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.

Thinking about this further, one can’t help but be struck by the peculiarity of the situation. An Australian who has only been ice skating for three years is given the task of teaching Danish juniors to skate. Of course, anyone who has been following this website will also know that I used to be an inline skater, and was part of the Australian “program” which took a bunch of inline skaters and trained them for the Olympics. In 16 months, one out of five of us made it to the games, a seemingly impossible proposition at the start of the journey. Since all of the Danish skaters are originally inline skaters, my particular experience is more valuable than say, someone who has been ice skating all their lives.

So recently we have been doing some short track skating to help the skaters with cornering technique as well as ice feel, and it has been going very well. More recently, we had our first long track training camp. For this, we went to holland, and coincidentally ended up at the very ice skating rink where I first learned how to ice skate (strictly speaking, the first long track I ever skated on was Dronten, but I only went for a week, and I was in the middle of a backpacking trip). So over the course of a long weekend, I attempted to work my magic on a small squad of talented inline skaters to try and make them good ice skaters.

In my characteristic style, I took some video. Not just for technique analysis (although there was plenty of that) but also to document what happened, to have the memories, and just for a bit of fun. I present the video here:

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):

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.

Anyone who has ever been involved at a fairly serious level in the world of sport will have come across nutritional supplements of some kind. These can range from simply having electrolytes in your drinking water to practically constructing entire meals out of various powders and vitamin tablets. There are many arguments for and against the use of supplements, and to what extent they should be used, and to what extent they are even useful. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and the bottom line is that many of these supplements work… but is that the whole story?

Obviously I wouldn’t be writing an article about it if there wasn’t a story of some kind to be told here. As with any good investigation, the golden rule is to follow the gold, so to speak. The big money in supplements is to be had in the US market and, not surprisingly, most companies that deal in supplements are based in the US and primarily operate out of there. As a result, most of the guidelines concerning regulation of the industry are shaped by what happens regulations-wise in the US.

Regulation

How do we regulate supplements? I guess it comes down to what they are. We eat them, so I suppose they are food. You can’t really call vitamin tablets “food” though, so maybe they could be classified as medicine. Of course, they’re not really medicines, and I’m sure the companies that manufacture them don’t want to go through the very arduous and rigorous process of having to get them approved as medicines. The truth is that in most jurisdictions these supplements are classified as neither food nor medicines, and as a result they are not subject to any of the regulations that food or medicines are subject to. Is this a problem? It can be.

The attitude amongst EU regulators is similar. Nobody really cares about regulating the supplement industry. The saying basically goes “if you get sick from this stuff, it’s your own fault, nobody is telling you to eat it”, which is true to an extent. It isn’t really food because nobody needs to eat it, and you never eat it in the same amounts or frequency as food. What this basically means is that supplement manufacturers have no obligations whatsoever concerning the quality or purity of what goes into the supplements, and this can have far-reaching consequences for those who use them.

Melamine

Take for example a protein powder. People who do a lot of resistance training (like weights) take protein powders after their workouts because it aids recovery, these powders typically being absorbed by your body much faster than just eating a few chunks of meat following a workout. You look on the back of the packaging and check the per-100g content of protein and are satisfied that you are getting adequate protein to recover from your training session.

Let’s look deeper though. How is protein measured? Protein is typically measured by measuring the nitrogen content (because proteins contain nitrogen) of food. There are ways to artificially increase the amount of nitrogen in food in order to give a higher figure for protein content. Thanks to the Chinese Milk Scandal, we are now familiar with melamine. Melamine is a chemical that is used in fire retardants, furniture coatings, and plastic dinnerware – it isn’t edible. Mixing small amounts of melamine into milk allows the milk to be thinned out considerably while maintaining the illusion of a high protein content. Of course, there is no extra protein, and when the melamine gets into your body, it pairs up with cyanuric acid (melamine is a base) and forms crystals in the kidneys.

Ever heard stories about bodybuilders having trouble with their kidneys because of the protein powder? Melamine is probably the reason why. The LD50 for melamine is actually quite low, but if you ingest it regularly, it will accumulate faster than your body is able to flush it out. Obviously, it will have a greater effect on infants and small pets, which is how the original Chinese Milk Scandal broke. Putting melamine in food is completely illegal of course, but since supplements like protein powder aren’t technically classified as food, there’s nothing to stop them from doing this, except perhaps the occasional law suit.

Heavy Metals

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. A consumer reports article last year reported finding heavy metals in many popular supplements. Of course, all of the supplement companies implicated came out with scathing attacks on every aspect of the article, and tried to blur the issue by comparing their products to certain kinds of shellfish (which are known to contain similar amounts of heavy metals). These comparisons are absurd, of course, because nobody consumes shellfish in anywhere near the amounts or frequency as people consume protein powder. While it is true that the amounts are quite small, and for most users insignificant, it does highlight the fact that these companies are not subject to any real regulation or quality control aside from their own.

In addition, (organic) contaminants have been known to react with things in our stomachs and turn into substances which appear on the doping list. Whether this was deliberate or not (look up “nandrolone contamination”) is difficult to say, but the outcomes of such contamination are perhaps more immediate and consequential to a competitive athlete who may end up serving a ban through no fault of her own, than the long-term consequences of lead or cadmium poisoning.

So what do we do about this? We like the convenience of these drinks and bars, ready for us when we finish a workout to aid our recovery, yet we are faced with uncertainty about contaminants, benign or otherwise, in these supplements. Large government bodies generally don’t care for the issue because it really only affects a small portion of the population, and taking supplements is entirely voluntary – it’s not like food, where you have to eat it all the time (and governments have enough trouble regulating the food industry). We certainly can’t trust the word of the supplement manufacturers, because they’re hardly going to bad-mouth their own products… So do we just have to put up with this big fat caveat emptor?

An Idea

I have an idea… we could start some kind of online index where the community of elite athletes and coaches submit their favourite supplements (and possibly donate some money to pay for the lab time) and we test them independently. The impact of the consumer reports article clearly shows that public opinion counts for a lot in this industry, and building a publicly accessible lookup-list of supplements with independent testing, and the endorsement of the very people who need this oversight the most would be an invaluable resource. I’m happy to lead this at the start, being something of an athlete as well as something of a scientist (as well as having a small amount of experience with building websites). I’m envisioning that it will become a little bit like dpreview.com has become for the digital camera industry.

What do people think?

A batsman from the Columbia University Cricket Club faces a ball at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx

With the ICC Cricket World Cup under way, I thought this would be a good time to write an article about cricket for the benefit of my friends who are not familiar with the game. With any luck I will be able to communicate a basic understanding of the game, and perhaps even a bit of appreciation for the various skills and difficulties associated with it. At the very least, I hope that my friends will be able to understand the occasional facebook status update about results from the world cup. Cricket is often confusing to newcomers because (in typical English fashion) the nomenclature of the game is strange, and many words have more than one meaning depending on the context.

