Black Bird singing in the dead of night.

Yesterday, and I don't know how, a black bird (my generic term for this creature--I'm not a "birder" or even a "bird watcher") somehow got inside our house and flew upstairs to our bedroom.  We vainly attempted to coax Mr. Bird out via any number of opened windows but our terrified visitor instead flew into my bedroom closet which is stuffed to the gunnels with my treasured junque.  After carefully removing lots of boxes (boy were they dusty!) we finally managed to trap our avian friend (unharmed) in a waste paper basket.  I then succeeded in taking this outdoors and released our birdy back to where he belongs.  What, you may ask, does any of this have to do with a skating blot?  The answer, my friends, while not blown on the wind, is contained inside one of those dusty boxes brought to the light of day from the depths of my "archive".

Yep, 1976.  Some of the skaters at my home rink weren't even born then!  I was still 29 on the 8th of May so you can trust me--this really is my card.  I wonder what is the meaning "IST" Gamma?  First? Gamma?  Is that like being First Trumpet?  Perhaps it distinguishes this early gamma success from my more recent re-passing of that milestone a couple years ago.  Perhaps now I'm merely 2nd gamma.  I may never know.  I wonder if the requirements for gamma have changed over the years?

 When I earned this card I was less than a year out of the service (I was discharged in July of '75) and back studying at the University of Delaware.  Ice skating at UDEL was not particularly well known in those pre-Johnny Weir/Kimmie Meissner days.  The Skating Club of Wilmington had yet to join forces with the University's skating club but, even in those prehistoric days, figure skating was listed as one of a handful of "activities" which students could sign up for as part of the student activity fee--a fee which we all had to pay.  Fresh out of the service and living on the slim combination of a graduate stipend and VA benefits, I was bound and determined to get something back for the fee collected so figure skating it was.  That ancient history can be revisited here  

This was our textbook.  Still useful reading.

It amazes me that my old gamma card has survived several moves of house.  It shows just how infrequently I revisit the contents of the particular box it was in.  I had completely forgotten it.  On a whim I sent the pix of my old card to ISI and asked them if their records go back this far.  ISI itself was still a "teenager" in 1976 (founded in 1959). If their records are intact I wonder if they have a record of me passing Delta.  Didn't find that card.  I do remember working on FS-1 elements before leaving Delaware.

Opening an old box introduces so many questions.  I still don't know how that bird got into the house.

Alea iacta est (the die is cast)

Unlike Suetonius, in his famous comment to Julius Caesar in 49 BC, I don't plan to cross the Rubicon in defiance of the Roman Senate.  But in a similar sense, my fate is now defined.  I will compete at ISI district IV's spring competition.  There's no turning back.  I've paid my $55.00 for (maybe) 45 seconds of skating time in front of my adoring public--oh, how they love me (big news for them).  What was I thinking?

For the sake of my two dear constant readers I should back up just a tad and provide the back story from this afternoon's lesson with my long suffering Coach A.

As noted in a previous post Coach A., as befits a good coach, was busy imploring her students (which includes moi) to consider the upcoming spring comp.  Up until now I have resisted the notion of competition.  Testing is one thing but competition seemed beastly and undignified for a person of my considerable gravitas.  However this cunning woman had a card up her sleeve:  She said "I know you want to dance the Canasta Tango rather than the Dutch Waltz but in order to do that you must pass ISI Dance 3 no later than today."  I've been trying to pass Dance  3--like forever.  As an organization, ISI is a stickler in that skaters must have passed the level which contains a given skill prior to competing at a level containing that skill.  USFSA, in contrast, allows skaters to "punch above their weight" so to speak.  But this is an ISI competition and the CT is a Dance 3 level skill.  I had previously  passed Dance level 2.

Dance 3, in addition to the CT also demands that students pass the Rhythm Blues--an evil dance which posses a series of  tricky tuck behind steps in the end pattern.  Many times has your diarist crashed and burnt while attempting "blues expression" in this particular dance.  I was in a grim mood.

