The Secret Weapon: O

At last: an advantage to living in Utah. ;-)

I've been training at 4200 feet altitude for the past three years or so. In that rarified air, by the time my three-minute-forty-second routine was over, I was skating on fumes. Well. Lake Placid sits at 1800 feet... Imagine my delight yesterday during my practice session when I finished my program *and* still had gas to spare. Honestly, it's such a profoundly obvious equation: more oxygen, less fatigue. I just had never experienced it before as an athlete. Sweet.

I had another practice later in the day and a short one at eight this morning. Everyone is quite serious about the rehearsals. Regardless of age or level, the skaters are here to give it their all. A few have sponsored their coaches to attend, but I think having my coach Stephanee here would have made me quite anxious. She's extraordinary, believe me, but without her standing by the boards, I find I'm able to reduce that incessant self-conscious mind-chatter having to do with then-now: Last week I could land that flip with my eyes closed. Stephanee must think I'm a complete...andonandon. There is an advantage, I'm saying, to anonymity, to being an unknown quantity to others--and in a certain weird way to myself here--that I hadn't anticipated.

But next year--and I'm quite sure I'll be doing this again, as long as I can, in fact--that circumstance will change. I like making new friends. The funny thing is, one of the first people who spoke to me, a coach for another competitor, knows more about my deep skating past than most. When I stopped for a drink of Powerade this morning, Loren O'Neil smiled and said that I looked so much like Sonja Henie, it was frightening. I have to say this pleased me; we were practicing on the 1932 ice sheet where Sonja won one of her several Olympic titles.

"You knew her?"

"I did," Loren said. And so we chatted for a couple of minutes.

Turns out he knew Joannie McCusker, too, who had skated with Sonja in the Icelandia show. She was hired to teach me Sonja's signature "toework" maneuvers back when I was thirteen (egad forty-plus years ago) and my then-coach decided that I was the perfect candidate to play her in a biographic movie epic. (He was also the one who arranged the photo session at Sonja's Beverly Hills mansion. Turns out she was deathly ill already that day from leukemia and died a couple of months later. But that's another story.) The movie was never made--and I'm probably about the age now she was then. Sigh.

Please stop me before I say it. Oh, nevermind: It's a small world--and while we're at it, Carpe diem.

I feel right home here among my peers, even though this whole competitive scene is quite foreign to me. The prevailing attitude seems to be joy; joy for the sport, the cameraderie, the fact that our bodies are still obliging our whims, at least in small spurts. And then, of course, there are the lovely skating dresses. A lady should never outgrow the joy of wearing chiffon and sequins in public.

PS: I'd like to thank my official photographer and videographer, Don Marano, for his splendid documentary work thus far.

Dawn