IP Skate Tip- Low Down, KNSB #11 Den Haag & More, Indoors, ISU LT WC Erfurt, Road Rash Chronicles, Hegarty's The Floor

IP Skate Tip- Low Down: The latest Inline Planet Skate Tip of the week is really good ;)- The Low Down.


Is this skater low enough? ... Take the High-Low Photo Quiz!
KNSB #11 Den Haag: You can read Skate Podium's live udpates from the KNSB Cup #11 Den Haag.

To catch up on the results from all the other long track speedskating races, make sure you check out SpeedskatingResults.com.

Indoors: The indoor racing at the Canadian Championships has been scrapped, but that's not stopped a few clubs from still operating an indoor program. Andrew Hegarty is laying down The Challenge. He writes 'In my last post I suggested a friendly competition between the big 3 indoor clubs in Canada. I thought about it some more and I figured that it might actually be fun to do...What do the winners get? Bragging rights and that’s it. This would simply be for the fun of it'.

The thread French indoor inline championships has a lot of potential for developing ideas and discussion. I think it's one to watch. Jim White writes 'France will soon (this winter) have an indoor championships... I've heard that Italy and Switzerland have had indoor national championships, perhaps others, so hopefully there's movement to an European indoor championship, then perhaps worlds!'

ISU LT WC Erfurt: The ISU long track world cup kicked off today in Erfurt- you can find all the results here. You should be able to find pictures here a little bit later.

As always, Speed Skating World Online Magazine is giving us some insight on the racing action- here are a few links of interest from today's racing; ladies 500m B, men 500m B, ladies 500m A, men 500m A, ladies 1000m A, men 1000m A, ladies 1000m B, and men 1000m B.

Road Rash Chronicles: Here's a fun link for you to read with lots of good stuff and a voice from Ottawa; Road Rash Chronicles. This site has regular updates- here's one of the recent videos; Inline Interval Training-


Hegarty's The Floor: Andrew Hegarty's latest post is called The Floor. About the floor that the Scooter's Indoor Speed Club uses, Andrew says 'When skating indoors the quality of the floor is imperative. The better the surface, the more grip and the faster you can enter the corners. We have to spend 30 minutes ++ each practice cleaning the dust off of Scooters just so that the floor is acceptable; even then we rarely dip into the sub 10s laps and we tend to avg mid to low 10’s in our rolling fast laps. I wonder whether we’d be faster or slower on the floor that Ottawa uses'.

Wayne Burrett, Aaron Arndt, Andrew Hegarty, and I met last night for a few hours to discuss plans re. the SISC and we made a plan to 'teach' others how to clean the floor properly. There's a real science- a method and technique but also an art behind cleaning the floor at Scooter's. We've got to dry mop the floor 3 or 4 times, and then vinegar the floor in the correct places a few times, digging away at the dirt and dust and sparkles from the ornaments that hang from the ceilings, making sure we cover the track patterns (entry and exit lines) used in the corners.