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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

so many things are wrong with this graph!

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

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

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

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

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:

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.

The week prior to that, most of us were in Moscow for the Junior World Championships. Of course, only two of the skaters in our squad are actually juniors, the rest of us were basically there as “team support” otherwise known as tourists. I had run into some visa trouble prior to departing, the main problem being that I didn’t have one. You see, it ordinarily takes 6 working days to process a Russian visa, but since I had only returned from Canada 6 days previously (and only 4 working days) there was worry that I might not be able to get my visa in time. Add to that, the strange quirk that the Russian consulate was closed on international women’s day, and the fact that it took two hours (and almost 50 euros) each way for me to get there by train, I really only had two working days to play with. Luckily, everything worked out and I was able to travel to Moscow as a tourist team leader for Australia (and Sophie also tagged along, as the team’s medical person).

Touristing around Moscow was an interesting experience. Traveling is something that I do quite often but it is very rare that I get to experience a place that is as “foreign” as Moscow city is. First, there was the language. Prior to arriving in Moscow, I did not know any of the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet that weren’t obviously the same as those from the Latin alphabet. On the evening we arrived, I grabbed a few tourist maps of the city and began trying to teach myself the alphabet, if only to enable me to recognize train stations. By then end of our four-day trip, I was able to read Cyrillic (although not very quickly, and not with any understanding of what the words actually meant, though most were guessable). Trains in Moscow are pretty special. The Metro is the second most used in the world (behind Tokyo), trains run frequently, and the coverage is good. The stations themselves are magnificent. My darkroom website features a stitched panoramic shot of the Komsomolskaya station to give you an example of just how wonderful these places are.

We had a good day and a half of dedicated touristing during which we saw a lot of the city. We began with a bus tour just to get an initial familiarization with the sights and layout of the city. As it was low season (apparently, everyone comes in the summer time and not in the middle of winter) the bus was empty save for us, so even though we arrived late, and in the wrong location, the bus actually came around to pick us up. After the bus tour, we went walking and did a bit of museum-hopping as well as visiting Lenin’s tomb. Lenin’s tomb is an interesting sight because, despite dying in 1924, his body has been preserved (quite well, if slightly discoloured) in a tomb where anyone can come and visit.

St Basil's Cathedral at Red Square

Not only is Russian architecture very different to anything that I’m used to (a constant reminder that I’m in a foreign city) Russian history itself lends a strange backdrop to the experience of modern Moscow. In many ways, Moscow reminded me of Beijing, and the parallels don’t stop at comparisons of communist regimes. Both China and Russia experienced long histories of very powerful dynastic empires, “glory days” if you will, during which the respective countries were dominant world powers. Then the empires fell into decline, exacerbated by war, and were eventually overthrown. Now they are both growing and struggling with their image and identity in the world.

Here is a link to some of the photos from the trip.

Junior world championships went well, with a few Australian records falling (not just junior records either). We all seemed to enjoy ourselves and are very hopeful for the future of Australian speed skating. And now we come to the reason for the name of this blog entry – the future of Australian speed skating will most likely not include me. Obviously I will continue to skate (because I really enjoy it) but intense training and high-level competition are not for me anymore. I am also getting older, and my body is becoming less-suited to sports like speed skating, and more-suited to sports like curling, which I intend to take up. I also hope to continue my academic career a bit, and eventually get a job and save the world (though not necessarily in that order). Do not be alarmed – this is not the penultimate post of the website, but it is the penultimate post concerning speed skating.

Why penultimate? Because I expect to have one more.

Some of you may be aware already, but I’m currently in the process of shooting and then putting together a documentary about the journey of the Australian speed skating team from about October 2008 until now. This is a difficult process because, apart from all of the shooting that has to be done and interviews (all on a super tight budget), I will soon have to hit the editing suites and begin editing video and sound until this documentary feature comes together. Hopefully it will be of high enough quality to do justice to the extraordinary story of this group of skaters. If anyone out there knows anything about documentary film making or would like to help out, I would really appreciate any assistance (I’ve never done this before). Eventually I’d like to hit a few film festivals and then get this doco shown on Australian and Dutch TV, and maybe a few other countries depending on how successful it is. Hopefully I can get this all done before the next Olympic Games in Сочи (Sochi).

