It’s about time we pulled ourselves out of the dark ages and abolished this barbaric practice worldwide, once and for all, because it doesn’t belong here. We’ve gone to the moon, and we’ve sent probes to take our curiosity beyond the farthest reaches of our own solar system, yet we still have capital punishment… wtf mate?

Footnotes

The large square has a side length of 1. All of the lines within the square begin at the corners and end at the midpoint of an edge. The question is:

What is the area of the light-blue square?

(I realize that many of my maths friends have seen this before, try not to spoil it for everyone else)

I will write the answer and an explanation in the comments in a few days.

(actually, just scroll down for the solution (if you want to see it))

keep going

.

.

.

Solution:

so it turns out I can’t post pictures in the comments. So I present the solution here.

It helps to cut along the lines and try to rearrange things. We can cut out triangles from the original square and then reattach them as illustrated above.

If you repeat several times, you end up with the diagram above – five identical squares with the same area as the original square. So we can safely say that the square in the middle has an area one fifth of the original large square.

Stay tuned for more silly recreational mathematical goodness…

Ten years on, and I remember it well. I was at the Melbourne University gym when it happened, I had just finished doing weights and as I came out of the weights room into the main foyer, there was a small crowd gathered around the TV screens. “A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center” someone said, anticipating my query. I watched the live report for a short while, and as I was about to leave (it was about 11 at night) the second plane crashed into the south tower.

I didn’t know what to make of it. I quickly rushed home and flicked on the news. It didn’t seem to matter which channel I chose, as everyone seemed to be reporting on the same thing. This was a big deal, that much was clear. Details slowly began to emerge – two planes, three planes, no four planes, another one crashed into the Pentagon. It was all too much. At that moment, I was very glad that I was in Australia, quite literally on the other side of the world, and that I was far away from it all.

So it’s been 10 years since that day and much has changed, but have the changes been for the better? On the 12th of September, French newspaper Le Monde ran the headline “Nous sommes tous Américains” (We are all Americans). You would be hard-pressed to find a Frenchman agreeing with that sentiment now. The world seemed to change in some kind of profound way that day, it seemed to lose a bit of its innocence – of what innocence it had left.

It seems strange. Nearly 3000 people died that day, and that’s not a lot. Many more people die every day from hunger, disease, and civil conflict, so what’s the big deal? In our minds, this seems much worse, because it’s not just about the number, but the intent. All the other deaths seem less significant because they are the result of a system where people are, on some level, trying to do the right thing. Even people who die due to the criminal negligence of a dictator do so because, in some strange way, that dictator thinks what he is doing is “right”.

What makes the September 11 attacks significant is their intention – to terrorise. To paraphrase a quote from one of my favourite films, The Dark Knight – “some people just want to watch the world burn”. It is perhaps not quite so simple – the organisers of the attacks weren’t just destroying for destruction’s sake, they were trying to instil fear into a population, and in that aim they succeeded admirably. How do you deter someone who’s willing to die just to get to you? How do you disarm someone who uses ordinary commercial airplanes as weapons? How do you defend against fear?

Some ice hockey coaches say that the best form of defence is to attack. Sadly the principles of ice hockey don’t apply to international conflict situations, and here’s why: In ice hockey, both teams are evenly matched – they have the same equipment, the same number of players, and play by the same rules, and have the same criteria for victory – this is not true of terrorists. We on the one hand would like to stop them from killing innocent people, while they cry victory when we’re scared. So what is the best way to respond to terrorism? It certainly isn’t to attack and kill terrorists, as they seem not to mind death so much.

I suppose the only benefit that can possibly come from killing terrorists is that being dead makes it difficult to terrorize. The killing of Osama Bin Laden is certainly a blow to terrorism, but unless the root causes are addressed, the setback will only be temporary. Taking a few key players out of a hockey team might make them suck out loud for a while, but as long as players want to be good at hockey, the team will eventually come back. So what’s the key? How do we construct a world where people don’t want to be terrorists?

Think about it this way – if ice skating wasn’t fun, if manoeuvering a puck around with a stick wasn’t fun, and if scoring goals and winning games wasn’t fun, then nobody would want to play hockey. Luckily, the aim of terrorism is well-defined – to terrorise. Do something nasty like blowing up a bus, if people become scared and change their behaviour to reflect that, then you’ve won. Looking at it this way, the odds seem stacked in their favour. I mean, it’s not really very difficult to scare us, and here’s why:

Think of a lottery. I think people who buy lottery tickets are idiots because the chance of winning is so minuscule that your expected value (the probability of an event, multiplied by the value outcome of that event) is actually much, much, much lower than the value of your ticket. You may as well flush money down the toilet if you’re going to buy lottery tickets. But why do so many people buy lottery tickets? Because winning would be really great. We know this because it’s on TV, we see people winning lotteries and buying lots of cool stuff. Of course, if the TV actually showed us a representative sample of lottery participants, you would have maybe 10 years worth of shots of people saying “oh well, I didn’t win this time” for every minute of people saying “yes! I won the lottery”. But our minds don’t work like that anyway, we’ll only remember the exciting “winning” scenes and forget the rest.