But Coach A. was insistent.  And so we gave it a go.  And much to my surprise I pulled the proverbial rabbit out of the hat.  We somehow managed to skate the RB cleanly twice and with that I passed!  With that hurtle out of the way we shifted gears and spent the rest of our time cleaning up my CT skills.  No, I can't show you the Dance 3 badge today but "soon come, Mon, soon come" as they say down in the islands.

I now have roughly a month to make the CT competition worthy.  Coach A. threw me one last curve:  she prefers Hernando's Hideaway over Besame Mucho.  The things I suffer for my art.

Humor ver 1.0

Entering the Twilight Zone of Expression.

Canasta Tango pattern

So I'm back to having coached ice dance lessons on a regular basis.  My rink added a late afternoon public on Tuesdays which so far, has yet to be discovered by the general public.  Since coach A. had no one lined up for this new session I was able to book a half hour at 4pm for the whole month of March Tuesdays.

This past Tuesday, as we're leaving the ice, she said "the skating director asked me whether or not you'd be interested in competing at ISI Districts."  I had seen the face book posting that announced our rink was hosting District IV's spring competition but hadn't given it a second thought.  I had let my dues slip--after my big face plant last July it was not a given that I'd be skating well enough to test let alone compete.  Coach A. expanded the subject:  "The deadline for paying your dues and filling out the form is the 15th of March.  You'll skate either the Dutch Waltz or the Canasta Tango.  I'll see how they look at next week's lesson and then we can decide."  March 15th--that's like this coming Tuesday.  Yow!  The competition itself is not until the weekend of the 16th of April, so I'd have a month to knock off the rough edges--and a deadline.

OK, I've been skating these two low level dances off and on for a couple of years now and pretty much can remember the steps.  On a good day I can even place them on the rink where they more or less need to go.  But a dance needs to be skated with feeling.  One hears of skaters possessing great Tango or Waltz or Blues expression.  It's one thing to go through the motions and execute the steps correctly and another thing to skate a dance in a way that captures something of the emotion of that dance.  Somehow the expression thing is a quality that continues to elude me.  Coach A. has the unenviable job of attempting to teach a Clydesdale to dance. 

Last night diaristdaughter and I went to the rink for a Friday night public.  I figured it would be packed but with that deadline now looming in my near future I needed some ice time before the next lesson/decision.  While I was there I paid my team dues.  I decided why not use the ISI competition as a warm up for skating my USFSA prelim dance tests?  Having people watch me skate isn't new.  The major difference would be that all those aggravating people would be up in the stands (where they belong) instead of on the ice blocking my pattern.  It continues to amaze me: ice tourists don't know any of the dance patterns but they instinctively know exactly where to congregate in order to screw up an ice dancer attempting to practice a pattern dance.   Anyway, now that I had an nonrefundable stake in the game it was time to come to grips with these dances once and for all.

We bought our ice passes and for a while were the only skaters on the ice.  A half hour into the session there were still only four or five skaters in addition to us.  Very unusual for a Friday night.  But then again, this was another March only add-on session and it replaced the usual late Friday evening "disco ball/DJ" session.  Maybe all the crazy kids that love to crash into each other in the dark during the DJ thing were off doing roller derby instead.

After warming up I scrolled through the music on my shuffle and queued up my file of ice dance music.  I have half a dozen different tunes with the correct beats per minute for each of the three preliminary dances.  I alternated between tunes for both the DW and the CT as I practiced.  Towards the middle of the session, while skating the Canasta Tango, I had the sensation of actually connecting to the dance.  My feet were finally executing the steps on what seemed to be the correct beat of the music most of the time.  Sort of a WOW moment.  The ability to hook up with the music seemed to depend on which tune I was playing.  After experimenting I came to realize that the tune Besame Mucho worked best for me.  Hernando's Hideaway didn't work nearly as well, nor did any of the other CT tunes in my file.  This seemed kind of random since they all possessed the same number of BPM, but I decided to stick with Besame Mucho for the rest of the time I spent working on the CT.  Once I settled on the music I started cleaning up the steps and soon discovered that I was executing the slide chasse and swing roll steps with a little more style than usual.  Was I crossing over some sort of a threshold and entering the realm of "Tango expession"?  The short answer seemed to be YES (!)  My steps were crisper.  My demeanor and movements seemed to have been taken over by another spirit--one with an "attitude".  It was sort of like a dreamscape.  Who the hell was this skater?

