Guys, don't let me startle you, but without women in sports, I'd never have succeeded in becoming a speedskater. By and large, men are absent from my list of influential sports figures that have shaped my own development as an athlete. It's the women who have provided me with the motivation and direction necessary to pursue a career on wheels.

It all began in the late 80's with the Cal Berkeley Women's Cycling Team. They took me under their wing and allowed me to skate behind them in training. What a view! Make no mistake however. The sight of tender young cyclists was hardly consolation for the suffering I endured at their hands.

These women grew my motor. I was taught to hang on at all costs, even if it meant by a thread, chest heaving and slobber dangling from the corner of my mouth in long gooey strips. This wasn't desire that kept me going, it was simply survival, for without them I was off the back forever.

My technique suffered as a result of trying so hard just to keep up. After getting trounced in Holland in the summer of '89 (I finished 37th in a B race), I realized I had a long way to go. I was basically just a glorified hacker on skates and decided to do something about it.

I turned to Dianne Holum, an Olympic long track gold medalist and coach of speedskating legend Eric Heiden. Dianne taught me the value of slowing down and working on individual stroke components. By ironing out inconsistencies at low speed, she reasoned, the stroke will hold together at high speed, and not feel awkward and out of control. She was right.

Thanks to Dianne, I unlearned a lot of bad habits and picked up many good ones. All of a sudden, I was a halfway decent sprinter. After a couple of years I was promoted to the A category in Holland, and after a couple more years struggling against my heroes, I finally beat them. To this day, when fatigue causes momentary lapses back into bad form near the end of a race, I hear Dianne's voice yelling at me "get that butt down!" or "bring those knees together".

There are other women who have helped me through the unseen hours of training and preparation that go into racing:

Santa Barbara's Renée Jacobs taught me what it means to spend time at something. She could sit for hours on end in front of books and exercise her brain with complex problems and foreign languages. From her I saw how natural ability would take me only so far, and to excel I'd have to concentrate on the building blocks to achieve any measure of success (today Renée owns a large business that caters exclusively to athletic women, Title IX Sports, while all I have is a couple of world records in my back pocket).

Walnut Creek's Carrie Medved cracked the whip and kept me working during the winter. She oversaw my indoor slideboard sessions like a compassionate slave driver, shouting encouragement but never allowing me to stop in spite of screaming thighs. Her presence seemed to increase my capacity for work, as if the pain wasn't so bad because she was there to share it.

I look to other skating women for inspiration even though some of them are only half my age:

Sacramento's 15 year old skating phenom Michelle Bizeau skates past 99 percent of the women as if they were standing still. It's not the way she slaughters the competition that's such a joy to watch, it's the way how after such cutthroat racing, whether in victory or in defeat, there's still a certain sense of childlike wonderment bubbling within her.

Huntington Beach's Julie Brandt should be on the cover of this and every magazine in the world for her incredible feats. At only 18, she's the premiere woman speedskater in the world and has a soul and a spirit any company could build a franchise upon. With a smile on her face, Julie enters the pro men's race and whups up on them 99 percent of the time. She'll chase down breaks singlehandedly and launch herself like there's no tomorrow (in head to head confrontations with her, I maintain a slight edge, 2-1, and it doesn't get any easier).

And finally, no ode to women in sports would be complete without thanking my Dutch mother. Although rarely able to differentiate between baseball, football, or volleyball practice, mom fed me mountains throughout grammar and high school. Thanks to her I have a strong body in which skating has found a happy home.