My old John Deere

I’m not a fan of country music but there’s a bit of country music lore that’s loosely relevant to my recent training exploits.

Legendary country singer George Jones was known as an enthusiastic consumer of “adult beverages.” In fact, he was such an incorrigible booze hound that his wife once hid the keys to all his vehicles so he couldn’t drive to a liquor store or bar. But wily old Jonesy still made his escape after noticing a key dangling from the ignition of his old John Deere riding mower. This incident and more subsequent ones became well known in country music circles and were further immortalized in Vince Gill’s 1993 song One More Last Chance, which featured the line, “but she forgot about my old John Deere.”

How this relates to me is that I think I may have bested old Jonesy when it comes to unconventional usage of a John Deere riding mower.

You see, by about the midway point of this off-season I got my leg strength up to the point that I could start pursuing serious speed work. This is an endeavour that hockey players and other athletes typically pursue through the pushing or pulling of heavy objects, which develops the legs for explosive bursts of going real fast. An example of such training can be seen in this video, which shows NHLer Martin St. Louis engaging in a mind-blowing display of sled hauling (pertinent bit starts at :40 of the video).

As a lowly beer leaguer, I don’t have access to the types of resistance mechanisms that the pros use, so I’ve had to improvise.

Earlier this off-season I experimented with sprinting up the grassy hill that lies next to our house. The scheme didn’t take root because the uneven terrain was face-plantingly treacherous after dark, which is when I usually do my training.

A couple of times (during daylight hours) I loaded one or both of my kids into a wagon and pushed it as fast as I could up our sloped driveway, with the oldest kid (age 7) in charge of steering the wagon. This method didn’t take off either, as the gravel driveway provided rather poor traction and was therefore unsuitable for fast starts. Also, once the kids realized that I wasn’t really doing the exercise for their enjoyment, they stopped agreeing to participate.

Another time I loaded a wheelbarrow with bags of dirt and sprinted it up our driveway a few times. Again, traction was a serious drawback to the scheme.

As all these trials and errors were taking place, I often eyed the old John Deere SX-95 riding mower that was sitting innocently in front of our garage. I knew the thing was heavy and difficult to push because I’d experienced these facts many times in the course of mowing our wild environs. So one night I decided to accomplish my speed work by pushing the mower up our driveway.

It was a decent system. I’d push the mower up the slope for about 10 seconds then let it roll back down into position for the next rep. But again the one problem was traction on the gravel driveway. Still, I felt that the mower was the right tool; I just needed to match it with the right location.

I knew that solid traction and a relatively level surface were available on the paved road of our subdivision, but even I wasn’t willing to endure the humiliation that would occur when a neighbour came driving along as I was pushing the mower down the road after dark. Such a meeting would be inevitable and would most certainly yield a healthy dose of slackjawed gawking and possibly even force me into offering some sort of explanation. What could I possibly say?

“Hey neighbour! What’s that? Oh, just taking old JD here out for a spot of exercise! Tootle-loo!”

I don’t think so.

Fashion risk

That left our front lawn as the only remaining option. It has the benefit of being quite flat and it’s also sheltered from the view of passersby. I knew there would be a traction issue here too as the grass is always damp and slick during my workout times. The best solution would have been some form of cleated shoes like those used for soccer, football or baseball, but I don’t have any of those and I’m too cheap to buy some just for one exercise.

So once again I made do with what I have. I set off wearing the most aggressively treaded footwear I own – a pair of green rubber oilfield boots that are still caked with bitumen stains collected on drilling rigs throughout Western Canada more than a decade ago. Imagine that look with cutoff shorts and pasty poultry legs – now that’s a three-alarm fashion faux pas! But like I’ve said many times, hockey training ain’t no fashion show.

Anyway, back and forth I went, grunting the 400-pound mower in a bouncing, clattering trajectory across our front lawn, which proved to be much rougher than it appears.

But the scheme worked. By holding onto the steering wheel and pushing the mower backwards, I was able to keep it on course while providing my legs with a burningly productive workout.

So, just like Vince Gill’s song of more than 20 years ago, my ode to the old John Deere has proven to be a hit and has achieved regular rotation ... in my workout schedule that is.

Digging deeper

Hockey season starts in about a month and as far as I can tell I’m on track to be in peak form when the puck drops. This is despite an inauspicious start to my off-season training.

In the early going I struggled to address the strength and cardio components laid out in my guide book while also providing my muscles with sufficient recovery time.

One thing that was tripping me up, I eventually realized, was that I was misreading my body’s signals. What I interpreted as muscle fatigue caused by the workouts I was doing actually turned out to be plain old weakness in my leg muscles. As a consequence, I wound up resting my legs, thinking they needed time to recover, when I should have been working them more regularly to make them stronger.

A more thorough reading of my book supplemented by some Internet research and some simple trial and error helped me to sort through my confusion and I put together a solid plan for the summer.

This plan involved dividing the off-season into three segments. The first segment focused on building my basic cardio capacity through regular runs and Xbox boxing sessions, with a secondary focus on building leg strength and beginning to develop the anaerobic energy systems in the legs, which is accomplished through timed sprints.