Cricket is a very old bat-and-ball game that originated in England. It is popular in England, and is considered by some to be the national sport. When the British Empire was at its peak, it spread the game throughout the colonies, and it is therefore no surprise that the world’s strongest cricketing nations are former British colonies. I first played it as a schoolboy in Hong Kong, although curiously enough I hardly played it while I lived in Australia (where it is one of the most popular summer sports). I briefly played for the Columbia University Cricket Club when I lived in New York.

There are various variants of the sport which are most easily distinguished by the length of time it takes to complete a game. At the very top, there are “test matches” which last up to five days – this is the highest form of the game. It is also the least-understood form of the game. The other two most common forms are “One Day Internationals” (ODIs) and “Twenty20″. ODIs, as the name suggests, last for about one day and consist of one innings of 50 overs per side. Twenty20 is basically identical, except with only 20 overs per side and they generally last just over three hours.

Basic Rules

The game is played on an oval-shaped grass field with no fixed dimensions. The boundary is marked by a rope, and the middle is dominated by a 22-yard rectangular pitch called the wicket. At either end of this rectangular pitch stand three vertical bits of wood which are called stumps (sometimes also called wickets) across the top which are placed bails. During the game, the batting team will have two batsmen batting, standing at either end of the wicket, while the fielding side will have their full team of 11 players in the field.

The object of the game is to accumulate a higher number of runs than the other team. A run is scored when the two batsmen swap ends after a ball is bowled (most often after one of the batsmen has hit it). If a ball is hit and reaches the boundary it is automatically counted as four runs, if it passes the boundary without touching the ground, then it is counted as six runs.¹ Runs are also awarded for wides (when the ball is bowled outside a certain area) and for no-balls. No balls also result in the ball having to be bowled again. These extra runs are called “extras”.

A bowler (like a pitcher) will take a run up to one end of the rectangular pitch and then bowl a ball overarm towards the other end in the general direction of one of the batsmen. This happens six times in an over after which a different bowler will bowl the ball from the other end towards the other set of stumps. The objective of the bowlers is to remove the batsmen by getting them out while simultaneously limiting the number of runs.

There are many ways of going out in cricket. If the ball is hit, then caught before it touches the ground, then the batsman is out (this includes if it skims the edge of the bat, and then is caught by the wicket-keeper). If the batsman is outside his crease (a line 4 feet in front of the wicket) and the ball touches those bits of wood such that the bails are dislodged, then he is out. If this happens right after he has been bowled to, then he is “stumped”, if it happens while the batsmen are swapping ends in the process of scoring a run, then he is “run out”. If a ball is bowled, and the batsman misses it and it carries through to the wickets and dislodges the bails, then the batsman is “clean bowled”.

In a typical innings, the bowlers will continue bowling balls at the batsmen until either all of the batsmen are out, or a predetermined number of balls are bowled. (In a test match where there are, in principle, unlimited overs, there exists an additional option to declare – to end an innings before all the batsmen are out, which can be important strategically).

Hopefully the above explanations have given you a basic understanding of the mechanics of the game, so if you catch it on TV it won’t just look like a bunch of guys standing out in a field getting sunburnt.

A cricket ball

Basic Strategy

A well-rounded team will generally consist of 5 batsmen, 5 bowlers, and a wicket-keeper. Of course, at high levels of cricket, most of the players are decently capable of playing any position, but they will usually specialize in one aspect of the game. Players who are talented at batting and bowling are called all-rounders and are quite rare, and valuable players to have for obvious reasons.

A cricket ball is made from cork and is covered in leather, with a seam stitched around its equator. This gives bowlers all manner of devious ways in which to get a batsman out. This is generally what happens:

At the start of the innings, the ball is new and due to aerodynamics will move through the air faster. In the early overs of an innings the type of bowling primarily employed is that of the fast variety (typically 130+ km/h). Like fast serves in tennis, and fastballs in baseball, these are difficult for batsmen simply because they are so fast that they give batsmen less time to react to the delivery, making it difficult to score runs and also making them vulnerable to going out. Fast bowling is also psychologically intimidating, with bowlers sometimes deliberately bowling a ball to bounce into the body of a batsman to unsettle him.

As the game progresses, the ball becomes worn. However, a good fielding side will take care to keep one side of the ball more “polished” than the other. This has the effect of making the ball swing in the air. A ball coming at a batsman at 130 km/h AND changing path through the air presents obvious problems for his run-scoring agenda. Then there’s the added unpredictability of the bounce if the ball lands on the seam.

After a while the ball becomes really worn, and it is difficult for the fast bowlers to get the same speeds as they did at the start of the innings. The fast bowlers also get tired. The roughened surface of the ball allows for another kind of bowling to be used effectively – spin. The principle is simple enough – bowl the ball down the wicket and spin it so that it changes direction on the bounce. Being consistently accurate with spin delivery is difficult though, and a poorly-executed spin-ball, because of it’s lower speed, may be struck more easily by a batsman. Effective spin bowling (see below) however, with its unpredictability both in the air, and off the bounce can be used to devastating effect.

On the receiving end of all this are the batsmen. Unlike in baseball, where the ball must be hit within a certain area, a ball may travel anywhere after striking a cricket bat. Glancing shots which use the pace of a fast bowler more than the momentum of the cricket bat are common. Typically the best batsmen are sent to bat first because, even though they have to face the brunt of the fast bowling attack, they also get the opportunity to face more balls because if they are later in the order, then there is a chance that they may run out of time in which to score runs.

Good batsmen are usually not only very coordinated with hitting a ball with a bat, but also have very quick reflexes to react to inconsistent bounces, or the swing of a fast ball. It is widely rumoured that legendary batsman Donald Bradman practiced by hitting a golf ball with a cricket stump against a sheet of corrugated iron to hone his reflexes.

The currently in-progress Cricket World Cup consists of a tournament of one day matches. In an ODI, a coin is tossed and the winner of the toss decides whether he wants his team to bat or bowl first. The decision can be a very important one because the condition of the wicket changes throughout the day. As the ground gets pounded by cricket balls it slowly becomes rougher and the bounce more unpredictable, or so the theory goes. Other factors to consider include the moisture in the ground (the ball rolls faster on dry hard ground, making boundaries slightly easier), and even changing weather conditions (although that is more a consideration for 5-day test matches).

Understanding the Numbers

Cricket is a sport that lends itself very readily to statistics. While I could go on for many more articles on the various cricket stats that I have committed to memory, here I will try to construct a rough guide to understanding the reports that might come out in the news relating to the current world cup.

