Snow Patrol

Ok, we were supposed to be doing a competition here in Altenberg but because it decided to snow so damn much the race has been cancelled.
I'll explain how racing works. There are official training runs that take place in the couple of days leading up to a race. There are supposed to be 6 training runs available of which you must successfully complete at least 3 to be able to do the competition. The reason for this is two-fold: It gives you a chance to re-familiarise yourself with the track if you haven't been on it recently, and it weeds out those that may not be able to handle the track safely when it has been specially prepared on race day and it is lightning fast.

The race itself consists of two heats. There is some seeding that takes place in a race draw that determines the order in which competitors go off in the first run. The fastest 25 from the first heat get to do a second heat in the order of slowest to fastest. For example, last week I was 21st in the first heat, which meant I went off 4th in the second heat. Your final time is the combination of your first heat and your second heat and this determines your final placing. It is obviously possible to gain or lose ranking during the second heat if you have a great second run, or if you mess it up.

Our race cancellation started off innocuously enough with a training session being cancelled. Then another. A last ditch proposal to have one training run on the morning of the race, then the race in the afternoon was further diminished to having one training run on the afternoon followed immediately by a one-run race. Finally it was all cancelled. Stupid snow.

Tyler and I made an expedition to the track office to collect our licences. On the way we saw complete chaos on the roads. Despite being an ass-crack town, Altenberg lies on one of the major trucking routes between Germany and the Czech Republic. Steep roads, heavily laden articulated trucks and copious amounts of snow are a recipe for … some sort of weird disgusting disaster cake. Trucks being towed by special recovery trucks that must have more horsepower than a tugboat and more grip than a gorilla with glue on his hands. Trucks stuck on the side of the road cos they can’t get any further up the hill, even with chains on.

We also nearly had some tree fall on our car, which required us to manually lift it out of the way. Apparently being cold gives you enormous tree lifting strength. Don’t ask.



At this stage I'm not sure whether I’m annoyed or relieved. Altengberg is a love-hate track. It's mean and unforgiving to the bad slider. Sometimes it's mean and unforgiving to the good slider. You may recall how I recently said that on most tracks if you get on the sled and lie there like a sack of potatoes you'll get down without too much trouble, speed or injury. This is not one of those tracks.

There are two corners here that will make a serious, committed effort to fuck you up. The first is called Omega, most likely because it looks like an omega. It's a 180-degree left turn that likes to leave you high on the wall at the end of the corner. The corner has finished coming around at this stage so there is no pressure and it's not obliged to hold you up there. So it drops you out into the left wall, hard. Hard enough to bump you off the sled, or if you catch the beginning of the next corner it'll flip you over.

Omega is not nearly as tough as the other corner. It's called Kreisel. It's a standard name on most tracks for a corner that turns more than 180 degrees. This one in particular turns 360 degrees. What that means is that you're pinned to that wall as you hook around this huge corner that loops around right and curves back under itself. What makes it even better is that there is a long 60m straight leading into it so you've got plenty of speed when you come trucking into this corner. I remember the first time I saw it four years ago. We were doing a track walk with Andy Walser (Sled God who makes our sleds) and he summed up the corner nicely. "If you go in early, it's ok. If you go in late, you die". His English isn't great but he gets the point across.


Imagine a corner turning right. If you enter the corner on the left side it’s called getting in early. The resulting change of direction is smoother. If you enter it on the right side, it’s called getting in late and your change of direction will be very abrupt. If you enter Kreisel on the left you’ll experience a relatively gradual onset of pressure as the corner brings you around. If you go in late, all five G’s hit you in a split second, your head suddenly weighs five times as much as normal and you crack your jaw off the edge of your sled, or the track underneath, whichever is closer.

But that’s just the entry; the corner’s not finished with you yet. As the corner continues to come around, the pressure rises and falls. This makes the sled rise and fall so you get huge oscillations that you have to control as hard as you can. If you do it right you flatten out into 3 big waves. If you do it wrong you get a fourth wave that doesn’t just flip you, it gives you air time Michael Jordan would be proud of. I think pretty much everyone has flown out of Kreisel at some stage or another. I’ve put a video here so you can see what it looks like when it goes wrong. When it goes right it’s a great feeling and either way the remaining six corners are almost fun enough to make up for Omega and Kreisel.