The second segment dialed down the frequency of cardio workouts and increased the frequency of anaerobic workouts. The third segment, which I’m just beginning, will continue to build strength and power in the legs, as well as overall cardio capacity, but will concentrate almost exclusively on hockey-related movements to achieve these goals, so the results translate as much as possible to the hockey rink.

Key change

A key adjustment I made this off-season was changing how I’ve performed my 30-second anaerobic intervals, which are a critical element in priming the leg muscles for the dynamic demands of hockey. Last year I approached this element by sprinting in a straight line but I’ve since realized that this type of movement has little relevance to hockey so I switched to doing hockey-related movements like lateral footwork, crossovers, leaps and pivots.

These exercises really make the leg muscles burn, which signalled to me that I needed to focus on them, since they mimic what my legs must endure during a hockey game. By doing these exercises regularly at a high intensity, I’ve been able to gradually increase the interval work time to 45 seconds and decrease the rest time from two minutes to 1:10. By the time the off-season is over, my aim is to have the work time up to a full minute followed by a minute of rest. This will closely approximate the shift-rest cycle I typically experience during a beer-league hockey game.

Need for speed

A key component of the latter half of my off-season has been a concentrated effort on exercises designed to boost my skating speed. This is achieved by making the legs stronger through squats of increasingly heavy weight, lateral leaps and sprinting against some form of resistance.

My book says that before undertaking serious speed training, a player should be able to perform several repetitions of deep squats of his own body weight. I started the off-season squatting 140 pounds, which is 10 pounds less than my body weight. I gradually worked up to 150 pounds and within a couple sessions was able to comfortably perform three sets of 10 squats.

This was my cue to start undertaking serious speed training, which I’ve been doing for the past month or so. This speed work is key, as speed used to be my hallmark as a player and its departure is what I’ve missed the most as I’ve aged.

I’m not sure how much of my lost speed I can recover, but I hope to be fast enough to keep up with the fast, young guys who populate our league. I’m emboldened by the fact that, when I was in my late 20s, I played regularly with some older guys and the fastest guy on the ice was this 44-year-old guy who was about my size.

The reason that this guy – let’s call him Brian – was able to be so fast at his age was that he took care of his body. I think of him often when I’m out training and visualizing what I hope to achieve this upcoming season. As a formerly fast player who’s now trapped inside a 44-year-old body, my dream is to be able to step on the gas and have my body respond.

Wheeling and dealing – Part 1

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’ve realized that I require additional equipment if I’m to take my training to the next level. One of the items I placed on my must-acquire list was a whole whack of pucks for shooting practice.

Like any schmoe who plays hockey, I had some pucks kicking around the house, like 10 or so, but I knew this paltry number wouldn’t do if I was going to work seriously at improving my shot. I needed to take a significant number of shots every day but also wanted to minimize the amount of time spent retrieving pucks. The solution, I figured, was to have enough pucks that I could shoot the entire batch once, then retrieve them afterward and be ready for the next day.

The number I settled on was 200. This may seem crazy, but it isn’t.

I estimate that a hockey player, while practicing his shooting in much the same way as a golfer practices at a driving range, can fire a puck every two to four seconds. So working through 200 pucks would take anywhere from 400 to 800 seconds (seven to 14 minutes) – a manageable amount of time to spend every day. Plus, I think 200 pucks would be manageable space-wise and lead to improvement if shot every day.

So I set about finding 200 pucks. About the cheapest place around to buy pucks in my part of the world is Canadian Tire, a department store. It sells brand new pucks for 98 cents each – not a bad price but much too high when you’re looking at buying 200 of them. (I wasn’t prepared to spend $200 on this acquisition).

Turning to the Internet, I learned that 50 cents a puck is about the best price you can get. On Kijiji I found a guy in my area offering 200 pucks for $100 – right in my wheelhouse. We agreed on the price via email and I awaited a response about a meeting time and place. Meanwhile, I got a text response from another seller I’d contacted. It was a fellow acting as an agent for his eight-year-old kid, who collects pucks around outdoor rinks each spring. I told him I’d already settled on a deal.

Then seller No. 1 emailed back with meeting instructions.

“I usually meet my buyers in the Co-op parking lot. Look for a black Honda,” he told me.

Whoa. This guy regularly makes deals in parking lots? And he drives a black Honda?

I realized that I was about to do business with a deadly Asian triad that specializes in stolen hockey gear!

I could see exactly how it would play out. We’d be conducting our business and would start up an innocent discussion about a random beer-league topic – the relative merits of dumping and chasing, perhaps. But he’d be pro and I’d be con, and with the suddenness of a Kansas tornado, our disagreement would turn violent. In the end, the evening news would relate how my lifeless body was found stuffed in a Co-op shopping cart with a wad of hockey tape jammed in my mouth and a jagged chunk of composite stick protruding from my neck.

I texted the kid’s dad and asked if he’d sell 200 pucks for $85. The kid went for it so I gingerly backed out of the deal with the triad guy.

So I’m happy to report that I now have 200 pucks in my garage. I haven’t shot any of them yet because I need some more stuff to complete my shooting gallery, which is in the works.

For those of you who are curious, 200 pucks weigh in at about 70 pounds and nearly fill a large plastic storage container, displacing about 1.6 cubic feet, or 45.3 litres, of volume.