And finally, possibly the last Yeow News Network update to primarily feature speed skating. (This one is of a slightly comical nature) Enjoy!

Team photo from the world cup in Salt Lake City. L-R: Harry Oosterhuis, Rogina De Jong, Daniel Grieg, Sophie Muir, Joshua Lose, Desly Hill, Marie Walth Perkins, Daniel Yeow

Beep – the alarm goes off, it is 6am. It is dark. A small group of skaters drag themselves out of bed, throw some warm clothes on and grab their skating bags. We walk outside and fumble around in the darkness trying to activate the lights on our bicycles. 40 minutes later we are warming up on the ice in Ijsbaan Twente, in Enschede, near the Dutch-German border – we are the only people there. It is still dark.

There is something unusual about this team. We train in the Netherlands, but we are not Dutch. We aren’t even European – we are Australians. In the summer of 2008, Desly Hill, former Australian inline skating coach and now Dutch national inline coach, hatched the most audacious of plans – an Australian long track speed skating team. There has never been one before, only lone individuals training under a coach. Two current Australian junior inliners and three seniors who had all but quit the sport got the call, and by October we were assembling in Enschede, taking the first tentative steps onto the ice, and on an incredible journey.

Fast forward to Vancouver, February 2010. Sophie Muir becomes the first Australian long track speed skater in 16 years. She is also the first female olympic long tracker from Australia… ever. She has only been ice skating for 16 months. Three other skaters on the team were at the top of the reserve list for the games, but barely missed out. It is scarcely believable that less than one year ago, only one of us had even qualified for a world cup race. It is even less believable that two years ago, only one of us had ever stepped on the ice wearing speed skates. To understand how this happened, we should first examine some of the characters in our extraordinary play.

7 years ago, Sophie Muir quit inline skating after winning a career total of seven world championship titles (six of them junior). She was backpacking around Europe in the summer and came across old friend Desly Hill in Gijon, Spain during the 2008 inline world championships. A few weeks later she was lacing up a pair of ice skates and had agreed to “give it a try” for a month to see if she liked it. One month became two months. Two months became three. Three months quickly became sixteen, and the transformation from beginner to olympian has been so rapid that she still gets quizzical looks from people when she mentions that she is a speed skater from Australia.

3 years ago Joshua Lose woke up in hospital after colliding with a car while riding his bicycle. He had severe head trauma and had lost his sense of smell. It would be several weeks before he could even hold a conversation and have any hope of remembering it later. He would eventually recover (but not his sense of smell) and move to holland to skate inline races at the suggestion of Desly, but be forced to quit due to foot problems which required expensive surgery. He was subsequently convinced to join our team on the ice and within two months had qualified for the world cups in the 5000m. He would go on to qualify for the Olympic games with an impressive time of 6:27, only to miss out due to a technicality in the ISU rules concerning Olympic qualification.

Desly Hill herself won seventeen medals at world championships in inline skating, four of which are gold – all of them in senior division. She has been coaching skaters very successfully ever since she quit competing and has also miraculously managed to find time to complete a masters degree in applied science majoring in elite sports coaching. She doesn’t like to lose, and she knows how to win. Even after her first olympics, and the incredible result made even moreso by the impossibly short lead-time, she’s hungry for more. Next time she wants a medal, and like any coach she is already making plans for bringing that objective to fruition.