I reverted to the Dutch Waltz and tried different tunes in the hopes of a repeat of my Tango revelation but try as I might I just wasn't feeling it for the DW.  This is odd in as much as I truly enjoy listening to Strauss waltz music.  Perhaps this is a reflection of me having a harder time with the basic skills required of the DW.  I almost always have trouble with the end pattern of that dance.  Unless I place the last progressive and swing roll just right I flirt with the risk of running out of room for the two last 3 beat strokes before the dance repeats.  You can ask my ex-dance partner V.  She took up riding horses in steeplechase events, figuring that it was safer than doing the Dutch Waltz with your diarist.  Maybe once I get the end pattern under control I'll be able to enter the "Waltz Zone".

As for next Tuesday's decision--it's a done deal in my mind.  Just need to sell it to my coach and hopefully not forget the password for getting back into the Tango Zone--Besame, Besame Mucho...   

How do they do it?

Last week I was blessed by a cancellation which resulted in me having a coached lesson; a rare thing since I lost my regular time slot with a popular coach.  The timing of the lesson was set to begin after the first thirty minutes of a public session which was an hour and a half long.  Perfect.  Thirty minutes to warm up my legs and warm up my dances.

Now I don't know about all coaches, but this particular one, plus a few others at our rink which I've not taken from, have the remarkable ability of showing up at almost the last minute for a scheduled lesson.  They're never late but never are they overly early.  They show up in the lobby with just enough time to lace up their skates and hit the ice.  It's as if, like migrating birds, they have very precise internal clocks and GPS systems which infallibly get them to which ever rink and lesson bang on the dot every time.  Traffic snarls don't seem to impact their equation.  The efficiency of this is to me impressive.  Whenever I cut a trip to the rink close it costs me at the minimum ten minutes of ice time.

The other noteworthy thing about this "just in time" delivery philosophy is that coaches don't seem to
need warm up time.  There's none of that six minute warm up hocus-pocus that competitors get.  Nope, a coach steps out on the ice ready to go.  By way of comparison, your old diarist likes to arrive at the rink with enough time in hand to briskly walk around the rink perimeter for 15 minutes while the Zamboni operator does his thing prior to the beginning of the session.  Following that bit of brisk walking I lace up but then need at least a couple laps around the rink with forward stroking, some power pulls and my latest warm up trick, doing forward cross rolls down the long axis of the rink, before even thinking about turns, backwards skating or the like.  I realize that coaches are younger than me.  That's hardly news:  practically every skater out on the ice is younger than me.  Having said that I still see many thirty-somethings putting in their warm up time prior to attempting any demanding elements.  How do coaches perform without warming up?  Do they have electric socks which send jolts of stimulating energy up their legs as they drive in for the lesson?  Are the individuals who gravitate to coaching those genetically endowed with perpetually warmed up legs?

We could eat up a lot of time pondering these things.  But for now I'll just have to accept my observation without any meaningful experimental test to demonstrate the validity of one explanation over another.

Going the distance Dutch style: ice skating and all cause mortality.

One of the  benefits of working in a human nutrition research lab is that my work computer gives me access to peer reviewed journal articles which delve into many arcane areas related to human health.  After reading a post about the figure skater Anna Galmarini, who died at the relatively young age of 54, I started to wonder if  any research had been done on the beneficial effects of ice skating on longevity, or if not longevity then perhaps all cause mortality.  Intuitively, one would think that exertion resulting from skating would generate some benefit beyond, say, channel surfing on the couch.  And so to the internet and  PubMed I went.  My search was not long.  In fact I found only one scholarly article when using "ice skating" and "longevity" as search terms, but it never the less opened a door to an unknown (at least to me) world of long distance canal skating in the Netherlands and specifically the Dutch Eleven Cities Race/Tour.