Let’s begin with the match report from the recent game between Pakistan and Sri Lanka:

“Pakistan 277/7 (50 ov); Sri Lanka 266/9 (50 ov) – Pakistan won by 11 runs”

277/7 (two hundred and seventy seven for seven) is something you’ll often hear in a quick news report, and sometimes the big and small number is swapped. The side who bats first appears first. The big number is the number of runs. 277 is a decent score, especially considering that these are two very good, well-rounded teams playing each other. In an ODI, each side bowls 50 overs, which is 300 balls. The small number is the number of wickets lost. Every time a batsman goes out, it is called a “wicket” (remember my earlier point about confusing nomenclature?). So this means that Pakistan scored 277 runs, and in doing so seven batsmen went out. The number in brackets, not always present on result reports, is the number of overs. In this case, both teams reached the end of all of their overs and the winning side easily determined by counting the runs. This was a relatively close game with both teams having to “use up” all their balls before a result could be determined. The theoretical maximum number of runs per over is 36, and scores of 10 per over are not unusual, especially in the final overs of a game.

Now a different situation:

“Bangladesh 58 (18.5 ov); West Indies 59/1 (12.2 ov) – West Indies won by 9 wickets (with 226 balls remaining)”

The 58 with no number after it indicates that Bangladesh were “all out” for 58 runs (you could write 58/10, but that wastes ink). In this game the West Indies were able to bowl out the entire Bangladeshi team for only 58 runs on the 5th ball of the 19th over. Either the “windies” were having a very good bowling day, or Bangladesh were having a shocker of a batting day, though I suspect both factors conspired to create this result. The windies had no trouble chasing the total, and achieved this on the 2nd ball of the 13th over for the loss of only one wicket (so only one guy went out). When there is a successful run-chase, the margin of victory is not the number of runs (because who knows how high a total the winning team could have achieved) but instead is the difference in number of wickets taken by each team. The number of balls remaining is not always included.

Ok, lets have a look at a typical line on a scorecard:

| 1 . . 4 . . | . . 4 . 2 . | 1 . . W . nb . | . . 1 . . 2 | . . . . . . |

The numbers are the number of runs. The dots are just our lazy way of writing zero. This is where the term “dot ball” comes from. When a bowler bowls a dot ball, it is well-executed enough to prevent the batsman from scoring any runs. The big “W” means wicket, indicating that a batsman is out, and “nb” is short for “no ball”. Notice that no runs were scored during the last over – this is called a “maiden” over.

Batting stats are fairly easy to understand. There’s the batting average, which is the average number of runs that the batsman scores per wicket. This means that if a batsman somehow manages to get through a bunch of games without going out (he could still be “in” when the game runs out of overs, or he could be the unhappy half of the final pair when the last guy goes out). When you think about batting averages as being per wicket, although almost superfluous for batting, it helps us understand bowling stats.

Sometimes a brief match report will take the form:

Australia 262 for 6 (Watson 79, Clarke 58*, Mpofu 2-58) beat Zimbabwe 171 (Cremer 37, Johnson 4-19, Tait 2-34) by 91 runs

The names in brackets are “highlight” performances. So in th Australian batting innings, Watson scored 79 runs, and Clarke 58 runs not-out (that’s what the asterisk means). In the same innings, Mpofu (a bowler from Zimbabwe) gave away only 58 runs, for two wickets.

The other major stats that get bandied about are a batsman’s “strike rate”, which is simply the percentage of runs-from-balls that a batsman makes, and a bowler’s “economy” is the number of runs he gives away per wicket.

So hopefully this has given you a good overview of the game of cricket and will help you understand and enjoy the cricket world cup and any subsequent cricket games you might find yourself watching.

Getting ready to bat for the Columbia University Cricket Club. I went out for a "duck" that day (0 runs)

Footnotes

But how does one go about training our core muscles? Most people immediately think about doing lots of situps, or crunches. If you want to have good-looking abs, then by all means do lots of situps, but this is only a small part of the story. If you want to build core strength, it is essential to also target the lower back, the obliques, and even the pelvic floor muscles (the muscles that you use to hold your pee in). Targeting these muscles can sometimes be quite difficult because it requires you to really think about the exercises you’re doing, rather than repetitively go through the motions.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have had the experience of training myself to isolate various abdominal muscles while simultaneously being able to watch them on an ultrasound machine. There are various exercises that I do to train these muscles and I am going to try to describe some of them in this article.

A helpful thing to remember is that the point of all of these exercises is not to build bigger muscles. The point is to isolate certain muscles, and build strength and coordination of those muscles. These are the muscles that will form a stable base from which almost all bodily movement begins.

Start by lying down on your back with your feet on the ground and with your knees bent. Try to stay completely relaxed. Feel around the front of your lower torso with your fingers until you find the point at which your hip bones protrude. Move upwards just slightly from that point and press lightly with your fingers. Now draw your navel towards your spine (suck your tummy in). You should be able to feel those muscles activate (fyi, these are your internal obliques). Concentrate on being able to breathe in and out while maintaining that muscle contraction and keeping your belly in.

The first exercise is quite easy. While keeping those muscles activated, gently lift your left leg from the ground by about a centimeter (0.39 inches) and then put it down, repeat with the right leg. When you’re comfortable with that, you can straighten the leg that you are lifting. As the exercise gets harder, it is tempting to activate different muscles to help out, but you should resist this urge and concentrate on using those muscles just above your hips. Remember, the idea isn’t to become super-strong, it is to become more coordinated.

Next, flip over onto all fours and while keeping your tummy sucked in, extend your leg backwards without moving the rest of your body. Once you can do that smoothly, make it harder by extending your alternate arm. (see diagram)

The added difficulty of having to balance on an alternate hand and knee also makes you think a bit about where your “center” is. For males, it is in the middle of the body, about where the belly button is, and for females it is a few inches lower (and for speed skaters it’s even lower because we have such fat thighs). Not coincidentally, it is all the little muscles surrounding that center of mass that we are training for coordination. Concentrate on this first set of relatively easy exercises for a while before moving on to the next exercises, otherwise the proper muscles won’t be adequately trained. If they’re not adequately trained, you’ll move onto the next exercises, get frustrated, and your body will go back to using the wrong muscle groups – the ones associated with actually moving. We’re concentrating on those muscles that are used for stabilizing.

Once you’ve mastered the initial exercises, it’s time to move onto slightly harder stuff. Most of these exercises are designed with a sport like speed skating in mind (surprised? don’t be). Speed skating is very demanding on core stability and also on the stabilizing muscles around the hip joints, and to a lesser extent, the ankles. The following exercises will reflect this.

Start on your back again with your knees bent and your feet on the ground as before. Draw your navel towards your spine. Instead of lifting your leg up though, lift your hips off the ground. You should feel a muscle contraction in your gluteals and hamstrings when you do this. It is very important to keep those correct muscles in your abs isolated.

This is a considerably more difficult exercise than the first one, so take your time getting used to it before progressing to the next level, which is simply to take your arms off the ground and cross them over your chest, to add a little bit of instability to the structure.

Once you’re comfortable with this, you can do it with only one leg. Be careful though, make sure you are still isolating those muscles above your hips, and make absolutely sure you keep your body completely square (don’t rock from side to side) while balanced only on one foot.

Once you’ve mastered that, you can go one step further and place your feet on an inflatable exercise ball and instead of lifting and lowering your hips, you bend and straighten your legs. This exercise (and you’ll feel it) also targets the stabilizing muscles in your hips as well as your core.

