Olympic Recap

Wow! What a great set of Olympic games!!! Congrats to the US Women’s Ice Hockey team for pulling out a victory and Gold Medal in a shootout win over Canada. Too bad the Men’s team couldn’t do the same, I think we had a shot at double Gold Medals in ice hockey.

I am hoping that all of you had the chance to watch some of the other sporting events besides the ice hockey. In particular, the long track speed skating. There’s no doubt that in a race where a 1000th of a second matters, speed skaters are going to use scientifically verified techniques to provide maximal speed and power. I thought NBC did an incredible job of showing the skating stride mechanics in slow motion, and even some great stop action shots where they talked about the physics and biomechanics involved in speed generation. It was so beautiful to see these skaters get a full leg “recovery” where the skates came together and the blade was placed onto the ice on an outside edge. In several stop action frames, they even drew a vertical line through the skater showing how perfect the anatomical alignment was of the skaters being “over their hip” and over their skate. They then also drew 2 horizontal lines, one through the hips and another one through the shoulders, showing those lines to be PERFECTLY perpendicular to the vertical “balance” line. In other words, the skater’s upper body and torso was NOT tipped to the right or the left, nor did the upper body move while transitioning from one stride to the next. Now that’s CORE STRENGTH!

The other aspect of the telecast that I actually enjoyed this time around were the commercials. There were several ads that showed a lot of video of athletes training, training to exhaustion, and putting in the hours. I really feel like this piece of becoming successful is SO OVERLOOKED. That’s what makes Olympians, well, Olympians! Same for any professional athlete. In my opinion, if you aren’t putting in the extra hours in the gym, and extra hours honing your craft (power skating training, shooting, and eye-hand-puck work), you are striving to be AVERAGE. All those hours at the rink, driving to all those away games and tournaments, JUST TO BE AVERAGE??? What’s the point in that??? Face it, if you’re just showing up to your practices and games, you will never be as successful as the other player who works on his skills ABOVE AND BEYOND what the rest of the team is doing. Participating in the skating treadmill training, on-ice power skating, shooting a million pucks, stickhandling clinics, etc. is like putting money in a savings account. It will always be there for you when you need it most. Embrace the hard work that it takes to ABOVE AVERAGE!