On balance I’m probably just relieved, I didn’t actually need to do this race and there’s nothing to be gained from hurting myself on this track.

From here I’ve got a day or two off which are gonna be spent relaxing a bit with some of our American traveling companions. After that I’m heading to Konigssee for five days training before going home for Christmas on the 23rd December. I’m seriously looking forward to getting home. I’ve been away for two and a half months. It’s been fun and all but I’m not overly fond of German food or German beds. The former is too processed and the latter is too soft.

Mojo

At the moment I’m in Altenberg, Germany. It’s a tiny little town near the east border that actually manages to surpass Konigssee as a true ass-crack town. There is one set of traffic lights here.

I’ve just come from a competition in Konigssee where I placed 21^st out of 69 entrants. That’s a good result and I’m happy with it for a number of reasons.

I took over half a second off my previous best time (that’s huge by the way).

I came close to beating my coach.

I beat my team-mate Patrick.

Following the international training in Torino and after making a few adjustments to my sled I seem to have gotten my mojo back. I’ve begun sliding better and better, much to my relief. I was starting to get worried there. Big thanks to everyone who had faith in me and took the time to tell me so. Every little helps when you’re doing your best and it’s still not working.

Over the years I've been doing skeleton I've gathered the impression that people think there's not much to it once you've done the push and loaded onto the sled. You just lie there like a brave sack of potatoes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a lot of work to be done over the next 50 seconds. I'd say the sport is about 10% push and 90% driving. Sure, the push is helpful but it's no good to you if you can't drive. There's a Russian slider on the World Cup circuit at the moment. I can't remember his name right now but he is a seriously fast pusher. He holds the push record of nearly every track he's been to. But not the downtime records, and that's because he can't drive. By the time he gets to the bottom of the track he has lost so much time from bumps and skids that his awesome start is utterly wasted.

On the other hand look at someone like my coach, Clifton Wrottesley (Lord). He came fourth in the last Winter Olympics. He is an amazingly good driver and a not-so-amazing starter. If you have a slow start you can make up for it somewhat by being a good driver. During the course of his 2nd run in the Games, Clifton went from being 11th to 4th by driving the sled so well.

On most tracks, if you get on the sled and lie there like the aforementioned sack of potatoes you will probably make it down without too much trouble. You'll get bumped a bit, but you won't get seriously hurt, and you certainly won't get a fast time.

The sled you ride is about 70 cm wide, enough to accommodate your shoulders and a bit more for protection. The track varies in width from 1m to 5m. There's plenty of room and a huge huge number of lines you can take while going down the track. Some are easier to do, some end up hurting you, and some are definitely faster than others. What differentiates them all? Steering. You decide where the sled goes in the track.

If it were like driving a car it would be easy: “Oh, I want to go left here, I’ll just turn the wheel and it’s done “. Not so on a sled, and this is what makes it such a great sport. It’s not just the ability to swallow your fear and go head first at 80mph, it’s not just your athletic ability to do a fast push start. It’s also your ability to drive a sled that is difficult to drive. You need to have a complete awareness of where you are in a corner, what pressures you’re experiencing, whether the sled is rising or falling or skidding. And if you need to make adjustments they have to be done for fractions of a second at just the right moment.

But that’s not the hardest part. The hardest part is doing as little steering as possible. Steering is basically braking. The more steering you do, the more braking you do, the more speed you lose, never to be regained. That balance between doing too little and too much is a fine one.

When it all comes together it’s an amazing feeling that is difficult to describe. I’ve regained some of that feeling. It may sound stereotypical but it’s almost as if you are one with your sled, and not just because there are huge G forces pushing you onto it. When you pick up a glass of water you just do it. You don’t think about the individual movements involved like extending your arm, opening your hand, moving it around the glass, closing your hand. The nitty gritty details are taken care of on a deeper level that doesn’t register.

Every Journey ...

There are two main parts to a skeleton race. The first is the push start, the second is the slide. Doing both in as little time as possible is the aim of the game.

The push start is pretty damn important, it's your chance to put as much speed into the sled as possible before gravity takes over. Imagine doing two runs down a track. On both slides you drive exactly the same, take exactly the same lines, the ice is in exactly the same condition. The only difference is that on the first slide you push off a tenth of a second quicker. All else being equal, that slide can be about three tenths of a second quicker by the time you get to the bottom. When a race can be won by thousandths of a second that's a pretty big difference.