Terrorism is like a reverse lottery. We see these two massive buildings collapse after airplanes fly into them, and all the chaos that ensues. We see photos of mangled buses. We see videos of people getting their heads sawn off. All pretty horrible stuff, and it scares us. But statistically, it shouldn’t. The probability of you succumbing to an act of terror is insignificant. You’re much more likely to die in a motor vehicle accident. But the images that stick in our heads are the high-impact, low-probability events… because that’s just how our minds work.¹

So not being scared would quickly take the wind out of the sails of would-be terrorists, but for many reasons this is difficult to do. We can try, of course, but we’re never going to get around the fact that images of innocent people being killed in horrible ways is going to make us scared that something similar might happen to us. Not reporting it might be a possibility, but I am of the view that that would be irresponsible journalism. Reporting it in such a way as to diminish its impact would also seem to me to be poor journalism, even though it would be preferable to the sensationalization that does sometimes grip the news/entertainment media in the relentless battle for TV ratings.

What else motivates terrorists? What in the world goes through someone’s head when they strap explosives to themselves and willingly commit their lives to the act of instilling fear in others? I believe it is hopelessness. The kind of hopelessness that is fed by extreme poverty and hunger. The kind of hopelessness that grows in the mind, not only of those who are marginalised by a particular society, but by a whole world who seems indifferent to their humanity.

Ask yourself: why wouldn’t I be a suicide bomber? Well, I have things to look forward to. I’m going skating tomorrow night, and I don’t want to miss out on that. I’ve got a good education, and with it good career prospects. I’m surrounded by people who care about me, who would probably miss me if I became a suicide bomber. Someday I might want to have kids and watch them grow up, and being a suicide bomber kind of puts an end to all that. I can make a positive difference in people’s lives, and I feel like I owe it to these people to stick around and not deny them that.

My guess is that the average suicide bomber probably doesn’t think most of those thoughts. The average suicide bomber probably doesn’t come from a wealthy background, or live in a wealthy country. The average suicide bomber probably isn’t terribly well-educated either. My guess is that there needs to be a very high degree of desperation in a person’s life for them to want to end it as a suicide bomber. Of course, this is not to say that the above is true for all terrorists. The organizers and financiers, who are often wealthy and educated, are often also far less willing to strap a bomb to themselves, instead leading others to do it.

Before we start to point fingers at Islam, we should remember that there are something like 1.5 billion Muslims in the world today, and the number of terrorists is far, far lower (think of those lottery tickets). Islam has simply been unfortunate enough to be the dominant religion in many of the places where terrorism germinates. Earlier in history, when abject poverty was far more evenly distributed around the world, Christians (during the crusades) also did very many very nasty things to non-christians, often quoting scripture as justification for it.

I’m sorry to say it, but the terrorists are winning. We’re scared of them. In many parts of the world, people are more concerned about terrorists than climate change (which, unlike a lottery ticket, will most definitely affect them). They say that they want to destroy western civilization, and we’re so scared that some of us have taken up arms. Some nut in Norway got so scared of Muslims that he went a killed a bunch of his own people. A handful of countries got so scared that they spent a great deal of money and human lives (many more than were lost when the twin towers fell) on invading two sovereign countries. These conflicts have exacerbated strains in international relations, and depleted the treasuries of countries who could really have used a bit more financial stability.

And for what?

A few heads on pikes. That’s all. The ill will that our war on terror has fed will fill the ranks of terrorist training camps for years to come. We would have been better off just taking three trillion dollars and distributing a thousand dollars to each of the poorest 3 billion people in the world. We would have lost a whole lot less lives, and founded a 3-billion-strong fan club of western civilization. Of course, I’m not a big fan of supply-side economics, or the kind of international aid that just gives people money, but it’s a sobering thought that so much money has been spent. Money that could have been spent a little more wisely.

So it’s been ten years since it happened. Those who perpetrated those cowardly acts are mostly dead now, which I suppose is a good thing. But the price has been great, too great. We’ve spent too much money, and lost too many lives. In doing so, we’ve also sown the seeds for more hate. We say that we’re fighting to preserve our way of life, but we should remember the values that our way of life is built upon. Our way of life isn’t just about shiny buildings, and public transport – it’s about ideas, and principles… those ideas and principles are invulnerable to bullets and bombs, or so we thought. If all it takes is a few collapsing buildings and exploding buses for us to abandon those principles, then the terrorists have already won.²

If we truly want to honour those who died in terrorist attacks, both on September 11 and elsewhere, then we should remember this. We must remember what it is that our way of life is built upon. We must not give in to fear. If the terrorists want to make martyrs of the cowards who perpetrate terrorist attacks then let us also give meaning to our own victims. Let their deaths not be in vain, but let their memory serve as a constant reminder that we are better than them. But to truly be better than them, then we must fight with our ideas, and not with our guns. That is how to honour the victims of 9/11

Footnotes

First, we need to establish the basic tenets of skating technique.

