To see some pictures....click on the slideshow in 'My Travels'

So, a few of you have asked me to post some more pictures, which i will do shortly, but for now, just click right on the slideshow in 'My Travels' and it will take you directly to a picasa web album where you can see pictures from some of the places i've been like Santa Cruz,CA; San Diego, CA; Las Vegas, NV: Moab,UT; Harbin, China; Newfoundland; Bend, OR and more.

My dad is now a big deal!

A quick shout out and Congrats to my Tato (dad), Michael Makowsky. Last month he was named to the Championship list for Starters (the guys who shoot the gun to start races), which is limited to the top 24 starters. He was promoted to a Level 5, which is the top level, and now is eligible to start at World Cups, World Championships and the Olympics. While he will not be starting in Vancouver, hopefully he will be on track to start in Sochi, Russia in 2014.

There is a running joke between Lucas, my dad and I. My dad can only start women (for obvious conflict of interest reasons). We joke that it's a good thing that either Luc or I aren't female, cuz then he would never be able to start any competition!

Congrats Tato!

White man can jump?

People wonder what kind of things I do for training i.e. what kind of weight can I lift, how high can i jump etc. Here is a You Tube clip of Adrian Wilson who plays for the Arizona Cardinals. He is jumping a 66 inch hurdle.

This is my best attempt at jumping over the moon. I still have quite a way to go, but this is about 50 inches. Only 16 inches to go! Not bad for a guy who is only 70 in tall! Looking at the video, my butt is way over the bar, i just have to get my feet up higher like Adrian does. That's easily another 6-8 inches!

Summer Update Part 3 - Home in Sask and Richmond

So my last post finished up with the great training camp I was at in Oregon. By this point, I was already done 3 weeks of a 4 week training block.

(You might ask, what's a training block? well, our coach breaks out the year into several big blocks called macrocycles. These are usually 3 weeks, but can be 4 weeks long followed by one week of recovery. Each macrocycle is made up of several microcycles, each one week long. So, if i say we are in a week 3 of a 4 week build or block, it means we have finished the 3rd week of 4).

In the past, Marcel (Lacroix, my coach) would have us finish this block with a large volume camp and then a nice long week off. Not this year. We came back to Calgary and hopped straight onto the ice for another week of training. It was hard. I was tired before the week started, and by the end, i just wanted to go home. My body needed a break.

Cue up a trip to the motherland, i.e. Saskatchewan. What a great trip home, and so badly needed. It was so great to get home and just get away from skating. Don't get me wrong, I love it, but it was a long summer, hard training and lots of travelling. This was the last break until after the Olympics, so i took full advantage of it. I got to catch up with some of the girls (yes, that would be you Alana, Jen and Britt), spend some time with Ciara throwing a football around and being informed on what everyone I graduated with is up to and had a beer on the patio at Freddy's brand spanking new place (which is awesome btw). The other half of the trip was spent in Canora with my family. It was so great seeing my Baba and Dido (88 years old on Sept 5th!), my aunts and uncles and maybe most importantly, spending some quality time with my 3 younger cousins Larissa, Matthew and Jordan. Larissa helped Luc and I cook dinner for everyone on Thursday night, and afterwards I showed her pictures from China, California, Oregon and other places I've been so lucky to have visited. She just loved it! Matthew is a gem. At 2.5 he knows how to turn on the quad and riding lawnmower, soaks up new words and information like a sponge and just loves a good 'airplane ride'. It would have been great to spend more time at the farm, but we had to get back to Calgary and then off to Richmond. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it up to Saskatoon to see O.T and D.J, Oksana, Julian and Tatiana and the rest of the Ukie crew (that includes you Zhan, Mysak and E.B.) and some other friends I haven't seen in a long time (Sean, Amanda etc.) Any other summer and I'd have far more time for trips like that, but its Olympic year, and there is nothing normal about Olympic year.

Finally, 2 more weeks in Richmond. Richmond doesn't even feel like a trip anymore except for the quick airplane ride. It is the same as in Calgary, but in Richmond: same training, different location. The 2 weeks flew by, and before i knew it we were back here in Calgary. The training was great and things are coming along well.

You may be wondering where I'm at now, how I'm feeling and everything. so very quickly here it is. Physically, I'm in great shape right now, probably the best shape of my life. I'm much stronger, leaner and fitter than i have ever been. My testing results in the lab are far better than last year and keep getting better. On the ice I've made significant technical improvements; I just might be a speedskater one day :D. Most importantly, my biggest changes have come in my head. My mental game has improved so much, and my focus is sharper than it has ever been. All the other gains have been helped by getting considerably more sleep, only focusing on skating etc, but without a sharper focus, my gains would have been severely limited. Sometimes we laugh at the saying "you need to take time to smell the flowers", but its true. Its so easy to get caught up in the future and what ifs and results that you forget to focus on the moment. Without enjoying the moment and all the steps it takes to achieve something, before you know it, that experience has passed and you're left asking "what just happened?".

