PAIN IS PAIN
Summer dryland training for speed skating- low walks on the treadmill!
I’m often asked, what’s harder, speed skating or cycling? I’ve been thinking about this these past three weeks while watching the Tour de France. The Tour gave me many reminders of how hard bike racing is.
There are those horrendous crashes which I’ve had my share of. Oh, how many times I had experienced hitting the pavement at high speeds. Losing skin. The bruising and bleeding. And stitches. My body is scarred everywhere. Speed skating has it dangers too, but crashes in long track are few and far between. Even with seventeen inch blades on my feet, the risks cannot compare.
But I want to get at what made these sports hard, aside from enduring physical injury from crashes
There were the breakaways. I thought of how I made breaks away from the peleton myself. Just when suffering is most intense was the time to attack. The desire and will to put in that one last seemingly impossible effort is enough to weaken others.
When riders were off alone trying to hold off the other breakaway riders or the looming surge of the entire peloton just seconds away, I too thought of the all-out physical effort required to hold off the chase. That, and the constant mental focus to push on and on when it seemed like I could not ride another minute at that pace. I recall one race where I held off the peloton for 126 kilometers during a stage in the Tour de L’Aude, long enough to cross the finish line alone for the win.
It wasn’t just the riders at the front of the race who reminded me of all the pain a racer has to endure either. For it’s at the rear of the race where the really ugly suffering takes place. I too had my days struggling to stay with the peleton. Anyone watching the Tour might get the idea that the lead riders aren’t in all that much discomfort. They are. But at the rear you really get a nice picture of how hard a cyclist is trying to not get dropped.
I have my experiences of cracking in road races. The absolute humiliation and suffering can go on literally for hours. Getting dropped in a race with maybe a hundred kilometers left, in the cold and the rain, with hardly any energy are truly demoralizing days. I can’t imagine some of my speed skating teammates surviving this harsh reality of bicycle racing. I can’t imagine them swimming in the shark infested waters of the cycling world where even I, at times, felt like a minnow.
To be fair, though there are similarities, you can’t really compare a speed skating race to a stage race. But when I look at the hard reality of my day to day training regime as a speed skater, I do see a few parallels that the two could be judged on.
Though the regime is entirely different for the two sports, both are equally hard to train for. Some aspects of the training for speed skating are more difficult. What makes skating training harder is the relentless focus on technique. Sitting on the bike is far easier than finding the perfect position for skating. However, both of these endurance sports leave a person completely exhausted. Sitting here on the one day off a week I get to rest, I’m in a state of intense fatigue. I’m not tired some of the time – I’m tired ALL of the time, exactly as I was as a professional cyclist.
Watching the Tour de France everyday definitely gave me reminders of the advantages a decade of bike racing has given me over other athletes without this experience. I realize I’ve somewhat lost this connection that I had to the athlete I was as a bike racer.
If I look closely at my best races in skating, I can see clearly how cycling has impacted me and made me different than any other skater. I’ve been at my best when faced with adversity. What happens is I become that bike racer again, and I respond as if being attacked from every direction. This has forced me to look deep inside my core being for the strength to fight back. Essentially, what I’ve found is the same tenacity I saw in the Tour riders.
Thinking about all the training I have left to do in preparation for the Olympics in February, one thing is for sure: I will look inward to see what strengths developed in bike racing have been lying dormant for me to utilize in these coming months.
As for which sport is harder, pain is pain. Endurance sport allows for no escape from it.