The line of an ice blade or inline frame, with various forces drawn in

The above diagram is that of a left skate in the straight, viewed from above. The skate points slightly outwards from the center line and force is applied by the skater towards the left, perpendicular to the line of travel (often slightly towards the rear as well) indicated above by the blue arrow. The ground exerts an equal and opposite force in the opposite direction (as per Newton’s third law) but because of the way a skate limits the range of direction of motion (they like to go forwards or backwards along a straight line) it exerts a force back towards the skater (and balancing these forces is what keeps a skater upright when the point of contact with the ground is not directly below a skater’s center of mass). This force is indicated by the green line. These two forces mostly cancel each other out but not quite. Anyone who knows anything about vectors knows that if the blue and the green line aren’t exactly lined up, there will be a third force, indicated by the red line. This is the arrow that drives the skater forwards.

The observant readers will note that if you reduce the angle between the green and blue lines, the red line will be bigger. This can be achieved by turning the skate further away from the center line, and is what happens during the start of a race when the skater is accelerating. The tradeoff is that this kind of pushing cannot be maintained by a very long time because there is a limit to how long a skaters legs can be. The angle has to slowly come closer to being in line with the direction of motion as the skater gets faster.

Tracks on the ice at the start of a race

This is perhaps easier to understand with the above illustration. At the start, the skater is practically running with the skates pointing outwards, and as he gains speed, he has to point his skates more and more forward. Of course, this isn’t the whole story. Skates are designed to be able to turn, and it’s a good thing too because at the high speeds that elite skaters reach, both on the ice and on inlines, even a very slight angle outwards would quickly be unproductive in generating forward force. What eventually happens is the centrifugal/centripetal force generated when a skater turns is used

Diagram of the forces in the straight, superimposed on Joshua Lose

To re-use the convention from a previous diagram, this is how the tracks would look in the ice:

this is what the tracks would look like when a skater is up to speed

So if these general principles are true for both ice and inline skates, then why the huge difference in technique?

The first major difference in technique is easily explained. Ice skaters are generally lower than inline skaters. On the short track, this is because they experience greater cornering forces (with theoretically infinite grip, compared to the finite grip of inline wheels) so must lower their center of mass just to lean into the corner more effectively. On long track, it is because the speeds experienced are much higher, and the contribution of air resistance to drag is greater. In addition, on the ice there is almost no friction between the blade and the ice, while in the inline world, there is friction and rolling resistance associated with the wheels. This means that not only is air resistance greater on the ice in absolute terms, but it also contributes a much greater percentage to the total resistance a skater must overcome. (that’s why all the world records are set at altitude). I discuss the implications of altitude on skating in more detail here.

For the other differences, I believe it is essential to investigate the interface between skate and skating surface and examine the differences.

The cross section of a typical speed skating ice blade

Diagram of an inline wheel showing cross section and "footprint"

As can be seen from the diagrams above, when directly upright, there is little functional diference between an inline wheel and an ice blade. When force is applied on a wheel towards the ground (like when you stand on your skates) the wheel deforms and a larger section of wheel is in contact with the ground, giving you more grip. Putting more force on an ice blade while upright will deform the metal, but much more slightly, almost imperceptibly. It is easy to see how harder wheels would roll for longer than softer wheels, as they would deform less, and less rolling energy would be wasted in changing the shape of the wheel.

Of course, very little time is spent in a completely upright position while one is skating. Usually the blade or wheel is on an angle, or as we skaters call it “edge” (that term probably comes from ice originally, where the “edge” is very obvious and quite sharp).

diagram of blade on ice, while the blade is at an angle

putting a wheel on an angle deforms it, causing the contact patch to change shape when rotated

On the ice, putting the blade at an angle causes it to deform slightly. As it deforms, the contact patch lengthens slightly and also turns into a curved line. On a wheel it deforms (the amount is exaggerated in the diagram). If the wheel is not rotating, this deformation doesn’t change the shape of the contact patch much. However, when the wheels are rotating, it changes the shape of the contact patch so that it “points” in a different direction from straight ahead. This is how inline skates turn.

What are the implications for this? There are a few. Firstly, placing more force straight down on a wheel will make it turn more. This allows a skilled inline skater to generate more force in a straight-push by directing some amount of force straight into the ground. This has the added benefit of increasing the contact patch on the ground, resulting in more grip. This effect is limited with an ice blade simply because the metal doesn’t deform as much as the much softer urethane of an inline wheel. (it also has very different elastic properties).