By now the muscles in the sides of your core are probably starting to get stronger. There is a tendency to create abdominal pressure by contracting the whole group of lower abdominal muscles, including the center ones. The feeling is similar to that of being constipated. Try to resist doing this. A way to try to get the correct “feel” for which muscles you’re trying to contract (short of experimenting with a real-time ultrasound imager) is to lie on your back, draw your navel towards your spine, breathe in while concentrating on pushing your ribs out then breathing out as if through a straw. You should feel abdominal muscles in your sides, even in your back, and slightly further up your trunk tighten. Those are the muscles you should be recruiting. (If all of what I just said confuses you, don’t worry about it and just concentrate on keeping your belly sucked in).

The next exercise is quite difficult. Don’t be surprised if you can only do it for about 30 seconds to start with. If you do it frequently (like, every other day) you should be able to slowly build up to at least 2 minute sets.

Variously called the “ab plank”, “prone hold”, and “elbows and toes”, this is a very simple and very effective exercise at training the core stabilizing muscles. Resist the temptation to activate the ab muscles down the center of your tummy (the 6-pack muscles, or rectus abdominus) because it defeats the purpose of the exercise. An interesting thing that you’ll find, is that if you only use those 6-pack muscles, you’ll have a lot of trouble getting past 2 minutes, but if you concentrate on training the side muscles, then it actually becomes easier to hold the position for a long time. I used to be able to do 5 minute sets of these without too much difficulty.

Once you’re confident with this, you can move onto your sides.

The ab muscles are not naturally as strong, nor are they designed to bear as much weight in that direction as in the forward-backward direction (which is part of the reason why we’re much better at running forwards-backwards, than sideways), so don’t expect to be able to hold this position for very long. If you’re into speed skating, you’ll want to eventually do these side holds with only one foot. If you’re after even more difficulty, elevate that foot slightly and then move your hips up and down in a slow controlled manner.

All of the exercises so far have been very static. The reason for this is that the idea is to train your muscles to stabilize you, and when the muscles are being used in that way, they have to contract, but don’t often move very much. Depending on your sport, you may also want to do exercises which involve motion. I will present a few very general exercises here, but you should try to design exercises which involve movements that closely mimic your movements in your chosen sport.

This next exercise is useful because it activates a fairly steady muscle contraction over a wide range of motion. Done properly, it can also aid in your flexibility.

This is the ball throw situp. Being by sitting on the “corner” of an inflatable ball and have someone throw you a heavy object, like a 5kg medicine ball.

Catch the ball (this is important) and arch yourself over the inflatable ball, keeping the medicine ball over your head, then come back and throw the ball at whoever threw it at you. Try to get the thrower to aim the ball at your head, or slightly above your head. The ball should trace a path through the air like a setup for a football header shot (then you catch it, instead of headering it, because it’s a 5k medicine ball).

This exercise is simple enough, you kneel on an inflatable exercise ball. Try to kneel “up straight” and if you find it too easy, then cross your arms. If you have a strong and coordinated core (and reasonably good balance), this shouldn’t be very difficult.

The obvious progression from kneeling on the ball is to stand on it. Difficult as this sounds, it is actually surprisingly easy, especially if you’re good at kneeling on the ball. The tricky part is getting onto the ball. The best way to do it is with the help of a friend, but if you don’t have any friends then try to do it near a wall, or use the squat rack frame to support you as you step up. Try not to use a box because it is very easy to fall off the ball just as you’re mounting or dismounting and the sharp corners of a box aren’t the best things to land on.

Another exercise with a heavy medicine ball. It is especially easy in exercises like this to forget to draw your navel towards your spine and activate the right muscles, so don’t forget. Begin by just throwing the ball at each others’ chests, but you want to eventually be throwing the ball to either side, and in slightly unpredictable ways. Also slowly increase the distance between throwers because it forces you to throw the ball harder, and that in turn teaches you to brace your ab muscles more strongly.

This exercise is much more speed skating specific, but can be useful to the average core stability workout nutcase. Holding the ball out in front of you with slightly bent arms, begin in a lunge position, with both knees at 90 degrees, then step up onto a box (it should be about knee-height), stand up straight while bringing the leg you didn’t use to step up with up in front of you (the diagram is better than my description). It should be done in one fluid and controlled movement, and not too quickly. Pause at the top, count to three, then come back down. Do about ten on one leg, then swap legs. Eventually, when you’ve mastered this movement, you can do it with a barbell across your shoulders, but be careful and have someone to spot you, especially if the weight starts to get heavy.

Start with a very light weight on the bar (or just the bar) when you switch because the position that your abs are in when you have your arms in front of you, compared to when you’re supporting a barbell is slightly different and and arms-in-front position is more stable. (Rugby fans will notice Johnny Wilkinson’s preparation before a kick involves holding his arms out in front of him – that’s why he does it, to stabilize his core before the kick).

This last exercise involves a twisting motion, and requires a cable attached to some weights. I imagine professional tennis players and woodcutters do this one all the time (I call it the “wood chop”), but anyone else who uses their abs can benefit too. Simply sit on the inflatable exercise ball, draw your navel towards your spine, and pull the cable across your body with your arms straight. Try to lock your arms and shoulders into one solid object and twist that object against the lower half of your body (i.e. keep your hips still). Not a lot of weight is required to make this an effective exercise. Concentrate on keeping your heels on the ground. If your heels lift off, then you’ve got too much weight. Again, the object is to move in a slow and controlled manner.

So there you have it. The core of my core workout. Suffice to say that I didn’t miss out on the Olympics for lack of a strong core (it was mostly to do with my speed skating technique). For sports that are particularly core-intensive (like mogul-skiing, their workout is crazy) there are more, and harder exercises of course, but even they would have had to start by mastering these.

There is far too much emphasis these days among sports people to concentrate on building up the motor-movement muscles, and WAY too much emphasis on the appearance of muscles in “general fitness” circles. Truth is, there are huge gains to be made in sports performance from concentrating more on technique, coordination, and core stability. For the casual weekend warrior, this is especially important for injury prevention.

There's more to it than just putting some skates on and going fast

In catching up with old friends in Melbourne, I have noticed a curious trend. Ordinarily, when one catches up with old friends after being overseas for an extended period, one is asked mostly about where one has been, what one did while there, and was it was like. While I was, expectedly, bombarded with those questions, I was struck by something else that I was asked for a lot – advice on physical training.

Unbeknownst to me, it seems that being a full-time athlete makes me an ideal candidate for being asked about all things relating to physical training, the assumption here being that I am somehow very knowledgeable about it. While I am fairly knowledgeable when it comes to matters of training, that should not be an obvious thing. Not all (in fact, very few) athletes know much about the science behind their training schedules. I suppose my friends also assumed that, being the sort of person who I am, I would have taken the time to learn about the science behind the training. While this happens to be true, the information in my head is not as useful as a lot of people seem to think.

