My Own 400m Oval

Speedskating is cross-training for cyclists, so this post about tonight belongs. The past week or so I have been looking at the local oval, basically a section of wetland remnants right off our downtown. In this picture, the bisected green strip of land in the middle (the longer part on the right) is actually the center area of the oval; the green pieces of sod above it are no longer there. So today I'm riding home from giving an exam in Amsterdam Zuidoost and from a distance in the fading daylight I see an unusual set of lights near town: they opened the skating oval! Since last Tuesday I've skated three times at Ankeveen, and every time it was great. But I've been looking at the very fine layer of ice on this "polder," and tonight I was able to get on it. Not only that, when I got there just before six, everybody had gone to dinner. O.K., one kid put his skates on with me, but for the half hour after that, we were the only ones there, and he wasn't really doing laps. So I had this whole oval to myself--my very first time skating here. A 400m oval (but much wider), in nature, with lights, real (and really good) ice, and for the better part of an hour it was just me doing laps. Knowing the ice was going to be good, I had grabbed my clap skates. The past week I used my old fixies--they're fine, less vulnerable to falling (which I haven't done yet), and easier to climb over earthen dams with, but they're not fast. Not that I'm a fast skater, but the difference was noticable nonetheless. It was the best hour of skating I've done in a long time, and given my outings of the past week, that's saying something.