But there’s more. Consider what happens when more weight is placed on a heel or toe.

placing more weight on the heel causes the blade to rock back, but the shape of the contact patch is unchanged

weight distributed evenly (top) and more in the heel (bottom), note the differently-shaped contact patches

As you can see from the diagrams, rocking back on ice skates doesn’t change the contact patch much (it can change slightly if the blade has a different radius over different sections), however doing the same on inline skates causes the heel to want to steer more than the toe which is a self-correcting behaviour.

perhaps an extreme example, but it shows that inline skaters can be more imprecise with their crossover alignment

ice skates are often aligned much more straight, i.e. with a greater overlap in the crossover

This behaviour of the wheels explains many oddities of technique, such as a tendency to “split” the legs (place the left one forward and right one back while both legs are on the ground in the corner) for extra grip on inline skates. It also goes some of the way to explaining why double-push doesn’t work on the ice.¹ In a strict technical sense, double push can be made to work on the ice, but the return in speed would be small compared to the extra effort required to execute it properly, and the tradeoff in reduced “normal” push would be too great.

inline straights involve much more twisting and rocking of the hips to maximise the force while the skate is directly under the skater

Ice straights are typified by flat shoulders and hips to maximize the force at the end of the extension (where turning force and grip is greatest)

Biomechanics tells us that generating force in the legs begins at the hips. The hips should be lowest (because lowering the hip gives the leg greater range of motion) during the part of the push where most force is needed. Because of the way wheels deform, and because of the finite nature of grip in the inline world, the most effective part of an inline push happens directly underneath the skater, when the legs are sandwiched between a skater’s center of mass and the ground and is most able to push the wheels into the ground. On the ice, however, where grip is effectively infinite and very little extra benefit is had from pushing an ice blade into the ground, the most effective part of the push happens when a skater’s legs are sandwiched between the skater’s center of mass and the ground at the point when the rotative force is the greatest (to take advantage of the centrifugal/centripetal forces), i.e. when the leg is almost at full extension, and is just beginning to steer back toward the direction of travel (like in the diagram with Joshua Lose and the force arrows).

Corners are much more similar with the main difference being that inline crossovers don’t neet to “cross over” as much (although they work perfectly well if you do them the same as you would on ice). On the ice, because the push is just as effective at the end of the extension as at the start, an ice skaters right hip stays low throughout the movement. On inlines, because there is less leeway to push into the ground near the end of the extension, inline skaters can afford to let their right hips ride a little higher than their left and not loose significant pushing force, and possibly even gain from the easier biomechanics of not having to operate the left hip joint right at the limit of its range of motion. Skating on a banked track (a track where the surface is tilted inwards in the corners) or on a very grippy indoor floor can make this difference less apparent, and good indoor inline skaters often have technique more similar to ice technique.

Footnotes

So you’re a pretty good inline skater. You’ve won a few national titles, perhaps you’ve even won a few national titles in different countries. Maybe you’ve been to world championships a few times. But now you want to try something new, you want to try ice skating.

There are many reasons why an inline speed skater would want to have a go at ice skating. Some people don’t like hot weather, others don’t like losing a leg-side of skin every time they crash, still others have Olympic aspirations. Whatever your reason, in this article I hope to provide some useful tips into making the transition into what may at first seem like a very alien new environment.

First you will have to get some gear. The most obvious difference between inline skating and ice skating is the ice. Anyone who has ever tried to inline skate on ice will quickly realize that urethane wheels are not ideally suited to skating on frozen water. You will need ice blades. But wait, there’s more… the demands of the sport, especially at the higher levels, require surprisingly different types of gear to most effectively skate around in circles.

It is my personal recommendation that a skater transitioning from inline to ice should first do short track. Short track skating takes place on a track of ice 111m in length while long track happens on a 400m ice track. The smaller confines, and sharper corners should be more familiar to inline skaters (particularly ones with experience in indoor skating), and the nature of short track blades, being fixed as well as having a rounder radius makes it much easier to acquire a “feel” for how ice blades behave. Even if you plan to ultimately transfer to long track, short track gives you a solid base in cornering technique, body position, as well as ice feel. It also helps you get used to the cold.

Starting from the ground up - skates

“there are really only two variables to consider, and those are length and stiffness”

Short track blades are, in comparison to long track blades and inline frames, relatively inexpensive. It is easy to see why – they are structurally quite simple beasts. In the early stages of getting into short track, there are really only two variables to consider, and those are length and stiffness. Length can be chosen based on the size of your feet with 15 inches being a good length for juniors while 17-18 inches is as long as you’ll ever want to get as a senior. Luckily, it is not crucial to get this exactly right as a beginner, because most of your time is spent on 2-3 inches of blade, right in the middle of your skate anyway. Stiffness is determined by your bodyweight, but for beginners it is advisable to err on the side of being too soft, rather than too stiff. As you become more experienced, and your technique improves, how your rocker, your bend, and even tube thickness become more important.