Let me begin by saying that I’m not a naturally sporty person. That might sound absurd, given that I have been involved in a great many sports, some at a fairly competitive level. A phrase I have recently used a lot is that I have been the fortunate winner of some kind of “genetic lottery”. It is well-known among my friends that I eat ridiculous amounts of food and never seem to put on any weight. What is less well-known is that this isn’t because I lead an active lifestyle. While I lived in New York doing my masters degree, I did almost no exercise. I always took the subway from my apartment on 86th St to uni, on 116th, which is about 20-30 minutes worth of walking. I still ate copious amounts of food, yet I neither gained weight, nor did I have the appearance of gaining weight. I did the occasional push up and sit-up for merely cosmetic purposes, in preparation for the unlikely scenario that a girl should find herself in my apartment requesting an inspection of the muscles in question.

It was only after I finished the actual degree and I found myself with a lot of free time, did the thought of exercise even cross my mind. I would then run a lap of central park just for fun, or play some indoor soccer or table tennis. An unusual thing that I noticed was that, despite not having done any training for almost a year, I was still a great deal fitter and stronger than most of the people who also participated in these activities. Moreover, most of these people were regular and long-term participants in those activities. Genetics – mere luck – determine a great deal about one’s sporting prowess, and this is especially apparent at the elite level. It is also apparent, if one knows what one is looking for, at the lower levels of sport. This is something to keep in mind, when considering any advice I give relating to sport.

Often I am asked to give advice on what training needs to be done for “general fitness”. This question baffles me. For me, sport is a tool; a means to an end. Most of the time for me, that end is just to have fun and be social. Recently, I had a go at making the Olympic games that end, but it didn’t quite work out. The notion that there are people out there who, by themselves, for no other reason than “general fitness” go out for runs and to the gym confuses me slightly. I often ask “what’s your goal?” to which I am usually met with the reply “just to get fit” at which point my head explodes in confusion.

But this is silly. It seems ridiculous that someone who has spent as much time in as many different sports as I have, and as much time training at a high level as I have can offer no help to the hapless seeker of information on how to be “generally fit”. Without clear goals (and by “clear goals” what I really mean is, “which olympic event are you trying to win?”) it is difficult for me to dispense responsible advice. However, in my meandering experience and observation, I have witnessed a great many people in their quest for “general fitness” doing things wrong. Is this a bad thing? My previous argument included matters such as risk of injury, however I have since realized that since they are not full time athletes, doing things badly just occasionally doesn’t do them enough harm to properly inconvenience them, and by “properly inconvenience”, I mean “injure themselves in a way that they would notice, and would impair their ability to train further”.

Nevertheless, I will now attempt to give advice (hence the title of this post) on how one might go about achieving their goal of “general fitness” without attracting the ire of people such as myself.

Firstly a word about technique. It is the first and last thing you should be thinking about whenever you do sport. There is hardly space in this article to go into any real detail about biomechanics so I won’t. Instead, my advice is to observe people who are at the top of whatever sport you happen to be doing and do what they do. Proper technique is the key to realizing your full potential in any given sport. Even if you do not have Olympic aspirations, proper technique is also a good way to avoid injury. In everything you do, there exists such a thing as “proper technique”. Some people have an ability to watch people and then copy their technique well, while others can “feel” their way towards good technique (talented swimmers do this). Get a coach, get a mirror, get a stopwatch… do whatever it takes, but make absolutely sure that you are ALWAYS thinking about doing things with proper technique.

Have fun – many people forget this. Many people also forget that fun can take many different forms. Playing a team sport like hockey for example can be fun for the social aspect, sports like orienteering can be fun for the exposure to beautiful scenery and nature (and bears). For those who just go to the gym, perhaps it is a good time to catch up on all the latest lectures from iTunes U, or to take a survey on the correlation between female buttock diameter and bench press ability. It can even be as inane as wanting to socialize with hot female curlers after a curling match. Whatever you can do to make it fun, do it because if you’re not enjoying yourself, then you’re not going to be motivated, and being motivated is important for all those instances when you don’t really want to wake up to go training because it’s too cold, wet, or early in the afternoon.

What I’m going to focus on takes its cues sports-science-wise from the early part of a training program. This is the part where an athlete has just come back from a long break and is simply preparing the body for “proper” training. At this point, a lot of people are thinking “why don’t we just get straight into proper training”. The simple answer to that is that it might kill you, and it would certainly injure you in a way akin to taking one step forward and about ten steps back (starting from zero, mind you). If you eventually want to get into “proper” training, then it’s up to you but I would generally advise against it unless you really want to go to the Olympics. Past a certain volume of training, there are rapidly decreasing returns, and past a *slightly* further point, it will do more harm than good. One of the challenges of a high performance coach, is to find that maximum amount of training that a body can take and do the most with it. Athletes chosen for this kind of thing are often considered for their ability to withstand and recover from high volumes and intensities of training.

A quick word on eating – eat well. Drink LOTS, in fact, carry a water bottle around with you wherever you go and sip from it regularly. Don’t go crazy trying to avoid every little thing that has fat in it. Do NOT go out and buy all the low-fat and sugar-free food in the supermarket. Avoid processed foods as much as possible. Think of it this way – if it has been processed, then your body has to un-process it to get to it. While your body is busy doing that, it also has to clean out all the stuff that isn’t “food”, like preservatives, colouring, etc. That’s all effort that is being wasted, and effort that your body was never designed to go through. You should try very hard to eat something within 20 minutes of finishing a workout because your body absorbs things faster while it is in that heightened state. If you can stomach it, nibbling during a workout is also recommended (as a practical note, I’ve only been able to make that work on long bike rides).

Your cardiovascular system is important for obvious reasons. In sport, even in sports which emphasize sprinting over endurance (shot put, to take an extreme example) a well trained CV system is important because it helps you recover from training. My general feeling about this, is to do something that is as low-impact as possible. Cycling and swimming are options that come to mind, and which of these you choose depends largely on which is closer to the sport you are training for. For a sport like speed skating, cycling is perfect because not only is it low impact, but it also works very similar muscle groups to those used in skating. Swimming is a better all-round workout and doesn’t usually require as much space. (you could always put your bike on a wind-trainer, or use a stationary bike I suppose). If your chosen sport is an endurance-heavy sport, like cross country running, then running is another option. Running however, is quite high-impact and requires more recovery time, and this should be kept in mind when designing your own program.

Specifically, every workout you do will train your CV system to some extent. It is helpful though, to have at least one session a week which targets it specifically. When I trained, it was a 3-hour bike ride every Sunday afternoon in a large pack. Of course, this is in the context of a training week where we would often do an easy hour on the bike in the late afternoon of every day for “recovery”. If you’re on a bike, you’ll need more time than if you’re swimming, and if you’re running, try not to go for more than 45 minutes otherwise you’ll food-flat.

