A rootin’ shootin’ good time

There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from nailing a target consistently when firing shots out of your garage late at night.

I know this first hand because every night for the past two weeks I’ve been setting up for some good old, down home shootin’ practice, firing with determination and glee at a target set up in my driveway.

Now before you imagine some sort of hillbilly scene featuring spent shotgun shells scattered about or Winchester hollow points whistling through the night, let me remind you that this here is a hockey blog. Ergo, I’m talking about shooting hockey pucks here, plain old six-ounce hunks of vulcanized rubber ... 200 of ‘em.

I’d meant to start practicing my shooting much earlier in the off-season but it took me a while to assemble the equipment I needed to create a workable setup.

The main puzzle piece was some sort of slippery surface from which to shoot my pucks since I knew from experience that shooting off a surface like a concrete floor or a piece of plywood wouldn’t translate well to on-ice performance. I did considerable research into the available options and, after much deliberation, placed an online order for two shooting pads: a four-foot by 10-foot rollup pad valued at $160 and a thicker 30-inch by 60-inch pad priced at $100 (plus $50 to ship both items from Ontario).

The order arrived on Aug. 19, only about a month before I expected the season to start. I quickly set up my shooting gallery according to a plan I’d refined in my mind after weeks of scheming.

I knew from experience that dryland shooting while wearing shoes also doesn’t translate well to the ice so one of my priorities was to devise a system that would enable me to wear skates while shooting. I also wanted a system that was quick and easy to set up and take down, since I don’t have a spot where I can leave it assembled on an ongoing basis.

The system I devised involves a couple of old blankets draped over a piece of wood suspended across two metal poles (racks used to hold up barbells for squats, etc.) I used heavy duty clamps bought at a hardware store to hold the blankets in place.

I set up this rig on my driveway about 10 or 15 feet outside my garage door then set up both shooting pads side by side on the floor inside the garage. The idea was to shoot from inside the garage (where there’s a solid, level floor), through the open bay door into the draped blankets. The larger shooting pad was to be the shooting surface and the smaller, thicker one was for me to stand on (in skates, even though the pad isn’t made to withstand this kind of abuse).

My first full shooting session was on Aug. 27. It took me about 17 minutes to shoot my 200 pucks. I was surprised to find that this seemingly inert exercise caused me to run out of breath — I had to rest numerous times. The repeated torque of the shooting action was also murder on the hand that holds the top of my stick. By the time I was half done my pile of pucks, I had a hole in the skin in the middle of my palm and another at the base of my pointing finger, revealing the tender, reddish sublayers.

By the time I was down to 60 pucks remaining, I had two bloody spots in the palms of my gloves and I was in serious pain. But I foolishly persevered, determined to finish my 200-puck quota.

After that, I took four days off from shooting, to give my hand a chance to heal a bit, then I got back at it. My hand was still quite sore but I relaxed my grip and spared it from further damage. This time it took me 13 minutes to shoot all the pucks.

Blankets are effective at funneling pucks into a cohesive pile for easy retrieval.

Since that day I’ve shot my 200 pucks every day, racking up 1,400 shots so far. I’m concentrating on the classic wrist shot because the league I play in doesn’t allow slap shots. I’m still trying to nail down the perfect technique as there are many subtle mechanical adjustments one can make and it’s hard to discern what effect each little change is having on the shot speed.

This is where a radar gun would come in handy. There are outlets that sell them for sports like hockey and baseball but that’s $100 I refuse to spend. For now at least I must be content to judge by feel and by sight.

The blankets work really well. Not only are they quick and easy to set up but they are also virtually silent. It’s usually about 11 p.m. when I’m doing my shots and the only sound is a faint thwack when each puck hits the blanket followed by a light clanging as the wooden pole rattles around in the metal rack.

The blankets are also very effective at directing pucks into a cohesive pile. In fact, my blankets are long enough to lie on the ground, so most of the pucks fall on top of them, and most of the pucks can be retrieved at once by gathering up the bottom of the blankets and dumping the pucks into their storage container. Pickup is done in about three minutes.

I feel that I’ve improved quite a bit within the first two weeks of practice. I’m getting my shots away quickly and it looks like they have a fair amount of zip on them. But I suspect if I measured the actual speed it would be rather unimpressive and if you pitted me against a good shooter, I would look very wimpy in comparison.