blade covers to walk from wherever you put on your skates, to wherever you are skating

The boots are essentially the same as inline boots. In fact, until relatively recently, short track boots have been IDENTICAL to inline boots, and manufactures didn’t make much of a distinction. Recently though, the bolt spacing on inline boots has changed from 165mm spacing to 195mm spacing. Fortunately, owing to the very simple nature of short track blades, one can easily get around this problem through use of an adaptor. Obviously, if you ever want to be a competitive racer in short track, you will need purpose-built short track boots, but as a beginner, adaptor plates will do just fine. Weber sports sells a good adaptor, and Raps (owners of the double-void extrusion patent) also manufacture an adaptor.

long sleeves and shin pad distinguish this suit from regular inline suits

An obvious difference between ice and most other skating surfaces is that it is cold. Ice halls and stadiums are, as a general rule, quite cold places and one thus has to dress accordingly. Short track suits have long sleeves, that is the most obvious difference. If you look closely at the photo above, you will also notice that they have shin pads. These are relatively soft shin pads, and it is common for skaters to wear harder shin pads underneath. The reason for this is obvious – in an inline pack, you occasionally get bumped by someone else’s skates, but it’s ok because wheels are not particularly sharp. Ice blades on the other hand, are quite sharp and the pads act as protection.

At higher levels of competition, cut proof suits will be required. These often take the form of full suits worn underneath a club or national suit, or sometimes the cut proof material is built into the suit itself. These suits are very expensive however, and protect the skater from very high-speed impacts, and the beginner skater need not concern themselves with them.

protects your neck, keeps you warm, and also catches bits of food

On the subject of protection, there are a plethora of other bits of protective gear used by short trackers to protect themselves from stray skates. The funny looking thing pictured above that looks a bit like a bib is a neck guard. This protects the veins and arteries around your neck from potentially fatal injuries resulting from crashing and ice skates. These are made out of a material that provides a high degree of cut-protection (usually a fibre like dyneema or kevlar). In addition to neck guards, one can also use ankle protectors to protect the very obvious veins and tendons that are concentrated around the ankle area.

ankle protectors protect your ankles. they can also protect your wrists (if you wear them on your wrists)

one final bit of obvious protection that every beginner should have is a pair of gloves. These are useful not just for protection from the cold, and other people’s skates, but eventually for “pivoting” (where you put your hand on the ice in the corners to steady yourself when you’re leaning very low). Most inline skaters should be familiar with the idea of wearing gloves, but it is important to note that gloves for ice skating should have full-fingers.

fits like a glove... because it is a glove

Other essential things to bring to training include a towel for drying the ice off your blades. It may sound slightly strange, but ice skate blades can and do rust. Also, no skating training session on the short track would be complete without a helmet. Special purpose-built short track helmets do exist, but for beginners, any kind of bicycle helmet should suffice.

the same helmet as I use for inline skating

So this is pretty much all the gear you will need to get on the ice and have a skate around. Initially, things like sharpening your skates (which I might cover in a later post) can be done on borrowed club jigs, or skate shops (if you happen to be in Canada or the Netherlands), or even very generous friends. Eventually though, you will have to accumulate the gear required to keep your skates sharp. Eventually, you will also need to learn about how to set up your blades properly. For now, I will just go through the gear.

sharpening jig

with regards to jigs, I would recommend one that easily disassembles because they are easier to travel with. There are many different types of jig out there and they all work fine. In a later post I will cover some basics about how to set up a jig properly (what little I know about it). It is important to note that due to very slight differences between jigs, you should try to always sharpen your skates in the same jig. I am often asked if it really makes a difference and the answer is “yes and no”. Yes, it does make a difference, but no, there is a good chance you won’t notice it. But for a top skater, skating at almost 60km/h, balanced on a piece of steel 1mm thick, these very tiny perturbations can definitely be felt.

a sharpening stone

The other essential part of the sharpening is the ubiquitous sharpening stone. Stones purpose-built for sharpening skates are sold in many specialty skating shops, but any stone that is flat can be used. Most hardware stores carry stones which are designed to be used with tools like chisels. Many specialty kitchen cutlery stores also carry stones, but these have a much finer surface and are more suitable to be used as polishing stones rather than sharpening. In general, the width of the stone should be at least seven inches.

side stones of varying degrees of abrasiveness

In addition to the large sharpening stone, smaller side stones are also needed. These can be much less coarse than the large stone as they are used to refine the edge of the blade from the sides, and not the top. These stones are also useful to have in your skate bag “for emergencies”.

