I had a student in Spokane last weekend who broke down and cried at not being able to latch on to the double push. The double push is a technique that's all the rage in racing circles, but that's beside the point. What matters is that I was bombarding her with too much information in too short a time for her to process fully. Much of my presentation incorporated skills that were cumulative in nature, like a pyramid of building blocks, so she was getting ahead of herself. Instead of falling into place, everything just seemed to fall apart. The confusion and frustration she felt was acute.

I know the feeling. I was reminded of an upper division survey course I once took at the University of California at Berkeley. It was taught by the head of the department, an old-school academician from Oxford who expected his students to have the built-in ability to soak up vast compendiums of information like sponges. I'll never forget how students in his class would break down and blubber, bewildered at the sheer volume of knowledge we were expected to digest and synthesize for his fearsome mid-terms and finals.

As with most things, if you don't first get the underpinnings firmly in place, it's hard to move on, but move on you must. We live in the day and age of Berlitz and speed reading, with ever higher expectations for rapid rewards. We fully expect to be able to download encyclopedic knowledge into our brains overnight, yet we well know that it's virtually impossible on such short notice to create all the mental pathways necessary to store the information permanently.

As if just remembering information, making connections, and seeing the big picture wasn't already hard enough. In skating you first have to understand with your mind and then interpret with your body. The doubly frustrating thing is that all too often the mind understands what needs to be done, but the body can't interpret as fast as desire would have it. The gap between apprehension and execution can be unnerving. Sometimes it takes a whole lifetime to bridge.

Dr. Stoddart, the professor who inspired the same reaction in his students as I did in Spokane, once taught me the value of constructing mental scaffolding as a way to organize seemingly endless reams of information Before complete synthesis of a subject had taken place, he maintained, you could still erect the framework on which to hang the bits that would later fit together into the whole.

Usually Stoddart would take a tangential approach to learning. Because he assigned more reading than was ever humanly possible, he always recommended dipping into books at random points and then moving both forwards and backwards, because that's the way our minds are organized (or disorganized, as it were).

Lists serve as the simplest way to organize material. Pneumonic devices (such as ROY G. BIV) are good mental jogs when the lists get too large for rote memorization. Making up rhymes is another good way to enhance retention of complicated material. Entire concepts can be organized by mental outlines that have lists or devices nested within. Before you know it you've broken stuff up into manageable bits and created a pegboard on which to pull yourself up to the top.

Skating works in a similar way. There are so many inter-related technical aspects involved that it can be a bit overwhelming without some basic structure. After presenting a certain set of skills ñ crossovers for example -- I'll write a list down on the ground with chalk, in the straightaway just before the turn. That way, as you go by each time, you can pick out something from the list to work on. It's a highly effective way to study skating. When the list is committed to memory, it's up to the muscles to follow suit.

Here's a basic checklist of points that I go through in my mind as I warm up (10-15 minutes) and whenever I'm so tired that my form starts deteriorating. It's the same sort of procedure an aircraft pilot would go through before taking off. You may want to cut this list out, have it laminated, and stuff it under your lycra shorts until you know it so well you can rattle it off the top of your head.



Even Push (are all my wheels leaving the ground together instead of just pushing with the toe wheels?)
Fall with the Hips (am I skating from the hips downwards like a metronome to get more power?)
Lean Back (am I leaning back so I can plane forward rather than fishtail and slow down?)
Focus (am I worried about my shoelaces coming untied or looking forward to the horizon?)
Full Extension (does my leg make a straight line at the end of my push?)
Heel Carve (am I focusing my push with my heel? does my heel kick out and my toe in at full extension?)
Knee Snap (am I getting that extra inch of push by locking my leg straight?)
Knees Together (do my knees physically touch after every stroke to maximize stroke length and balance?)
Nose/Knees/Toes Alignment (do these body parts form a straight line? If so, I'm balanced)
Parallel Arm Swing (are my arms coming up no high than even with ground surface?)
Rounded Back (are my shoulders droopy and my back relaxed so as not to compress vertebrae?)
Semi-Circular Recovery (after pushing do I recover by unweighted skate in a nice, lazy semi-circle?)
Skate a Little Lower (am I sitting deeply to get a longer push?)
Tops of Wheels (am I directing my push down and into the pavement with wheels straight up and down?)

Stay tuned next issue for a profile of the Ned Overend of in-line skating, Andy Firebaugh, who at 40 is dominating the race scene in Northern California. With his long femurs and redline cruising speed, Andy is ever ripe for victory. Learn his uplifting story of the seemingly insurmountable physical and mental barriers that he's hurdled along the way.

Eddy Matzger is a seasoned racer for TWINCAM, Roces, PowerBar, Breathe Right, and Transpack who also thrives on general skate instruction. His three day workshop travels nationally and abroad to a dozen cities each year. Still on the schedule for '97 are workshops in Long Beach, CA, and Gifu, Japan. The workshop kicks off '98 season at the end of January in Honolulu, HI. For more information, call toll-free 1-888-WRK-SHOP.