How to Get Into Speed Skating
If you enjoy speeding up a long strip of ice or catching tight turns trying to get ahead of the one in front, you might want to consider lace up a pair of skates. You don’t have to have Olympic-sized hips to try this, although it will certainly help. I stopped in practice to find out the details.
Events
There are two types of Olympic speed skating: long track and short track. Long track competitions are timed and usually two skaters compete at the same time on different tracks. The one who sends the fastest wins. To keep it interesting, there is also a team pursuit race where groups of three skate together.
Short track is another matter: several skaters line up and fight for position. The winner is determined locally, so it doesn’t matter how fast you advance as long as you are the first to cross the line. (The long track will include a similar style event this year called the Mass Start .)
If you’re hoping to get into traditional long-track speed skating, there are only two full-size ice rinks in the US where you can do it properly: one in Utah and one in Wisconsin . American speed skating pursues inline skaters on the road as there is no Olympic inline skating competition. So if you are in the mood to skate straight and swing your arms for a long time, the easiest way in this sport might be speed roller skating.
But the short track is simpler: the standard track fits easily inside the hockey rink. So if you go to a speed skating club, it will be easier for you to find people who train and compete in short track speed skating.
What it looks like
I met the Pittsburgh Speed Skating Club at an ice rink just outside town during open skating hours. (Hockey is so popular that it is difficult to find ice time at a reasonable cost. Little-known winter sports are hard to find.) They do short track speed skating, and one of this year’s short track speed skaters, John-Henry Krueger , trained. with this club when he was young.
I was allowed to borrow a pair of skates that you see in the photo above. Skates have longer and straighter blades than figure or hockey skates. (All skates have a “swing” shape, or a shape that resembles the base of a rocking chair, which helps you glide in a curved path as you lean on the side of the skate.) They also have very low ankles so you can bend your knees and bring your body weight closer to ice.
I won’t lie: the hardest part about ice skating is just ice skating . If you are a beginner on ice, it will take you a while to get comfortable with ice skating. Figure skating or ice hockey lessons can be a good first step before you head off to your speed skating practice.
I did a bit of figure skating (I can do a three-turn jump and a waltz jump and that’s the end of my repertoire), but most of my experience with wheeled skating. I used to play roller derby, which involves running fast laps with strong crossover movement on a heavily curved oval track. I have it , right? But as soon as I went out on the ice, it seemed to me that I had to re-learn to skate. I spoke to another newbie who used to do figure skating; we both felt lost.
So, over the next hour, the coaches helped us learn the simple art of lowering, pushing, shifting, and lifting the other leg. One coach told me that you want your toes, knee, and face aligned on top of each other. On one side of this vertical line are your opposite arm and leg. But on the other side of that line, opposing that weight, all you have is your hip. The lower you go and the more you protrude your hip, the more stable you will be.
Aside from carrying weight, another tricky skill was finding my benefits. All skates have two edges, which means that the large knife on your leg is actually two parallel knives if you look closely. When you slide straight ahead, you will be on both edges of the blade. But as soon as you lean into a turn, you find yourself on one edge or the other.
When you roll counterclockwise, every time you come to a turn, you make crossovers. Your right foot crosses over your left, so you touch the ice with the inside edge of your right skate and the outside edge of your left skate. Being on the outer edge is a little scary because you rely on the blade to cut into the ice and hold you back. If the blade slips off, you will land on your butt.
So I spent most of my time training in crossovers and finding the exact way to position my weight and legs so that the outer edge could hit the ice. Of course, one day I was defeated – I was driving on a bend and before I realized it, I was sliding and rolling on the ice. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I got up and was covered in shavings from my waist to my toes. Hey, falling on the first day is good, right? So you are trying.