Once you start getting into serious competition, (and presumably some serious speed), the setup of your skates will matter more and more to your progress. Variables such as the rocker and bend of your blades will become important, as will the ability to adjust those variables. For now, I will simply list the equipment required and will leave the explanation of how to use them properly to a later post.

accurate measurement is the beginning

The first tool in the arsenal of a skate tech is the 3-point gauge. The principle is simple enough – it measures how far a central point deviates from a theoretical straight line between two other points. It is the tool that allows you to measure both your bend and your rocker (they are both basically curved lines, curved along different axes).

coarse diamond stone

The “rocker” is the measure of the radius of the curve of the blade along the plane of the blade. Because of the way a blade deforms when you put pressure on it (that is how ice blades turn) the rocker will affect the radius at which you turn corners most effectively. On a long track, where the corner typically has a radius of 23-26 meters (depending on whether you are on the inner or outer lane) the radius of the blade is often very slight, usually between 21-26 meters. A smaller radius (more curve) allows you to feel the blade steering better, while a larger radius allows more blade to be on the ice at any one time, giving you more glide and more pressure.

On a short track, a long track blade cannot ordinarily turn the corner under pressure (you can get away with it if you are going very slowly, or are very light). The radius must be much, much smaller. On my blades, the radius is 6 meters near the toe, 11 meters in the middle, and 5 meters at the heel. This is called a “variable rocker” and is the norm in modern short track skating. Adjusting the rocker is a matter of putting the blades in the sharpening jig, running the gauge over them, and slowly “sharpening away” sections of blade until the radius matches what you’re after. It can take a VERY long time to do this, so we use diamond stones (pictured above) because they have the property of being very abrasive, while still being very smooth and flat. Machines are also commonly used to do the initial work, with the final adjustments being done by hand.

this is not a trick of the light - the blade is bent

The bend, like the rocker is also the measure of a curvy line. This time it is the radius of the curve of the blade along the plane of the ice (it is easier to see what I mean by looking at the photograph above). The bend is considerably more difficult to implement and adjust because it involves, you guessed it, actually bending the blade. The purpose of bending the blade, is so that a longer section of blade is touching the ice while one is cornering (to get the same amount of contact patch without a bend, one would need to put much more pressure on the blade, and sometimes this is simplt not possible). The tradeoff with a bend in any one direction is that you sacrifice a lot of push in the other direction. In short track, where you spend most of your time turning left, this sacrifice is negligible. In any case, the gauge is used in a similar way as is done for rockering, but a different tool is used:

The pennington blade bender

As you may have guessed by the absence of the wooden background in this image, I do not own one of these. For long track skates, the blades are also bent, but the bend is very slight, especially on the left skate (because both edges are important for pushing in long track, whereas in short track, both skates are used mostly for cornering in one direction).

long track skates, quite different from inline skates (important note: these are not "typical" skates that you would buy in a shop)

Once you’ve had a good taste of short track skating, you may want to simply continue with it, or you may want to give long track skating a try. Thankfully, much less protective equipment is required (because collisions between skaters are much less frequent). The boots and blades however are very different. While it is obvious in the above picture that a long track boot is much lower-cut than a short track or inline boot, what is less obvious is that they are much softer structurally. This is because the ankle is a much more active part of the skating technique, and a softer boot allows you to “feel” the ice more, which is essential in long track.

The blades are also very obviously different, with a hinge at the toe giving them the name “clap skate”. The clap basically allows your push to extend further than it normally would – they are not used on short track because it is unsafe to have clap skates when skaters are in such close proximity. It also makes the blades very much more expensive than short track blades. Unfortunately, while it is relatively easy to find inexpensive short track blades from many different manufacturers (Maple, Pennington, Bont, just to name a few), there are basically only two manufacturers of decent long track blades – Viking, and Maple. A third has recently made an entry into the scene, but at the time of writing, I only have authoritative accounts on their top-end product, which I would not recommend for a beginner long track skater.

So to get started, any low-cut boot with 165mm bolt spacing which is reasonably structurally soft will do. As for choice of blades, I would personally recommend the maples for an inline skater making the transition to ice as they are stiffer than the vikings and will “feel” and behave more similarly to inline skates. If you’ve been doing a lot of short track as part of your transition, then you will find soft long track boots an ankle-strengthening experience, but should get the hang of cornering quite quickly. Deeper technical advice I will leave for a later post, but suffice to say that the main difference between ice and inline straights is the timing.

It is important to note that it is extremely beneficial to do all three of these at the same time. Inline skating is excellent for maintaining physical conditioning during the warmer part of the year (and you also get to be outside). Short track skating is the best thing you can do for your corners as it is unforgiving of poor technique and on the ice you effectively have an infinite amount of grip, while long track allows you to reach speeds much higher than is possible on either inline or short track. All three can have benefits for the others and it should surprise nobody that some of the best long track skaters in the world came from a background of either inline or short track.

I shall write more later, and hope to cover the subjects of technique and biomechanics in later posts, but for now I hope that this article has given you a good idea of how to get started. Feel free to leave a comment or contact the author via the contact form on this website.