The eleven Cities event is not an annual event but is held only on years in which the ice on the 200 kilometers (that's about 120 miles in old money) of canals which link the cities freezes to a thickness (15 centimeters/ 6 inches), a thickness deemed suitable for the event which is limited to 20,000 participants.  Sometimes the race takes place on consecutive years, other times there may be a break of 20 years between races.  The organizers make a preliminary announcement of the possibility of a race within 2 to 3 days and if conditions hold up, the race takes place.  This wiki page explains the whole deal.  One thing to keep in mind is that since this event isn't a predictable date that one can circle on the calendar, perspective participants need to continuously maintain their fitness levels in anticipation of a race.

So, getting back to our scholarly research paper, did the authors see any benefit from all this skating on lifespan or healthspan?  Recall that I introduced this event as a "Race/Tour" so there are two major divisions within the participants: serious races who complete the event in less than 7 hours and recreational skaters who get a completion award if they finish by midnight.  The race itself starts at 5:30 in the morning.  The race has taken place for a number of years and the authors, epidemiologists at Leiden University Hospital, were able to track down skaters who participated in race/tours between 1956 and 1988.  Of that cohort there were 259 men  took part in the speed event, 1000 men who finished within the time limit and finally, 1000 men who did not finish in time to qualify for an award.  Women, although their numbers have increased over the years, were not included because their sample size was too small to be statistically reliable.  The results demonstrated that although there wasn't an increase in longevity, there was a 24% reduction of (premature) all cause mortality among all of the skaters observed, with the strongest reduction found during the first ten years after the race.  And although the benefit decreased over time there was a persistent 17% reduction, compared to the general population, even after more than thirty years.

Closer examination of the stats break out differences between racers and tourists and between tourists who finished within the time limit and those who had to give up.  I'll let those interested do their own reading but as a teaser I'll point out that although there was a slight benefit for finishing, even the tourists who didn't complete within the time limit benefited from participation in the event.  Bottom line: even the recreational skaters benefited.

So, does recreational figure skating several times per week benefit the skater?  My guess is that it probably does, although the benefit is no doubt rather smaller than that seen for long distance skaters who, like long distance runners, continuously maintain their fitness in anticipation of the next event.  For figure skaters like me, one would need a very large cohort and would need to be able to control variables such as age, gender and life style choices (like smoking for example), but yes, a small benefit is probably hiding within those numbers!

A Sign of the Times?

Yesterday, while in south Jersey, I went over to the Flyer's Skate Zone on Albany Avenue for the 12:30-2:30 pm public session.  While the local economy is reeling under the weight of a collapsing gambling industry to the point of driving the city to seriously consider filing for bankruptcy, one would never know it from the size of the crowd gathering at the rink.  I had to circle the parking lot twice before finding a space.  A healthy ice tourist presence does help keep the doors open. 

But the  thing that really grabbed my attention was a notice printed out on single sheets of computer printer paper, scotch taped to the rink Plexiglas windows which stated " No Chewing Tobacco out on the rink."  My reaction was  Oh my Gaud---ewwwwwww.  I next wondered is this a hockey thing or an unwashed public thing? 

Is chewing tobacco spital a  common thing or a hockey thing?

 

 

 A quick trip to the internet revealed that this was not an isolated case.  You can read about it (or not) here: https://www.google.com/search?q=No+chewing+tobacco+on+the+ice+rink&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Is this a problem at your rink?  It's news to me--lips that touch chew will never touch mine.  Up til now I've thought that it's bad enough to skate over stick-on skating passes which have liberated themselves from their purchasers.  But then I probably live a sheltered life. 

Well, although the rink was heaving with people, ice time is ice time.  No lick-spital was encountered yesterday by your diarist.