I might be in the best shape I've ever been, skating the best i have and mentally sharper than ever, but the only thing that matters is what happens on the ice. All the work has been done this summer, and now we are getting into racing season, the specific work. Its now 3.5 weeks until Fall Trials in Richmond. Now the real work begins: Time to get 'er done!

Summer Update Part 2 - Richmond/Oregon

Summer update part 2: Over the first few months of the summer, we were away for 5.5 weeks out of 8, so it was nice to get back to Calgary and just be at home. It was nice to get back in touch with friends and sleep and not be stuck in airports or on airplanes. By this point in the summer, we have been training full out for a month or two, so my body is used to the daily pounding. July was quite nice in Calgary, lots of nice weather, lots of hard riding and time spent on the ice. But, we were counting down the weeks until we were off on our second stint of travelling (we had 4 weeks at home in Calgary before we were off to Oregon).

The last few weeks before we left for Oregon were the first 2 weeks of a long 4 week training block. My body was starting to feel the first 2 weeks, so, what better way to recover than to go on a one week volume camp, spent almost exclusively on my bike.

(Aside: Back in May, I fell in love. Freddy from Dutch Cycle in Regina set me up with a brand spanking new 2009 Giant TCR Advanced 0. It's beautiful. Light. Fast. It makes me want to hop on the bike and just go and ride. That's the baby I've been riding all summer... I think we've logged something like 3000 km so far.)

Bend, Oregon is a city of 80,000 people in Central Oregon. It is on the Deschutes River at the base of the Cascade Mountains. And most importantly, there are trafic circles. Lots and lots of traffic circles. We stayed on the west edge of town, on the Cascade highway which climbs straight up to Mt. Bachelor (9000' at peak). It is one of the large mountains close to Bend, including the 3 sisters, all which are taller than 10,000 ft. Bend is a cool little place that's almost a little too perfect at times. I never saw any cops, except at the county police softball tourney where there must have been too many beverages being consumed. At that time, we asked, "If all the cops are here.....who's out on the road?".

The first day of the training camp was fun, if low walks are considered fun. For those of you who don't know, low walks are what we do to get 'down time', or time in skating position, in the summer. We are in a crouched position, similar to what we are on the ice, but we 'walk' by driving our knees through, land with our knees well over our toes, staying super low, all while maintaining a still back as if we were transporting a tea cup on it. It was a great session, but I couldn't walk anywhere (especially not down the stairs) without cramping or feeling awful muscle pain for about 4 days. Lets just say that some of the most painful massages of my life happened in the days following that low walk program. Luckily that afternoon we had a recovery ride, 2 hours nice and easy.

Over the next week, we logged something like 400+ km on the bike in 4 rides, plus we spent 5+ hours one day mountain biking up towards Tumalo Falls. That ride was at least 35 miles (58 km). Other than that first recovery ride, all of the riding was done in our aerobic zone. My aerobic zone is from 160-175 bpm, and I sustained on average something around that for 3.5-4 hours each ride.

During the week, we packed up our bikes and drove down to Crater Lake, in Southern Oregon. Why you ask? We rode our bike on the 32 mi loop around the Crater Rim. It's a collapsed volcano that has the 4th deepest lake on the planet in it (over 600m deep!). It just might be my favorite ride on the planet. It is an up and down ride with 1150 m of climbing on each loop. I decided to be brave and take off with Super Luc (i.e. my bro) and we hammered for 3 hours and 20 min, then he went for another 40 min or so to finish 2 full loops. I was short a third of the second loop, but still managed to ride for 85-90 km with lots and lots of climbing. Riding in that kind of scenery makes it quite easy to push really hard, for the same reason I was loving riding my bike in California. Here is a pic of Crater Lake.

Our last ride for the week started off with a nice long climb up towards Mt. Bachelor. There is about 8 km on the flat which leads into a 20 km climb with about 800m of vertical. Those first 28 km took an hour and 5 minutes, and we weren't going easy. Then we went down the other side of the pass, and turned right back around. Nothing like a 115 km hard ride to end off a camp when our legs are really talking to us. On top of that, a few sprint workouts and speed/agility circuits, and I was cooked. I was so fatigued at this point, but i still had a big smile on my face because I had one great week of training, and i really pushed myself hard.

