Getting My Bearings

I am (as the Hubster frequently laments) a girl who is given to ignoring routine maintenance of my equipment.  Once, when the Hubster and I were dirt biking in Colorado, I neglected to check the tightness of various bolts, and managed to have my headlight fall off the first day of riding.  Then, having not learned from my mistakes (live and learn?  What's that?) I proceeded to lose a bolt from the rear fender the next day, causing the fender to droop and, consequently, causing the rear tire to do some fender redesign.  Hubster was not amused (although he was nice enough to fix both oopses with a couple zip ties, since the relevant bolts were long gone.)

Skates don't have nearly as many moving parts as dirt bikes, but there are still some maintenance tasks required.  Long track skates, of course, must be sharpened.  Since speedskates are flat ground, not hollow ground as are hockey skates and figure skates, they must be sharpened by hand. I'm fairly good about doing this regularly (every other time I skate or so), but I tend to be pretty perfunctory about putting a good edge on the blades. Since I'm also bad at detecting, when I'm skating, whether the blades have a good edge or not, this really  isn't much of a problem.

In addition to sharpening the skates, I need to check the bolts that hold the blades to the boot.  If they loosen a little, the angle of the blade to the boot can change--an angle that has been carefully calculated by Coach TieGuy since I, as I mentioned before, have an unfortunate lack of ability to discern whether my skates are functioning properly or not. If the bolts loosen a lot, the blade can move enough to cause you to crash, which I think even I would notice.  There's another bolt (actually a screw) on long track clap skates, though; the one at the hinge of the clap mechanism.

This little one right here...

...see the gray dot in the middle of the red part?  Can you tell it's an Allen bolt head?  No?  I couldn't either...until the bolt fell halfway out as I was skating a corner, and I crashed into a heap.

In my defense, I will say that this tiny bolt/screw/whatever it is had never loosened up on my old blades, not in 5 years of skating.  So I could...maybe...be forgiven for not knowing that it was something that should be checked regularly.  However, once it had loosened up for the first time, I don't think I can legitimately claim ignorance, and thus I have no excuse for having it loosen up--and subsequently crashing--a second time.

Inline skates, although they have no clap mechanism or tricky hidden bolts, do have some things that require maintenance.  Like long track skates, they have bolts that hold the frames to the boots, and these need to be checked/tightened regularly (and the punishment for forgetting to do so and thus crashing when the frame moves is much more severe on inlines...).  Inline skate wheels also have bearings, which need to be either cleaned (most people) or thrown away and replaced (me--did I mention I don't like doing maintenance tasks?) every so often.

I knew my bearings were getting bad a couple of weeks ago; they start to produce a characteristic whirring noise when they get debris in them, and mine were getting pretty loud.  But I figured what the heck...it's almost the end of the season, they're not really that bad, and maybe the noise will alert the Skate Park Punks Patrons that I'm coming down the track and they'll refrain from jumping out in front of me--kind of like those Deer Whistles you put on your car.  Besides, I once won $20 because of bad bearings.  (It was at a Summer Inline Series race many years ago.  My bearings were getting pretty noisy, and  some guy commented that I needed to replace them.  I said nah, they're OK, the season's almost done anyway.  He responded "well, you won't win tonight on those.  I'll bet you 10 bucks you don't win on those crappy bearings."  But I did win--2 races, so (even though I insisted that he didn't need to), he gave me $20.).

By last Friday, though, I couldn't take it any more--the bearings were loud enough that I suspected they might actually not be working properly anymore ("not working properly anymore" means "I have to skate harder to go fast," so this is something to pay attention to).  Besides, I had a set of brand new bearings that I had gotten for free from the inline team I sort of skate on (the mighty Media Machine), so it seemed silly not to put them in.

When I took the old bearings out, I tried, as I always do (just for fun), to spin each of them to see how compromised their function had become before I finally replaced them.  This time, two of the bearings would not spin at all--completely locked up.  I'm not sure how much extra effort is required to skate on locked-up bearings, but you'd think it would have at least some impact on a person's speed.  So I figured, when I headed out Saturday morning to do my tempo workout, that I'd maybe be a bit faster than I've been lately.

Um, no.  My second 1000 meter tempo was absolutely, positively, without a doubt the slowest one I've ever done.  My usual 1K tempo laps are around 40 seconds, maybe a 39...this year they've been more like 41-43.

Yesterday's tempo featured a 47 second and a 50 second lap.

To put that in perspective, I have done 5x12 lap workouts--60 laps--where the laps averaged 45 seconds.

Oh, sure, I had some "reasons" that might explain my sluggishness (Coach TieGuy likes to call them "excuses," but I prefer "reasons").  I'm sick, work is stressful right now, and Friday night (thanks, I think, to a combination of Sudafed and caffeine) I got exactly 1.5 hours of sleep.  Reasons or not, though, those are some mighty slow lap times!  Maybe the new bearings needed a bit of "break in" time, too...but I've never had bearings that need to be broken in cause a 10-second-per-lap slowdown.

Fortunately, though, I only had to wait 24 hours before I got to skate again, so I didn't get too far down the "how do I suck, let me count the ways" path.  And today's intervals were quite a bit better; enough, anyway, that I'm once again looking forward to the next workout, rather than looking back at the previous one and wondering what went wrong.  And I've got some fun new technique stuff to work on, and maybe a Pettit ice weekend coming up next weekend...that reminds me, better go check those sneaky hidden bolts on my long track skates...