Yay Capitalism!

I'd arrived in Lake Placid, where it's winter, to start training for the Winter Olympics, and it had the audacity to not be snowy. Not a flake to be seen. Anywhere.
But that's now been resolved. We've had a heap of snow and our heap of junk rental car is showing it's mettle ... or lack thereof. It's a constant source of amazement to me how something can be built and obviously never tested. I'm not a perfectionist by any stretch of the imagination, but if I were to build a windscreen de-mister, I'd damn well make sure it worked. Every morning we go to the track for training. It's a fifteen minute drive, and we spend every moment of it hunched over like giant irish prawns, trying to peer out of our frosted windscreen as the car ineffectually huffs luke-warm air at the bottom 20 centimeters of glass.
Then when we get to track we have to drive to the top. Its an automatic car, and I really don't think it should give off a burning smell when we get up there. I'm pretty sure it's an automatic ...

At the other end of the product spectrum there is the phenomenon known as the iPod. I just got myself an iPod Nano. Tiny (thinner than a pencil), big (4Gb), black (not white), and utterly sleek (not chunky). The only complaint I've heard leveled at these lovely pieces of kit is that they can be scratched simply by looking at them.
So, after donning a blind fold, I carefully lifted it out of the box and proceeded to apply something called the Invisible Shield. I'm not sure why Apple don't cover their iPods with this in the factory but they sure as hell ought to. Apparently it was designed to protect the edges of military helicopter blades from chipping. I suppose that means my Nano will be safe if I decide to whirl it over my head at hundreds of miles per hour. It may even protect it if I look at it and do crazy things like put it in my pocket and listen to music! What remains to be seen is whether this amazing cover will still permit me to use the scroll wheel.

In other news sliding is going well enough. I'm back on my sled nearly a week now and I'm still on one piece. It's taking a while to get back into the habit of performing the various things that make you a good slider. Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to focus on telling you all about some of those things, hopefully as I remember how to do them.

Into the Jaws of the Beast

Today I’m going to talk about fear. We’ve all experienced it at some stage or another. Watching horror films, nearly stepping out in front of a moving car. It makes you feel sick. It’s a cold feeling in the pit of your stomach, a sour taste on the back of your tongue. It usually passes quite quickly; a horror film is only an hour or two long; a car blasts its horn and is gone in a few seconds. You move on with your daily life, think nothing more of it. But have you really thought about it properly? What is fear? (Rory, philosopher, help me out here) Where does it come from? In an evolutionary sense, how does feeling sick help you deal with sabre-tooth tigers? It doesn't! It's completely useless. It's probably some side-effect of having a heap of adrenalin dumped into your system.

Yesterday I did my first slide of the season. I hadn't been on a sled in nearly 8 months. I have new runners on my sled, and the track here in Lake Placid chewed me up and spat me out nearly every time I went down it two years ago. I'm not going to lie, I was as nervous as hell.

And that's when I start to think that fear is completely and utterly irrational. There is no immediate threat to my personal well-being. There are no cars or sabre-tooth tigers bearing down on me. All I have is an idea of danger, a vague image in my mind of something going horribly wrong, of someone standing in the track when I go down, of a corner flipping me into a girder. None of it is real. None of this should have any effect on me. But it does.

I feel sick, I can't stop pacing up and down. Fortunately for my cool, composed exterior no-one can see my stomach churning, and my pacing looks like I'm doing a warm up.
Then I actually do my warm up, put the upcoming slide to the back of my mind.

There are ten people sliding before me.
I put my speed suit and a couple of armour pads on.
Then nine people.
I lean forward, close my eyes and visualise a run down the track.
Then seven.
I put my spikes on. My heart rate is still elevated from the warm up, and it's not going down.
Then six.
I hop around some more to loosen up as much as possible
Then five.
I do another visualisation.
Then three.
I put my gloves on.
Then two.
My heart rate keeps rising, I take deep breaths, try to relax.
Then one.
I pick up my helmet, walk outside into the cold.

As the last person pushes off. I take my sled and carry it over to the start, resting it on one end behind the starting block. I stand and look down the track. The ice crunches under my spikes as I shift from one foot to the other. My heart is hammering, I breathe deeply and flick through the sequence of corners one last time in my mind.

I try to push the fear out of my mind. Make way for the single point of focus, the here, the now, and the 19 corners waiting for me below.

The green light comes on, the track is clear. I put my sled down, shift the runner into the groove and feel the fear surge like a last breaking wave.

Sixty-four seconds later its all over.

The fear is forgotten. God, I love this sport.

Coming to America

Well the journey has started properly now.
After much last minute running around and general stress, I'm here in sunny USA. In case there's someone I haven't managed to recommend it to, check out www.orbitz.com. Bloody brilliant, got flights from Dublin - Boston - Munich - Dublin for $632. But there is something I love more than Orbitz. Something that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy when I think about it. It's cruise-control. The single greatest automobile invention since the wheel. Forget wankel-rotary engines, forget turbos, forget ABS, just get cruise-control.

Let me explain.
The drive from Boston to Lake Placid is something like 300 miles. The average speed limit on the roads covered is around 55mph.
300/55 ~ 5.5hrs of driving. Try tapping your foot for 15 mins and you'll get an idea of what it's like to have to adjust the throttle on a manual car for 300 miles. Cruise-control takes all that away and replaces it with a smooth, fuel efficient, foot saving alternative.

That's a lot of driving. I'm sure you could cut the trip shorter by the simple expedient of driving faster but there seem to be lots of highway troopers arounds. And not the sort that try to insert the word "miaow" into the conversation to mess with your head then let you go with a warning.

Anyway, we're here now in the Olympic Training Centre. It's a great facility that serves as a reminder as to why America tends to dominate every sport it looks at, except for rugby and football (or soccer as they call it here), and hurling, now that I think of. Okay, there are probably lots of sports it's crap at as a nation but that's cos it's not interested in them.

The OTC has got pretty much everything an athlete could need to excel. There is a canteen which is open from 7am - 9pm. It serves you as much food as you want and ensures that it is all healthy and good for you. There is a complete weights room with enough equipment to keep 30 athletes happy pumping iron. There's a physio there to analyse your techniques, injuries etc. It's got a gymnasium to run around in, do sprint training and all that.
It even has a giant treadmill with a skeleton sled attached to it so you can practise your push-starts. When I'm in Ireland, the best push-start training I can do is sprint with a short stick held to the ground to simulate running low with a sled. That's so pathetic I don't even do it, I just mentioned it as the only Irish alternative.

Most importantly (to me) it's got a really technical skeleton track about 15mins drive away. We start training on that track tomorrow. It's not an ideal track to start the season on but I'm told it's running a bit slow at the moment. We'll see ...