So, it’s been a while since I’ve last posted. It isn’t often that the main site gets outposted by the Darkroom, but it’s finally happened. Of course, the fact that I’ve recently returned from Mongolia (a destination more photogenic than write-o-genic) has nothing to do with that. Anyway, two weeks ago I visited a little restaurant in Denmark called “Noma” whose main claim to fame is that it is apparently the best restaurant in the world.

Anyone who knows a little bit about me knows that I enjoy my food. That can be interpreted in a number of ways ranging from me simply enjoying copious amounts of food, all the way to me enjoying expensive haute cuisine where many very small courses are brought to the diner on pretentious large plates by waiters with French accents. If you’re wondering which end of this spectrum I gravitate towards, my answer is “yes”.

My most recent proper fine dining experience was on the event of my birthday, courtesy of restaurant A.O.C. in Copenhagen. Although the restaurant is the holder of a Michelin star, I did not feel compelled to write at length about it, mostly because earlier in the year I had visited De Librije and The Fat Duck, which are not only 3-star establishments (3 is the maximum number, and rarely awarded), but heavyweights in their own right in the world of fine dining. It surprised me though, that the city of Copenhagen with its small population, in the country of Denmark which not only has a small population, but is also not exactly famous for its fine dining scene, was able to muster up such an experience.

Noma itself is a curiosity in that the Michelin guide has only awarded it two stars, yet has now stood at the top of the world restaurant ranking for the second year in a row. The rankings are of course, calculated very differently – the Michelin guide sends reviewers in secret to all restaurants being considered and restaurants being considered for Michelin stars are often visited by many reviewers who then meet in secret in the following months to discuss their experiences. The Restaurant Magazine ranking is decided by surveying industry experts, insiders, and the chefs themselves. In such circumstances, it might be easy for a restaurant to gain an unusually high position by fluke for a short while.

However, this year Noma hit the number 1 spot for the second year in a row. During the previous year, members of the restauranting world, shocked at Noma’s surprise ascendancy to the top spot, probably went to great lengths to get a reservation (yes, it takes a special kind of persistence to get one of these) and see for themselves if its place at the top of the restauranting podium is deserved or not. Naturally, since I have dined at far too many places listed in the top 100 and eaten more Michelin stars than exist in all of Denmark, I decided that I too should “check” to see whether Noma was truly deserving of the accolade.

(click on the pictures for enlargement)

We thought this was a pot of flowers, simply placed on our table for decoration... but it turned out to be our first course

Noma is headed by charismatic head chef Rene Redzepi who earned his wings working at the famous (and now closed) El Bulli in Spain – the previous occupant of the number 1 position (The Fat Duck and the French Laundry occasionally displaced it in the 9 years of the ranking’s existence). What’s hot in fine dining these days is the art of “molecular gastronomy” pioneered by Ferran Adria of El Bulli and it involves innovative and often very unconventional techniques of food preparation. The other well-known restaurant to practice molecular gastronomy is The Fat Duck, where my dining experience there began with a dish prepared in a vat of liquid nitrogen (you just can’t make this stuff up).

One of the many intriguing things about molecular gastronomy is that chefs are no longer constrained by traditional parameters, like the shape of their ingredients. Indeed our first course, cunningly disguised as a table decoration consisted of a malt flatbread. The latitude for creativity in designing the courses makes for a very theatrical eating experience. Modern fine dining now expects more than simply good tastes and smells. Every sensory input imaginable is being used to enhance the experience of the food, and to great effect.

seemingly simple dishes, seemingly simple ingredients, surprisingly complex sensory experiences

Perhaps one of the things that separates Noma from the “crowd”, even the very small crowd of a handful of restaurants who dare the molecular gastronomy, is that there is an emphasis on local ingredients. Fine dining has always existed, it seems, to serve the very wealthy, and the very wealthy have a habit of demanding the very best ingredients from around the world. Redzepi bucks this trend by basically serving up ingredients sourced from the local area – almost all of the ingredients come from within a circle that extends about fifty miles from the restaurant. As if that wasn’t enough of a challenge for a restaurant of this calibre, the ingredients also have to be in season (I really must try dining here in the Scandinavian winter).

my first thought was that quails were not big enough to lay eggs this size, then the waiter opened the shell up to reveal the actual eggs... #awkward

The result of working within these considerable constraints is an experimentation and innovation level that is unusually high. This, I believe, is the real reason that this restaurant is held in such high regard. Every saturday night, all the chefs get together after the end of the service, and have a little show-and-tell. Here they present what is essentially a food-brainstorming session where new dishes are examined and tested. For those readers with twitter, @ReneRedzepiNoma is Rene’s twitter feed and he will often post pictures of promising projects to his feed (and making this Author very hungry in the process).

new techniques meet old ingredients in new ways

After the initial barrage of small appetisers we settled into a “journey” through the main courses. Something I often ask for at restaurants to “test” them is for them to match each course to a non-alcoholic drink instead of a wine. I first got the idea at Vue de Monde, a very good restaurant in Melbourne, and have done this a few times since (even at Vue, after they stopped doing it. I think their sommelier hates me). At Per Se, after an initial pause from the shock of such an unusual request, the front of house manager proceeded to improvise some very innovative drinks to match my courses. Here at Noma, they pre-empted me by already having the option. The drinks were mostly blends of seasonal fruits and vegetables which matched the courses very well. They also made for a very amusing game of “guess the drink” which we were surprisingly bad at.