Work on your flexibility. You don’t have to be able to do the splits to be good at speed skating (although, if you’re a figure skater, it really helps) but having a good range of motion is very important not only for injury prevention, but for your own awareness of where bits of your own body are. Stretching for flexibility involves lengthening the muscle to its limit for about 20-30 seconds and repeating the process 2-3 times. Do NOT stretch immediately before or after a workout – it weakens the muscle. I suppose if you’re not training very often, or very intensely, it won’t matter much, but it will prevent you from getting the most out of your training. Flexibility workouts should be treated as separate workouts, but you can be flexible with them (har har) and do them anywhere – in front of the TV while your favourite weekly show is on for example. If flexibility is central to your sport, then you want to do this twice a week at least, otherwise once is fine.

Work on your core. When I say this, people think of abs, and six-packs. That is not quite what I mean. I’m really talking about obliques, and pelvic floor muscles. They are very underworked and underused muscles, yet are some of the most important when it comes to… well… moving. It’s hard to really understand this unless you’ve have a bad back injury. I had a prolapsed disc once, and it really sucked. It also made me realize how much you use your back in everything that you do, from tying your shoelaces, to opening doors. Small wonder then, that when you get to the elite level everyone tells you to work on your core. Of course, EVERYONE should work on their core because everyone moves. Just doing lots of sit ups though, isn’t going to help you very much.

working on our cores on the grass outside

You’re aiming to develop the muscles that stabilize you. This is all about having a strong platform from which to jump, throw, run, whatever. A nice one to start with is the “prone hold”, sometimes called the plank, or ab brace. It’s simple – you hold yourself off the ground using your elbows and toes. The key is to keep your back straight and to draw your belly button towards your spine (sucking your tummy in). Start with two or three sets of thirty seconds each. It might take a while, but you should eventually aim to progress to at least two sets of two minutes. I used to be able to do two sets of five minutes every day without much trouble. Another good exercise to add to that, is what I call the “wood chop”. This is where you sit on a medium-sized inflatable fit ball, and perform a twisting action with your arms outstretched drawing a weighted-cable across the front of your body (rather like chopping at a tree with an axe). These exercises won’t necessarily make you look hot in the mirror (with a shirt off), but they will make you biomechanically much more efficient at moving your own body.

Intensity is important. I actually have the opposite problem when I work out, I have a tendency to go out too hard and toast myself (which is fine for certain workouts, but not all). This depends very largely on what sport you pick, but it is a good idea to vary the intensity of your workouts. Training too intensely too often will burn you out and injure you. Doing the opposite will make you surprisingly useless at your chosen sport. Take this anecdote – I had a friend, Juan Carlos Valencia, stay with me for a number of months and he would run at least 10k every day. He challenged me to a race once – 800m, and I feel sure that he felt sure that he would win. He spent more time than I did training, and he certainly ran a far greater distance on a regular basis. However, when the day of the race came, I ran on his shoulder for 500m at a pace that I would describe as “uncomfortably fast”, but at 300m to go, I took off and covered the final 300m in the time it took him to cover 200m. I was exhausted, and he was not… but I had won the race by a considerable margin. I was training 5 days a week at the time (I was training for the 400m at university games), and my workouts weren’t long, but they involved a lot more speed work and were done at a much higher intensity (I call it “vomit intensity”).

Now just some quick notes on weight training to finish off.

Weight training in indispensable if you’re serious about getting anywhere in sport. Even if you aren’t, it’s much more time efficient than simply doing a lot of the sport. Always do a full warm up consisting of at least 5 minutes on a stationary bike or equivalently low-impact apparatus. Start with legs, then chest, shoulders, arms, and finish with your core workout. Even though you don’t specifically target your core until the end, you should always be thinking about what your core is doing when you do all the exercises. Always warm down afterwards, and don’t feel silly if you’re spending more time warming up and warming down than you actually spend working out.

Specificity is key. For weight training to really benefit you in the sport that you are doing, you need to be doing exercises which are reasonably specific to the actions that you perform in that sport. In speed skating, that is relatively easy – lots of squats, dead lifts, lunges and other similar exercises. Even then, we were instructed to time our muscle contractions to closely mimic what they would do in skating. For example, we did one-legged squats with a small amount of weight and we would count to three on the way down, but come up using only one count. Does it make a difference? Yes, a very very small one… but when fractions of a second matter so much, these things all add up. I suppose if you’re getting to the stage where you’re designing very specific weight exercises to assist with your sport, then you would (or should) have a coach to assist you.

Don’t get obsessed with lifting heavy weights. That’s a high speed train ticket to the land of injury. I suppose the exception to the rule “don’t get obsessed with lifting heavy weights” would be if your chosen sport is weightlifting, in which case, that is your imperative. Otherwise, realize that lighter weights, combined with proper technique and specificity will actually be much more effective in achieving your goals (nebulous as they may be). If you just want big muscles, then the feeling that you are going for is the “burn”. 2-3 sets of 10-15 reps, where the last 2-3 reps are giving you the “burn” is the general formula for muscle hypertrophy. Do these reps slowly on the way down as well as on the way up and you will be more effective. Eat lots of protein immediately after your workout to maximize your recovery.

Muscles are a funny thing. They are essential to performance in sport, but many people are surprised at just how much range you have when it comes to training muscles. If your aim is not to simply have big muscles, don’t get obsessed with having big muscles. Bodybuilders are actually very weak. For the amount of muscle they have, they really can’t do much other than look (questionably) good with their shirts off. As far as strength to weigh ratio goes, gymnasts and ballet dancers are the winners, and it won’t surprise you that being from either of those sets of people is a great starting point to get into other sports. But, in sports like shot put, your strength-to-weight ratio doesn’t get you anywhere, only your strengths does, and in speed skating, there is some middle ground. What I’m trying to say is “don’t put on more muscle than you need”. Muscle is “expensive”, you need to feed it, you need to maintain it. When you’re running hard you will hit your lactic threshold sooner if you have more muscle. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that you must always keep in mind what your muscles are there to do.

I don’t know if any of this information is useful to anybody, but there it is. Below is a typical week of training program for “general fitness” aimed at a versatile, well-rounded athlete such as a middle distance runner, skater, or curler. I am NOT currently doing any of this, nor do I intend to. If any readers decide to give this a try, I would be very interested in any feedback. The 1000m bike intervals and the 300m runs are the two high intensity workouts, you should ease into them and resist the temptation to go too hard. Delayed-onset muscle soreness is not a myth.

Monday

AM: Weights

PM: 1hr recovery ride if time permits(a normal conversation should be able to be maintained)

Tuesday

Running, 8x100m, 3min recovery (consistent high intensity, times should only drop off slightly in the 7th and 8th set)

Wednesday

AM: Interval ride, 6x1000m, at least 6 min recovery (These are from a standing start. Try to stay consistent. There is a tendency for these to make you feel ill towards the end. If you have trouble finding a bike and 1000m of clear road, do it on a stationary bike at a reasonably high resistance for 90 seconds. You should feel toasted at the end of every one.)