We didn't just work hard, we had some fun too! One afternoon, we rented some doubles kayaks and paddle boards and cruised down the Deschutes River. It was so much fun and a nice change of pace. I was lucky to share a kayak with Christine Nesbitt where we had a heart to heart chat, while seriously wondering if something was wrong with us. We just couldn't paddle in a straight line no matter what we did. We found out later on that there was a rudder....good to know. The paddleboarding was also great. I felt like i was paddling down the canals in venice...except i was on a board, not a boat, and i used a paddle, not a pole. Close enough.

Some other highlights for the week included non-stop mom jokes between Steve and Jeff, a constant barrage of "That's what she said!" (remember The Office?), Luc and I polishing off the "BBQ Extravaganza" from Baldy's BBQ (http://www.baldysbbq.com/), constant flatulence in the house (that's what you get when each of us consumes 3-6000 cals a day), Todd's 5 trips to Safeway in one day, Jeff's ordeal trying to order Rock n' Republic cycling gear using pre-paid Visa cards, losing Jay in the Old Mill District, my 3 trips to the post office, Jeff paddling up the rapids on the paddle board and the guys kayaking up the rapids and cruising back down. Another great training camp :)

Summer Update Part 1 - Santa Cruz/Richmond

Here is my first attempt at putting a blog together, so i'm not sure how it will go. I'm sitting here at the condo in Richmond, wondering what exactly to say in my my first post. I've decided to put a little blog together so that all of my family and friends know how I'm doing, where I currently am, and where I'll be. Hopefully I'm able to keep everyone in the loop as I go through the season.

Recently, I've been thinking about how much time I have spent away from Calgary this summer, and I now realize that I have only been in Calgary for about 5 weeks since May 15th. I remember being ready for the summer to start, and now its over. This is the busiest and maybe the most eventful summer I've had to date: I've travelled to California, Richmond (x3), Oregon and Saskatchewan, and each training camp had its moments. That's perhaps a great place to start, a little recap of the summer.

My schedule:

May 16-28 - Santa Cruz, CA

June 8-22 - Richmond, B.C.
June 29-July 12 - Richmond, B.C.
August 8-16 - Bend, OR
August 22-29 - Regina/Canora, SK
August 30-Sept 12 - Richmond, B.C.

May 2009, Santa Cruz, CA --> Best Camp Ever??

This was the first camp of the year, and it was meant to be a kick off for the season. As usual, we spent a whole bunch of time on the bike, starting to get some serious volume into our legs. For some reason, this camp was different though: maybe it was a combination of a sharpened focus, hard training and the scenery, but it was just different, and in a very good way. One day on the bike as we were riding down the coast from Monterrey to Big Sur, it just hit me.... This is my job. I've been sent here to California to ride my bike. That's all i have to do. It's that simple. I'm so lucky to be able to do this, and see all these places. I love this.

As for the things we did: Riding Highway 1 towards San Francisco, Dryland on top of the world, Sea Kayaking in Monterrey Bay, Riding through Pebble Beach/Spyglass Hill/Links at Spanish Bay, Dinner at Nepenthe, A day in San Francisco and a night at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.

June/July 2009, Richmond, B.C.

Much of June and July were spent in Richmond, B.C. It was important to start the skating for the year on the ice that we hope to race on at the Olympics. The ice in Richmond is much different than that in Calgary. Richmond is much slower and has less glide than Calgary, so starting off the year in Richmond allowed us to get our skating technique adapted for slower, 'working' ice.

Skating wasn't the only thing I did in Richmond. Lucas and I setup the condo we are renting for the year. It's a great little place with not too much stuff. We don't know where we'd be without help from Uncle Harvey and Aunti Fae who managed to gather up enough furniture, kitchenware and other items to furnish our place. We have so many plates and cups and kitchen stuff, along with a sweet wicker loveseat and rocking chair. Yes, we have wicker, and a rocking chair. Thank you to everyone that donated stuff for us, we look forward to meeting you all at Thanksgiving dinner!

Richmond/Vancouver is really quite a nice place. The summer has been great here, and it only rained for a day and a half in the 4 weeks we were here. The humidity is wonderful, it doesn't really get too hot, and from our balcony we can see the mountains on Galiano Island in the distance across the Straight of Georgia. Also, everyone at the Richmond Oval has been great and the Oval has been a great training facility. Lastly, the people of Richmond are excited to host us, and I've been approached several times at malls or where ever by people just curious to know more. Many of us participated in the Steveston Salmon Festival, which has a parade along with a large fair. There were 60,000 people watching the parade, and i think i must have signed a few hundred autographs in an hour and a half at the SSC booth. Tons of fun! Check out the media section for a link to some pics and a story from the festival.