Since starting the team, we’ve moved from Enschede to Heerenveen – the Mecca of speed skating. So much has happened in such a short time that it is easy to forget that 2 years ago there was no Australian long track team. Only in recent months has the administrative machinery of Australian sport realized that we exist and, thanks to our high media profile at the Vancouver Olympics, our prospects for future support from Australia look very good indeed. In a few days our very talented juniors, Brooke Lochland and Daniel Grieg, will be skating in the junior world championships in Moscow. Our team is here to stay, and while the cry of “the Australians are coming” may seem an amusing novelty now; I have little doubt that soon those words will strike fear into the hearts of our competitors.

But the team is much more than the sum of our parts. We’ve known each other through inline skating for years, and we feel like family. This amazing positive energy has allowed us to thrive in an environment that is a long way from, and very unlike our home (Australia is much warmer for instance). In our struggle we have helped encourage each other onto new heights never previously imaginable. Our camaraderie has been the envy of other skaters, many of whom have expressed interest in joining our ranks. Our assistant coach Rogina De Jong once accused us of “smiling too much”, which she mistook for us not taking things seriously. Like many athletes, we are obviously fiercely competitive. However, if the last 16 months have taught me anything, it is that in keeping with the Olympic spirit, it is important to not only play for keeps, but to also play for fun. The Australian team is determined to keep improving, just as we are committed to having fun. So watch out at the next big speed skating competition – the Australians are coming!

Team Germany crosses the line despite a fall on the last straight...

These olympics continue to surprise and inspire. Most unusual of the aftermath of the preliminaries is the absence of team Canada in the ladies’ final. The team that lost narrowly to the USA (by 4 hundredths of a second – less than a blade length) was the same team that broke the world record back in Calgary on the 6th of December. Also slightly unexpected is the absence of the Netherlands in the finals. I say “slightly” because the dutch are famous for not working as well as a team as some of the other countries are. The dutch men’s team was simply outskated by a strong team USA led by former inliner Chad Hedrick, while the dutch ladies were their own worst enemy when Renate Groenewold ran out of gas with a lap to go and caused her team to finish behind a strong German team.

The Russian ladies were unexpectedly bettered by Poland, who were in turn bettered (though not unexpectedly) by Japan. Japan will now face Germany in the final, who did very well to overcome the upset-causing US team despite Anni Friesinger running out of gas and falling in the final straight, dramatically throwing her skate over the line then punching the ice in the belief that she had let her team down, only to look up at the scoreboard to find that they had ousted the americans by two tenths of a second.

While the dutch were busy being knocked out by the americans in the men’s race, team Canada made a tough match with Norway look easy, bettering them by over a second, to set up another USA vs Canada showdown, which should warm up the crowd for tomorrow’s big hockey final.

It is difficult to pick a winner in either division. Germany needs to swap out Friesinger and bring in fresh skater Katrin Mattscherodt and also need to communicate a bit better to avoid the last skater falling off the back. Japan have cruised through without much fuss and really have skated “textbook” races, which will make it close. Based on individual performances of the skaters, I’m tipping Germany because of their better performance in the distance events, which will give them an advantage in recovering between rounds, and skating on this slow ice.

The men’s is also very difficult to pick. Watch out for “pushing” strategies. Canada have been practicing and perfecting a technique of the back skaters pushing the front skaters in order to save a bit of energy of the leading skater, particularly in the corner exit. The americans are just beginning to learn about this, and it could be the crucial difference in what is otherwise a very close match up. You’ve got one experienced veteran on each team, in Chad Hedrick and Denny Morrison, both of whom are great 5000m/1500m skaters, teamed up with relatively young and less-experienced up-and-coming skaters. I’m going to give it to Canada, because the hometown crowd will make the lactic burn in their thighs just a little more bearable.

The Canadian women's team on their way to a world record

The ladies’ 5000m was without incident nor any significant surprises (which itself is a bit of a surprise at these games). The favorite – Czech Martina Sablikova won, but after exhausting herself in trying to stay ahead of the pace set by German 21-year-old Stephanie Beckert which was extraordinary to say the least, taking entire seconds off the track record. The bronze medal was won by host country hero and opening ceremony flag-bearer Clara Hughes who became one of Canada’s most decorated olympians with 6 medals – two from summer games (cycling) and four from winter games (speed skating).