PM: Stretch

Thursday

AM: Weights

PM: recovery swim (not laps, think: water aerobics)

Friday

technique drills, in the mirror if possible, perhaps some small amount of core work

Saturday

Interval run, 8x300m, 90 second recovery, then 15min off, then 400m 100% (For the 8x300m, try to be completely consistent. The first few sets should feel too easy, and last few sets should feel very difficult, but all should be completed in the same amount of time. You should feel ill, like vomiting, after the 400m. Walk a lap, then jog a lap gently to recover. If you’re up to it, have an ice bath and then a warm shower afterwards.) p.s. Skip the 400m run for the first few weeks.

Sunday

Rest, or long slow recovery bike ride (2hrs+, take food)

(p.s. on monday and thursday nights, the recovery session can be replaced by an hour of deep tissue massage (the kind that hurts) once a week)

Take your pick

It’s been a while since I’ve penned a controversial post. Experience (and my web stats) have shown me that the most popular posts on this website are either slightly controversial (curiouser and curiouser, selection news, and on skating at altitude) or to do with photography (photo gear, and the truth behind the shutter are the most viewed articles on this site). This post will likely fall into the former category. Those readers who have been paying attention know that I’ve been very close to elite sport for a very long time now. I’m also quite an enthusiast when it comes to things like mathematics, and reading academic journals… which is not so common these days among professional athletes. I feel that this combination allows me to speak with at least a little bit of authority on these matters.

First up, I should mention that I can’t prove in a legal sense, any of the accusations that I will inevitably make or imply. I don’t think I’m going to get into any trouble for saying any of this, although if I were ever to become famous for whatever reason, I may be called up on it. If that happens, I won’t back down. You see, you don’t have to believe anything that I say. You could write me off as an embittered ex-athlete, except if you actually knew me, you would know that I don’t really care enough about sport, especially my own achievement in it, to ever really feel embittered about it. I’m just calling it as I see it, and those who know me well, know that I don’t miss much.

The first thing one needs to understand when one approaches sport these days is that, beyond amateur community league sport, sport has very little to do with all that “faster, higher, stronger” nonsense that you get fed as a kid, and really falls more under the category of entertainment (NBC’s budget for the winter games was north of a billion dollars). That is not to say that elite professional athletes aren’t faster, don’t jump higher, or aren’t stronger than your everyday club badminton player for example. But being good at sport, and I mean very good, is an expensive undertaking and only within the framework of sport-as-entertainment can that level of performance be sustained.

The Olympic Games, supposedly the pinnacle of sport, is basically a huge show. I apologize to anyone who still has any illusions about the Olympics being an amateur competition, because it is not. With very few exceptions (curling, for example), pretty much everyone who goes to the Olympics does their sport full time. How can they afford to do this? Easy – they are paid to. Often it isn’t much, and I would be lying if I were to give the impression that all professional athletes live very comfortable lives, but the truth of the matter is that hardly anyone at the Olympics is an amateur. Would Pierre de Coubertin have disapproved of what the modern Olympic games have become? Probably. But in a strange way, the influx of money into sport that comes with professionalism has become a great equalizer in the world of sport. Prior to this, participants at the games were mostly very wealthy people who could afford the “spare time” required to train properly for the games.

But what does this have anything to do with drugs in sport? Well, if I gave you some growth hormone, or EPO and said “here, take this” you probably wouldn’t do it. Why wouldn’t you do it? Well, you’re messing with your endocrine system, the viscosity of your blood, you might get caught, and the side-effects might leave you sterile or give you a heart attack. In short, it’s a risky thing to do. Maybe you can find a doctor to supervise your performance-enhancing drug taking, well then it starts to get expensive. All things considered, taking performance enhancing drugs effectively is an extremely expensive (the drugs themselves are also costly) and dangerous thing to do. In order for someone to make that kind of investment, and to take those kinds of risks, a very large reward is needed as incentive. So here’s where the money-in-sport equation starts to become relevant.

“Each one of the riders on the tour draws a salary of at least one million euros”

Take professional cycling as an example. The Tour de France is one of the most grueling and challenging sporting events ever dreamt up, and it is watched on TV by people all over the world. Because of this TV coverage, there is a huge potential for advertising on riders’ jerseys and, as a result of this, large and very well-run, and well-funded professional teams have formed who compete with each other. Each one of those bikes costs upwards of $10,000, and they have lots of bikes per rider for all kinds of situations and eventualities. Each one of the riders on the tour draws a salary of at least one million euros on top of all the free gear. Think about that for a second – one million euros a year just to get on a bike and ride all day. Riding is also fairly low-impact so a good rider can expect to have a career in excess of ten years. Six or seven good rides in le Tour during that time, and you may never have to worry about finances for the rest of your life. Does that create a strong incentive to dope? I would think so… and I would go so far as to say that everyone on the tour does it.

Don’t these people get tested? Of course they do, they just don’t get caught. The doping on the tour is systematic and the team doctors supervise it. Of course they do. Erythropoietin – better known as EPO increases your blood’s ability to carry oxygen, an obvious advantage in an endurance sport like road cycling. It also thickens the blood. I’m not exactly an endurance athlete (in fact, most would call me a “specialist sprinter”) and my resting heart rate is in the low 40s, a career endurance athlete would likely have a resting heart rate in the mid-to-low 30s. Think about that – that’s a beat every two seconds. Under normal blood pressure, if you’re running a beat every two seconds, if your blood is unusually thick, then it has a tendency to clot. If one of those clots ends up in a coronary artery, then your heart will stop. One of the roles of the team doctors these days is to wake up riders in the middle of the night, and get them onto the stationary bikes to keep their heart rates up to stop them from dying in their sleep. Of course, now that there’s a test for EPO, nobody uses it anymore, and another similar drug has almost certainly replaced it.

The trouble with tests is that you can only test for a known substance (you can obviously detect anything, but the quantities are so small that it would be impossible to show that any old anomaly was a performance-enhancing drug). Marion Jones doped for years on a designer steroid known as “The Clear” (tetrahydrogestrinone) and nobody would have ever known about it except that a sample of the stuff was turned in by a bitter coach and so a test was developed for it. If that sample had never been turned in, it would still be in use today, and remain undetectable. There is a very good chance that there are more designer steroids out there which may never be detected.

Does this ruin the world of sport? I don’t think so. It just makes it a little bit different. A lot of kids grow up thinking that being really good at sport is just a matter of training hard and being dedicated. When you slowly make your way up the ranks of elite sport, there is a point where you realize that this isn’t true, and a myriad of factors that are completely outside your control, like genetics, play a huge role in determining how successful you ultimately are at sport. Despite what he says, it is almost certainly true that Lance Armstrong, along with everyone who rides in the tour, is doped up to the eyeballs. That doesn’t make his achievement of winning seven tours any less remarkable. He still had to train very hard and be a bit of a genetic freak of nature to do all of those things. His battle with cancer is no less inspiring. There’s nothing “unfair” about the doping that goes on in the tour, because it is still very much a level playing field because everyone does it.