Here's how it works:
At the top of the track there is a wide, wooden block set into the ice. There are two parallel grooves cut into the ice about a meter apart. The grooves are about the width and depth of your thumb and run from in front of the block for about 30 meters.

There are a series of timing eyes at various locations down the track, which are used to time your progress. The only ones that matter are the first one and the last one. Your time starts when you cross the first one and stops when you cross the last one.

The first eye is about ten meters away from the block so you have a bit of room to get into your stride. Once the track is cleared and the buzzer goes, you have 30 seconds to cross the first eye.

So, the buzzer goes, you clear your mind, think whatever you have to think, put the sled down on the ice with one runner in the groove and get it going.

There are a couple of ways of doing this. The traditional way is to stand to the left of the sled, put your left paw on the left saddle rail, your right paw on the right and away you go. I've put a few sequence photos below of my teammate Patrick doing a two-handed start in Lake Placid.

The newer and better way, incidentally the one I use, is a one-handed start. You stand to one side (doesn’t matter which), put your nearside hand on the nearest saddle rail and run like hell. That may not seem like a huge difference but remember we’re talking “hundredths matter” here. The reason one-handeds are better is purely a matter of biomechanics. You have one arm free to perform your normal running motion and, more importantly, you are free to run in a slightly more natural upright position.

The only reason not everyone is doing one-handed starts is because they’re harder to do. You only have one hand on the sled controlling it so you need relatively strong shoulders. You also need better core strength to control the sled while you’re running beside it. It’s also tricky when you go to load onto the sled.
It’s soooo easy to jump on with too much sideways motion. Do that hard enough and the sled will pop out of the groove, send you into the wall, skidding. It’s a horrible mess and you can pretty much forget getting a decent time after losing all that momentum.

Ghostbusters

Time for a bit of culture. We're staying in Konigssee, Germany at the moment doing a bit of training and a competition. Around here they have a traditional festival take place on the 5th and 6th of December. I'm not too clear on what the origins are but Im going to take a wild, random stab in the dark and guess that its pagan. It's called something like Putenmalenlaufen and only happens here, although i suspect there are similar variations that take place around Europe.

The idea goes that during winter there arelots of evil spirits wandering about doing whatever it is that evil spirits do: giving people colds, making radio stations incessantly play every jingle-bell-ridden song they can get their sweaty hands on as soon as the clock ticks past midnight to the first of December. All reasonably explained as the doings of evil spirits. Coming up to Christmas people got into the "quick, Jesus is coming, everyone look busy" mood and decided to get rid of the evil spirits in a rather novel way. Ghostbusters hadn't been invented yet but that didn't stop those wily pagans.

Apparently evil spirits aren't very bright. If you dress up as a scary demon and make lots of noise the evil spirits get scared and run away. So what happens is you get several groups of about twenty people going around the town driving out the evil spirits. For several hours, starting around nine pm, these groups make circuits throughout the town centre as everyone comes out to watch and drink hot gluhwein. The group makes lots of noise shouting and ringing bells and rattling pots. As they go along they whip various bystanders to drive out the spirits. In doing so they also make you more fertile too.

There are two main types in the group. The central body is made up of guys wearing big costumes made out of straw with large bells attached to them. Floating around these guys are others dressed up with furs and wearing smaller bells. All of them are masked and all of them are carrying an assortment of whips lovingly made out of birch sticks bound together with traditional tennis racquet handle tape.



Normally you may think of Germans as reserved, efficient well-behaved people. But that's not the case during Putenmalenlaufen. These guys really get into it and I suspect large quantites of gluhwein help out here, along with the anonymity of a mask. They will go into restaurants and whip people as they dine. They'll grab girls, and smear black grease on their faces. After a while they'll take a break in some bar at a corner of the town, top themselves up with more booze and do it all again. They don't whip gently either.

While we were standing near the market square a group came by. Two of them made a bee-line straight for me and proceeded to drive out some evil spirits. I was wearing snow trousers so the first few hits didnt really hurt. My polite, manly stoicism served only to fuel their fervour so they upped their efforts until the whips broke. Fortunately I had positioned myself up against a large pillar which took most of the beating. Either way I feel very angelic and fertile so I guess it worked.