Ow--Wow--Ow

That's how my week has gone: from Ow to Wow and back to Ow again.

It's been a fun ride.

The first "ow" is a direct result of Crossfit.  You know how, when you do something physical that you haven't done before or haven't done in a while, you get Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS)?  Well, it's even worse when you're doing the physical thing wrong.  Despite having done thousands and thousands of squats during my skating career, I was unable to execute the Crossfit-style squat correctly and thus left Monday's intro class with my quads screaming obscenities at me.  By Wednesday morning, my quads were so sore that I could barely hobble down stairs (you know that DOMS is always worse on the second day, right?  You know Wednesday was the second day, right?  You know Wednesday was the day of my first on-ice workout this year, right?  Right).

(By the way, I love the new place I'm going for Crossfit.  The coaches I've met so far have been extremely nice, helpful, and--and believe me, I've given them plenty of opportunity to demonstrate this one--patient.  The facility is really nice--they even have showers. If anyone is looking to do Crossfit in the Northwest suburbs of Minneapolis, I highly recommend Crossift SISU.)

Anyway, I left Crossfit Wednesday morning wondering whether I'd even be able to skate.  Fortunately, my intro class that morning was 1:1 rather than a group (peer pressure is a powerful thing), so I ended up being able to talk my way out of actually doing a workout ("WOD"--Workout Of the Day); I had been afraid we'd do deadlifts or some other back-intensive WOD, thus sealing my DOMS-induced inability to assume a proper skating position.  Also fortunately (for my travel mates) Crossfit SISU has showers.  Unfortunately, the shower I used had "men's body wash" as the only cleaning product.  I left the shower all manly-fresh, and I'm afraid that adding my baby powder-scented deodorant to the mix resulted in me smelling rather, well, confused.  Still better than sweaty, though.

So on to Milwaukee.  Mel's dad (returning home) and Inliner Boy (heading for the ice as well) rode with me.  By the time we got to the oval after six hours in the car, "hobbling" pretty much described my movement.  But then I got on the ice, and suddenly...nothing hurt (or not very much, anyway).  I eased into my 5x2K (5x5 laps) workout with some 44-second laps--not the fastest, but I felt smooth, relaxed, and coordinated.

Trust me, these three words have rarely been used to describe my skating.

Best of all, my stroke count was extremely (and effortlessly) consistent: 10 stroke straightaways, 16 in the corners.  This consistency, and the fact that my straightaway stroke was an even number (last year I always seemed to end up at 11, and thus on the wrong foot, at the corner entry) meant that I entered almost all of my corners correctly.  Usually I hose up about 50% of my corner entries--and a bad entry can cost you half a second, so in a race corner entries are critical.

And the smooth, relaxed, coordinated, consistent-stroke-count, good-corner-entry mode continued into the last set of the workout--although the lap times dropped, in the middle sets, to satisfying 41's and 42's.

Then...fifth set.  Fourth lap.  Twenty-four laps into the twenty-five for the day.  As I approached the last corner on this lap, a thought drifted into my head.  I'd been trying very hard (and very unsuccessfully) all 24 laps to get my left hip into the corner.  This is something that people have been trying to get me to do for years; multiple coaches screamed "hip in" at me on multiple corners last year throughout Master's Camp, to no avail.  But suddenly I remembered that one of these coaches had emphasized contracting my right abs; Mel has also harped on this, calling it a "pinch" of the right side.  But I've never actually successfully executed it.

Until now.  I thought "pinch right side," I pinched my right side...and a whole new world opened up.  Not only was my hip in the corner, but suddenly my shoulders were square, I had a good full left leg push, and it was easy to lean.  It was as though the corner grabbed me and hurled me forward, screaming "come on, let's go fast!"

That was the "wow."

And a big "wow" it was.  I was a bit tired by the fifth set, so my lap times had slowed back to 44's for laps 23 and 24.  Just with the addition of the "pinch," though, my lap times dropped from 44.0 for lap 24, to 41.7 for lap 25.  Nice...free speed!

So I left "ice workout number one" very happy.  And I was really looking forward to workout number two, Thursday morning; I wanted to see how "the pinch" would affect my lap times in some 400 and 600 meter intervals.

Unfortunately, fatigue caught up with me for the interval workout.  (It probably didn't help that my hotflash-infested night in the motel resulted in about four hours of sleep).  The first two sets were OK, with lap times from 38 to 40, but by set three my legs were locking up at 500 meters in what Coach TieGuy used to call "peg leg."  I cut that set short and did the final set at reduced effort, and thought glum thoughts about the 13K workout I had planned for the final session--which would be happening in five hours. But after killing the five hours in the Pettit (spinning, foam rolling, eating, and napping), I felt more positive about my prospects for finishing the workout.

Until I stepped on the ice.  My skates, which had felt perfectly fine for the first workout and only mildly uncomfortable for the second, suddenly began inflicting excruciating pain on my left ankle, and the tongue on the right skate began trying to saw a hole in my foot.

That was the second "Ow."

Fortunately I still had my molefoam-and-scissors kit in my skate bag, and I was able to pad various bony foot-bits enough to skate.  And when I started the workout, I was happy to see that, although my legs were still tired, the "smooth, relaxed and coordinated" thing had returned.  I managed to complete the whole workout--including the 3K at the end of it--with slowish lap times but with decent technique--including a good, consistent "pinch."

So on the whole, an extremely successful and encouraging start to the ice season--because the "ow's" will go away, but the think the "wow" just might stick around.