Ottawa Practice

Posted on January 16, 2008

First, Special thanks go out to Stephane Tremblay, and Michael Garvin for setting things up for me to skate and assist in the Indoor facility this weekend in Ottawa.

Also to Cor Beattie for his advice, brief company, and kind words.  Big ups, C.  :)

So, onto the practice…

To start, things were a bit hectic in getting things set up for me to skate in Ottawa.  But, within about fifteen minutes of having things confirmed, I set out to Barry’s to hang out with the man Friday night, and of course Saturday morning.  Barry decided to join me at practice with the OUISC club, and I was really happy to see it.  Barry was on the floor and skating with us, mostly the whole time.  It was really great to see.  Old times, bro-ham, like the old ones.  :)

Their practice is broken down into three segments:

10:00am - 11:00 - Plyometric exercises
11:00am - 12:00 - Speed Training
12:00am - 13:00 - Technique & Fitness

Arriving at the facility a bit early, I saw some familiar faces as soon as I parked the car.  I realised that I hadn’t seen much of the Canadian Inline scene for quite some time outside of Toronto. 

Expecting the Plyometric to be outdoors as it normally is, I found everyone at the front of the building.  Due to the cold weather, the plyos were moved inside around the skating surface.  The plyos were super hard, if of course you did them right.  I was worried that my legs wouldn’t be as peppy as I had hoped for the practice.  I mean, you drive all the way, you hope to feel good for practice.  But after the first half of plyos, I felt warmed up which took longer than normal for me (probably because of the drive the night before and a not-so-great sleep).  So after an hour of plyos, I felt… alright. Though it was tougher than I had expected.

The next hour was the Speed hour.  I have to say though that I was confused when I saw all the local skaters pulling out their skates with XG’s on them…  I had heard the floor was slow and grippy, so to say the least, I was confused.  Hopping on the floor, and hoping for the best/most, it took me about two strides to feel how slow the floor was.  It felt like my wheels were deflated.  Or that I was bearing deep in a sludgy/mucousy material. 

The Ottawa floor looks like hardwood, but is actually an unusually thick laminate tile, and is just think enough to feel like a rubberized floor.  At speed, it is certainly far grippier than the floor in Toronto, but not at all “slip-free” anywhere above 70%.  Basically, there is very little glide, and it is tough to just hold your speed, but it is grippy enough to skate reasonably fast.  I think the most immediate impact is that it is really hard to hold pace.  I also think that it has later concequences on your techinque; that it will inevitably cause one to have an elevated stride rate, and will likely cause one to push back too much.

The floor being slow makes it tough to prolong the portions of the workout, since even a few laps are tough to skate at speed.  I won’t get into the specifics of another coach’s workout, so I will actually start to wrap this up rather quickly.

I think that the floor is slow enough to warrant shortening the straights a little, and it would then be far easier to do prolonged efforts within a workout.

I would say in short that if one were to skate a time trial at either Scooter’s or Ottawa; over 1 lap Ottawa would no doubt be faster, up to maybe about 3 or 4 laps.  Anything above that, Scooter’s is actually faster.  It would be really interesting to hold practices at each of the clubs and compare the lap times of varying distances and track patterns of the same skaters.

I stuck around and talked and skated a few accles and a warm down during the third and final hour, and spoke a bit to the Technique and Fitness group that was led by Michael Garvin.  It seemd to me he was doing a great job.  Keep up the great work, the club looks to be strong!

I will travel back to Ottawa this weekend and skate this Saturday’s practice with the group.  I am really looking forward to it.

I also picked up a few ideas on practices for us in Toronto, it was interesting to see what got this group excited, and these would be things that I might tend to ignore.

So, see you Saturday Ottawa!  (you too B)
-Aaroniscooldotcom.

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