photo by Steve Penland

Monday, November 14, 2011

SLC Camp Day 4

Sunday, Day 4 of the Camp.  Fortunately my legs felt much better on Day 4 than they had on Day 3.  I'm going to credit the ice bath (if you can call a bathtub full of from-the-tap cold water and two motel-room ice-buckets of ice an "ice bath.") on Saturday night. Anyway, I was glad my legs felt better, because I wanted to do a 3k in the end-of-camp time trials.

First, though, I had to get through the 500.  OK, I didn't have to do a 500, but I consider it a vital part of my warmup for longer races.  I really don't like 500's...they're short, but there's still plenty of time to screw up in plenty of ways, and I usually do.  This 500, though, went pretty well--not terribly fast, at 48.3, but  technically probably one of the better ones I've done.  And since this was an informal time trial and thus we could sign up for whichever lane we wanted, I was able to select the coveted (by me, anyway) first inner/last outer starting position, which allows me--by virtue of having the bigger-radius last outer turn in the final corner when I'm going my fastest--to have the best chance possible of executing the corner correctly.  And I did execute it correctly, more or less--at any rate, it wasn't my usual complete disaster of a final-corner-in-the-500, so I counted that as a success.  That final corner is the only place the Salt Lake oval video cameras don't capture you when you're skating, so I was spared a dissection of that part of my race...but the rest of it looked pretty decent to me--for me, anyway--and Derek Parra, who was reviewing everyone's videos, didn't disagree.

So, on to the 3k.  My legs were pretty sore and tired at this point, so I really didn't know what to expect.  Since I had done a 5:02 in the first 3k of my 5k a couple of weeks ago in Milwaukee, and Milwaukee is at least a second per lap slower than Salt Lake, I figured that, to be conservative, I'd tell myself to be happy with anything under a 5:00.  I've only ever done one 3k over 5:00 in Salt Lake, at a very disastrous (possibly because of undiagnosed hypothyroidism) Masters meet in January of 2010.  So I figured that, even with the preceding 3-day's worth of hard workouts, a sub 5:00 should be pretty much a certainty.

Not so.

The 3k turned out to be an exact clone of both the disastrous 3k of January 2010 and the disastrous 5k of March 2011...starting out OK, then within a lap or two quickly segueing from painful to excruciating to I-can-barely-put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, when-will-this-nightmare-end.  Together, these three races--my most recent three in Salt Lake--make up the total of my most disappointing, most excruciating, most frustrating, most confusing races of all time.  If all my long distance races felt like these three, I'd become a sprinter faster than you can say "I love the 500."

As I coasted past Derek on the backstretch, where he had remained, after starting the race, to yell encouragement to me and my pair (who skated a fantastic race), I responded to his "nice job" with "man that sucked!  I think the first 3k of my 5k in Milwaukee was faster than that."

And, when I checked the times--indeed, it almost had been.  My time was 5:01...so I had now skated over 5:00 twice in Salt Lake.

Disappointing, to be sure, and baffling as well.  When Derek went over the video with me, I really didn't see much more wrong than usual.  Sure, I couldn't get my hip into the corner and my straights were a bit, um, high tempo--but nothing out of the ordinary for me; in fact, my technique in this race looked better than what I had done in 3k's in Milwaukee last year--3k's that were significantly faster than this one.  So despite how horrible this race felt and how slow the time was, I can't blame it on technique implosion.

So I'm not sure what to think.  Could be just coincidence that my last 3 Salt Lake races have been my worst 3 races ever; there certainly could be 3 different causes (undiagnosed hypothyroidism, length of time at high altitude, fatigue from the camp) for the 3 disasters.  But they all felt horrible in exactly the same way.  I don't know...maybe sucky races all suck the same.  Or maybe there's something else going on..

But, whatever.  I'm going to follow the advice of Coach TieGuy and the sports psychologist--focus on the positive.  I had two fantastic races in Milwaukee so far this season, and tomorrow night is the first night of practice on my home oval.

That's all I need to think about.

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