The upcoming team pursuit races are only preliminaries, but should be interesting to watch nevertheless. During the world cup season prior to the games, the teams raced each other in a time-trial fashion (like everything else in long track) in order to obtain the highest possible ranking. The top eight qualify for the Olympic games, where unlike in the world cups, the positions are determined by a knockout tournament. This raises the possibility that the best strategy in a race (especially in the quarter finals) is NOT to cover the distance as fast as one possibly can, which is very unusual for long track.

To be good at the team pursuit requires much more than having the three fastest skaters. Team cohesion is also very important. The pursuit draws on skills which are not often well-developed in long track skaters, such as having to skate well in a pack and being able to change the lead skater smoothly and with the minimum expenditure of effort. The ability to skate well behind another skater and get the maximum benefit from the aerodynamic advantage of not having to lead can be crucial. These are skills that are well developed in short track and inline speed skaters, so expect teams made up of crossover athletes to do well.

The favorite for the men is the Netherlands, and on paper it seems that they should be impossible to beat. Sven Kramer will also be hungry for redemption after his devastating disqualification. They are, however, not invincible because they, more than most teams, lack the kind of team cohesion that many other teams actively try to foster. Other challengers include Canada, and the USA. Curiously, the US team did not field Shani Davis to go with Chad Hedrick and Trevor Marsicano, which, one would think, would be something of a “dream team”. Last year’s world champions, Sweden, will need a miracle to make it through, as they are paired with the dutch in the quarterfinals.

The ladies are a similar story with team Canada coming in as heavy favorites, having set a world record in Calgary just last December. The race for the silver will be interesting as Japan, Germany, Russia and the Netherlands are all very strong. In fact, in the Salt Lake City world cup, the last one before the olympics, second, third, and fourth were only separated by a hundredth of a second. The Netherlands has also been suffering from some internal politics and may not end up starting with their strongest 3 skaters which could impede their progress to the final.

Also to think about – each team is allowed to name a squad of four skaters, while only three have to skate (the time is taken from the third skater). This means that the team in the preliminaries may differ from the team in the final. In an effort to “save” skaters for the final, it may be that a slightly slower team doesn’t make it through because they tried to save themselves for a final.

Elma and Martina have a cuddle after their 5k at a world cup last season

Just when I thought this Olympics couldn’t get more unpredictable, the men’s 10,000m threw me another curve ball. Heavily favored for the win, Sven Kramer is disqualified under the most unusual of circumstances. While making a routine lane change from the inner to the outer, coach Gerard Kemkers has a brain cramp and tells him to go inside, Sven obediently obliges and is disqualified for failing to change lanes. He continued to skate, oblivious to this, to set a winning time only to have a post race meeting with Kemkers that can only be described as “heated”. That left 5000m silver medalist Lee Seung Hoon of Korea in the gold medal position, followed by Ivan Skobrev of Russia, then Bob de Jong also of the Netherlands.

In the ladies’ 5000m the clear favorite is Czech Martina Sablikova. Stephanie Beckert of Germany could be a threat as she has a really good kick for the finish, but since she isn’t paired with Sablikova, I don’t think she’ll quite get there. Kristina Groves and Clara Hughes will have the home crowd support and could lift, Groves in particular could be one to watch out for. Daniela Anschutz Thoms from Germany is also a medal threat, especially since she is in the last pair with Martina and will be able to measure her pace off her.

The wild card to watch for is Elma de Vries of the Netherlands. If her head is in a good place, she could conceivably win this event, but the mental aspect is so unpredictable it is impossible to say at this stage. Norway’s Maren Haugli is also an outside chance for a medal and should be inspired after her brother finished 6th in the 10k.