So which sports are rife with doping and which aren’t? As it is with most things these days, you have to follow the money. Anything that appears in the Olympics is a likely candidate because the exposure that the Olympics guarantee will raise the kind of money that makes doping “worth” it. Track and field is a good example of a sport in which not-doping places you at a severe disadvantage. Take Usain Bolt for example. I would contend that his world records are not “clean”. Of course, I don’t think any world records have been clean since the late 80s when athletics really started to become very financially lucrative because of sponsorships, endorsements, and the IAAF world athletics tour.

100m world record progression (try to ignore the background image lines)

As a side note, when viewing word record progressions in sports, it is always interesting to note that whenever a test is developed for a significant and widely used drug, such as testosterone, the frequency of world records suddenly drops, but always eventually catches up. The year before a sex test was developed for women there were about 15 women who ran 1500m in under 4 minutes. The year after the test was developed, that number dropped to 2.

The Jamaican case is an especially good example of doping evasion. One of the major advances in anti-doping efforts was the introduction of out of competition testing. Prior to this, people would dope for 3.9 years and then be “clean” for the Olympics (they often didn’t bother being clean for anything else – Carl Lewis, gold medalist in 1988 after Ben Johnson’s famous disqualification himself failed three tests in the two months prior to the Seoul Olympics). Out of competition testing involves randomly showing up to an athletes home or training facility and demanding a urine sample. This generally works very well, making it almost impossible to systematically take any detectable drugs. However, there is a flaw in the system – WADA, the world ant-doping agency requires respective countries’ IOCs to ensure that the testing is carried out. Countries like the USA have USADA and Australia has ASDA to conduct their out of competition testing. However, countries like Jamaica don’t have such an agency.

Again, I emphasize that I am not taking away from any of these guys’ achievements. In a perfect world where nobody doped, Usain Bolt would probably still have won his gold medals and set his world records. Those records would have been a little slower, sure, but no less impressive. The margins might also have not been so great because the absence of out-of-competition testing gives the Jamaicans a distinct advantage over their counterparts from other countries. One might be tempted to think that this advantage should be huge, and that the playing field is no longer level, but this isn’t quite true. Firstly, countries that have their own out of competition testing programs also tend to be a bit wealthier, and thus have better access to better drugs. Secondly, out of competition testing programs aren’t without their flaws.

Speed skaters get tested a lot. As do badminton players, I’m told. That’s because they don’t dope. I’ll get to why that is the case shortly. But my point here is that an out of competition testing program sets itself a goal of a certain number of tests. It them measures its “success” by how many positive tests it gets. Often (and I cannot prove this, but I’m pretty certain that it happens) when the doping is systematic and state-sanctioned, the “random” anti-doping program will be timed in such a way as to coincide with periods in a doping program where an athlete won’t test positive. During times when an athlete will test positive, the anti-doping agency will simply test other athletes. This way, they can still get to the end of their month or whatever, and say that they have a certain number of negative tests. Taking the randomness out of the system effectively renders it useless, and does so in a way that makes it seem like it still works.

So why don’t badminton players and speed skaters dope? Like I said before, not every elite athlete leads a luxurious life of multi-million dollar endorsements. Many sports also don’t benefit a great deal from doping. The greatest advantages to be had are in sports which require endurance, and muscle bulk. Badminton is great sport, and one must be quite fit to play it at the elite level, but the potential gains that doping would have on badminton, while they do exist, are probably not great enough to make the risks worth it.

Speed skating is an interesting example, and one that I’ve thought about for a while (for obvious reasons). I’m actually pretty sure that doping does exist in speed skating (apart from the obvious case of Claudia Pechstein) but that it is not very widespread. Curiously, Pechstein was only caught because of the introduction of the Biological Passport which doesn’t directly detect the presence of illegal substances in the blood, but rather it looks at the parameters of certain biological markers and sees how much they fluctuate over time. Strangely enough, Pechstein managed to get an injunction which allowed her to do one race at the Salt Lake City world cup in December 2009 (where I was also present, photos here) and, not surprisingly, she failed to qualify for the Vancouver 2010 games.

I mentioned before that riders on the tour earn upwards of a million euros a year, which over a long career can be a pretty strong incentive to dope. There are probably one, maybe two speed skaters in the world who make that kind of money. Everyone else kind of just scrapes by. The other factor at work here is income inequality. Speed skaters, by necessity, almost always come from fairly wealthy countries. This is because it is an expensive sport – the skates are expensive, ice time is expensive, the suits we wear are expensive. To even be able to compete, a huge amount of money needs to be invested first, over a long amount of time. The facilities also present a problem – I don’t know of a single long track in the world that doesn’t operate at a loss. Those things are extremely expensive to run, and most do it with government support, and a government has to be fairly wealthy in order to support that kind of sport.

This is why income inequality is important – it all comes down to a fairly simple equation: on the one hand, you have the enormous cost and risks, both legally and health-wise associated with taking drugs, and on the other you have the potential financial gain that may result from success gained by taking drugs. Most of the world’s speed skaters come from the Netherlands or Norway, both are very wealthy countries with high standards of living. In other words, it’s going to take huge amounts of money to make them want to dope, and while there is a lot of money in skating, there isn’t enough for that. Speed skating is also quite popular in many former eastern-bloc countries, and while the argument for doping in those cases is more plausible, it is still unlikely because, without the huge inequalities that used to exist, and without the massive state-driven systematic doping machine (whose last “product” was a young Claudia Pechstein) poor kids who want to make it in life have much better options (like internet scams) and the people who end up in speed skating tend to come from relatively wealthy families.

Contrast that to running, where athletes can come from very poor countries, and where entry-level equipment is very cheap. Compare a kid who is a talented runner in Jamaica with one from Norway. Who’s going to take the huge risks? Who stands to go from a life of poverty to one of unimaginable wealth? Who is going to receive help from their own sport’s governing bodies with systematic doping? Keeping this all in mind, I’m actually very optimistic about the eventual demise of systematic doping. Because in a perfect world, the monetary incentives just won’t be strong enough for people to want to take the risks. The only people left who will dope will be the crazy sociopathic people whose desire to win outweighs their sanity (at which point sport will obviously be only for entertainment purposes). Of course, such a world is still a very long way off. In the meantime, we’ll still have to put up with similarly crazy people who defend doping by being either ignorant of the way sport works (“but doping can only affect a 3% gain in performance at most”… uh duh, a 3m margin in a 100m race is kind of a big deal) or ignorant of the health risks involved, keeping in mind that those most at risk are also the poorest and least able to protect themselves from those risks.

At the moment, a lot of people “love” sport, but I suspect it is only because sport is their ticket out of poverty, which is what ultimately opens the door to the possibility of doping. In an ideal world, even though Olympic athletes would still be professionals, and would probably get fairly decent pay (as entertainers), it wouldn’t be so much that it would necessitate the need for performance enhancing drugs. In that sense at least, they would be doing it simply because they love the sport, which is where the word “amateur” originally comes from.

Further reading: “Positive” by Werner Reiterer, my own review here.