My favourite dish of the night: razor clam and horseradish with dill and parsley sauce

The courses were creative and surprising, and it goes without saying that it was unlike anything I have had before. None of the dishes could be called “traditional” in any sense of the word, yet many of them invoked memories of dishes of days gone by, except with a twist. The dishes were delicious, but they were something more. In my many other fine dining experiences, the object seemed to be to take a combination of good tastes and smells and deliver them to the recipient in various different ways. Points would be awarded to good combinations and effective, appropriate delivery methods. Noma was different, it mixed things up and challenged the consumer. For example, I would never think of putting horseradish, clam, dill, and parsley in the same dish… but it worked, and it was weird, and I think it pushed the definition of “eating” for me (in a good way).

Scallops and beech nut (from beech trees) cereals, watercress, and some squid ink which looked simply wonderful on my teeth

In the tradition of molecular gastronomy, it was impossible to tell what you were eating simply by looking at it. The taste would often be a pretty good clue. I think if I had eaten the whole meal, then been told afterwards what was in it, I would have struggled to believe it. The ingredients were, on the whole, quite simple. One of my dining companions was a local and she often would remark “oh, we used to pick those when we were kids” indicating to me that Noma’s reputation for foraging locally for their food was no myth. The food itself was more than a (delicious) challenge for the taste buds, but also an invitation. An invitation to taste Denmark and look at it in a way that you might not have previously. This invitation to “interact” even extended to the food…

Eggs and other yummy stuff

Indeed the inevitable finally came – an interactive dish. At The Fat Duck, we were served a seafood dish along with a sea shell with a set of headphones broadcasting sounds of the sea. At Noma we were told to fry an egg, then mix in the various additives according to a certain order and timing (a timer was provided to assist with the timing). I can just imagine the furious diner now standing up and exclaiming “I didn’t come halfway around the globe to the best restaurant in the world just to fry myself an egg!”. The dining experience at Noma reflects a wider philosophy, and that is one where we connect with our food.

“This is the new globalization, where things that are inexpensive to transport, and noncompetitive to share, like knowledge, ideas and creativity, move around the world with ease, while things which are costly to move, both in monetary and environmental terms, such as fresh food, don’t have to move as far – that’s smart.”

Too many people these days, especially fine diners, have forgotten about what food really is. It isn’t just expensive bits of funny-tasting stuff that we cook in a certain way so we can say “yum” then brag to our friends about it later. Its living things, things that grow, things that go through a long process before they end up on your plate. Using local ingredients is just a part of that, but what Redzepi has done is he has made it “cool” again to see food in this way. Perhaps indicative of Noma’s meteoric rise to the top is that, on its debut in the rankings, it was voted chef’s choice.

It is my hope that more restaurants like Noma pop up around the world. Not serving Nordic cuisine – that would be missing the point entirely. But embracing the philosophy of bringing the very best chefs, and techniques to bear on locally-sourced ingredients. Not just because it is better for the environment to eat locally-sourced foods (although that is a pretty good reason), but because it would give each restaurant its own unique character and identity – quite the opposite to the previous movement of carbon-copy big-brand restaurants like “Nobu”, “Pierre Gagnaire”, and “L’Atelier” opening up in big cities all over the world. This is the new globalization, where things that are inexpensive to transport, and noncompetitive to share, like knowledge, ideas and creativity, move around the world with ease, while things which are costly to move, both in monetary and environmental terms, such as fresh food, don’t have to move as far – that’s smart.

After six hours, we were done...

And inevitably, some of you are probably wondering about my verdict on the restaurant. This one is difficult, because the experience as a whole was subtly different to what fine diners are used to. We are used to being served, having the tastes and sensations washed over us while we passively experience and savour them. This was different. This was challenging, and interactive (and not only when we had to fry an egg which was both challenging and interactive). I suppose one could cop out and say that the comparison is too difficult, say that it is like comparing apples and oranges. But instead, imagine watching a well-executed blockbuster action movie – where the viewer is relatively passive, but nevertheless very entertained (something like Jurassic Park for example). Now think about a similarly well-executed movie, except that buried in the dialogue and characterizations are not just realistic, moving, and entertaining performances (all the great restaurants I’ve been to definitely have that “wow” factor), but this movie challenges you, nudges you out of your comfort zone, and really makes you think… perhaps a little bit like The Dark Knight. It was daring, it was different, and perhaps Noma really is the best restaurant in the world.