Long Track Speed Skating

In her long blades and racing suit, Kristina Groves is speed skating's superwoman, No.1 in the world at 1,500 metres, top three at two other distances. But within the walls of her Calgary condo, she is brought to the same standstill as other mortals. This morning, she is killing time, waiting for a refrigerator to be delivered.

Time seems to drag on the fridge vigil, but the Olympic season is something that's coming fast, and Groves, 32, is making the most of the last summer before the biggest winter of her life.

A year before the Vancouver Games, the Ottawa native added a twist to her training. She took a 10-day bicycling tour to south Utah with her boyfriend, Scott Maw. The trip was a model of multitasking.

Maw isn't just a friend, he's the strength consultant at the Canadian Sports Centre in Calgary. So the trip was an excellent way for Groves to get into top shape, and an opportunity to get away together as a couple after a season that took Groves to China, Japan, Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States.

It was a way to counter, physically and psychologically, the bad-news announcement in March that access to Calgary's Olympic Oval for Canada's skating crew would be slashed because of a funding crisis.

Legacy funding intended to run Calgary's Olympic facilities has been hit hard and the Oval budget was cut to $2.1-million a year from $3.6-million.

"It isn't just a huge part of what we do, it is what we do. We skate," said an incredulous Groves, who was on the podium 11 times in this past World Cup season. She had four golds (three at 1,500 metres and one at 1,000). She also got two bronze at the world single distance championships, at 3,000 and 5,000 at the Olympic venue in Richmond, B.C., and she lost another sure medal when she hit a puck marking the lane in the 1,500 metres.

The Canadian long track speed skating team is expected to produce 10 to 12 medals at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. The last year is crunch time.

"It's having the blinders on ... and I guess that's different from my approach after Torino, when I let my brain go and just did the training, thousands upon thousands of metres," Groves said. "With each year it's become more specific ...

"I'll try to qualify in every race I feel I have the potential. I can do everything from the 1,000 metres up to the 5K and team pursuit. My focus is on the skating and executing the best I can.

"Obviously everyone's striving for the top and success breeds success. But until Clara Hughes and Cindy Klassen came along, I didn't know it was possible to be No.1. The Dutch, the Germans, they always were the ones to beat. Now we know we can beat them, we all have the capability of being up there."

Capability comes from countless laps of the track, and how many laps depends on the focus of training.

"At the beginning of the season, we do a lot of long, slow laps," Groves said. "Certain base-training workouts are 60 to 80 laps ... and 25 laps is 10 kilometres, so we're talking 30 kilometres."

Then comes interval training, with sets of laps done at specific speeds with specific rest.

"Sometimes there's hardly any rest. Our coach [Harbin-born Xiuli Wang] is really a stickler for lap times. Sometimes, if you aren't hitting the times, you have to start over again. It's good, it makes you learn how to pace yourself."

Skaters from the men's developmental team are often on the ice with Groves, younger, stronger, but not necessarily wiser in terms of pacing.

"They're not so fast we can't keep up to them," Groves said. "The girls still lead quite a bit."

There's time spent in the weight room for work on the body core, then squats and jumps to build the strength for pushing power.

A little more than a month before a big event, training is focused on finishing and on doing what's expected in competition.

"We taper training as we get closer," Groves said. "We call it priming, a lot of rest combined with short, intense workouts. My coach calls it sharpening the pencil. We don't have any fancy tricks up our sleeve, it's just hard work. It's not rocket science."

Groves can pack away about 4,000 calories a day when in heavy training. "But I'm conscientious about food. I'm focused on what I eat, and it stems from my upbringing. I don't eat crappy food, not so it won't harm my performance but because it would affect my health.

"I'll eat a huge amount of carbohydrates to maintain that [4,000 calories], lots of brown rice and pasta and a lot of veggies. I don't eat much red meat, it's more eggs, protein, whey protein ... and I enjoy curds in smoothies.

"I treat myself time to time," Groves added. "My weaknesses are Kettle chips - made with good oils, not bad - good cookies and dark chocolate. I'm lucky, my parents were into good foods. I never had store-bought bread as a kid, and my mother still orders organic grain from a farmer and grinds it."

Groves has been churning around corners since she first caught the passion watching Canadian speed skating legend Gaetan Boucher. It wasn't the 1984 campaign, where he won two golds and a bronze, but his farewell tour at the Calgary Olympics that moved her.

"It was still Gaetan, and when I saw him and what he did, I wanted to do that," Groves said. "I was glued to the TV watching his races, I wanted to give it a try."

Groves took on the mantle of leadership in a season in which some of the team's best known stars were sidelined - Klassen recovering from knee surgery and Jeremy Wotherspoon nursing a broken arm. To heap more psychological stress on the team, coach Finn Halvorsen departed in a controversy - described as philosophical differences with management - at the end of the season.

"Our team is so strong and so deep that even if some are hurt, Christine Nesbitt, Shannon Rempel and Clara [Hughes] have been up there for years and know how to shut out the distractions and perform.

"I wasn't surprised at all, but it will be even better when they're back."

And for whatever criticism went along with Halvorsen's departure, Groves lauds one of his ideas as something that could manifest itself in hardware next February.

"One thing Finn did was bring in Johann Olov Koss as a mentor to the team," she said of Norway's multiple gold medal icon from the Lillehammer Games and the head of Right to Play. "We're in awe of him for two reasons: his success and his starting of Right to Play. He has been out a few times over the season, telling us what are the things we should think about with a home Games. It's just really good advice, it fully becomes a part of you. And, no, I won't tell what it is."