In hockey, really hard shooters are said to have a howitzer. Throughout my hockey career, I’ve been in possession of nothing more powerful than a homemade slingshot, but the progress I’ve made over the last couple weeks gives me a glimmer of hope that, maybe someday, I’ll be the proud owner of a genuine shootin’ iron of some calibre ... a dream come true for any self respecting hillbilly, I reckon.

Wheeling and dealing – Part 2

This off-season I’ve been pulled simultaneously in two opposite directions: the relentless desire to buy stuff to help my training and the relentless reality of limited finances.

These two elements battled mightily about two months ago when I found myself dying to buy a semi-fancy digital watch that could time intervals.

For those who are unaware, interval training involves alternating between exertion and rest for specified amounts of time in order to achieve specific physical outcomes. Interval workouts have been an integral part of my program since I started training about a year ago. One of my regular modules calls for a work-to-rest ratio of 10 seconds to 50 seconds. Another one is 30 seconds of givin’ ‘er followed by two minutes of rest. And my personal favourite is the good old scheme of two minutes on, two minutes off.

Up until recently I didn’t have a device that could manage these times for me, so I just counted in my head as I was doing my moves, not really knowing how close I was coming to the actual times. For example, I’d be grinding out a wind sprint, practically dying, while counting in my head, “20 Mississippi, 21 Mississippi ... come on 30 Mississippi!”

The system was quaint in its imperfection when I was first easing into this training thing, but as I’ve become more serious, I’ve felt a desire for accuracy.

In the spring I succumbed to temptation and conducted some online research into watches. I quickly discovered the Timex Sleek 150 and ascertained that it was the best watch for me because it allows the user to program three different interval schemes. I spent more time than I care to admit gazing at pictures of this prized timepiece.

The watch was out of reach due to the $125 price. Granted, this isn’t that much money in the grand scheme of things. Like, if I’d been facing some needed repair to my car or teeth, I could have come up with that much and more, but given that my hockey training is really a self-indulgent hobby that benefits no one else in my family, I couldn’t justify the expense.

Desire

But I must admit that I do sometimes become obsessed with objects of desire, and that’s what this watch became. Even though I told myself unequivocally that I couldn’t have it, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. One day I even ventured into a specialty running store to leer at the watch in person.

It took me mere seconds to spot it in its glass case, looking even more stunning than in the online pictures. How I longed to strap on that sleek little number and finger its buttons until a lap split, even if it was just a fleeting, one-time thing. 

But I wouldn’t allow myself to indulge this fantasy. The display case remained unopened, the watch untouched, staring at me with snooty disdain as its $125 price tag dangled with a forced casualness that was as infuriating as it was alluring.

Days and weeks passed. I accepted that the watch would never be mine but couldn’t shake the desire to possess it. Then one day I couldn’t resist popping into my local sporting goods emporium to see if that store also carried the watch in question. It did. And the watch was on clearance for $60, less than half the regular price!

My reaction was instant. I shielded the display case with my arms and body while summoning a clerk with violent movements of my head and eyebrows.

The rest is a blur. There was a key, then a box, then a credit card, followed by a sense of elation as I drifted to my car.

Good timing

I’ve been using the watch for several weeks now and it’s been one of those rare obsession purchases that has lived up to expectations. Truly, the watch has improved my life, and yes, I love it. There, I said it — I love my watch!

I’ve got three different interval workouts programmed into it and use them all regularly. It’s nice not to have to program it each time I do a different workout. And the watch counts the number of reps as I perform each interval sequence so I don’t have to keep track of those in my head.

But the best feature is simply that I no longer have to count Mississippis in my head. Instead, I can concentrate on doing my moves and maintaining them as my leg muscles melt, until that magical moment arrives when I’m saved by that most musical of sounds: “Beepity-beepity-BEEP!”

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. 

Beyond conditioning

Years ago, and for several consecutive years, I traveled with my beer-league buddies each spring to a weekend recreational tournament in the resort town of Banff. One of the perks of this hockey getaway was that a video replay was screened in the arena lounge following each game. This provided us weekend warriors a rare opportunity to see ourselves play on TV. We took full advantage.

Seeing my hockey-playing self on video was both encouraging and discouraging. On the encouraging side was the instant impression of, “Wow, that guy’s pretty fast.” But almost immediately came the question, “Why doesn’t he do something?” You see, I fit the stereotype of the small speedster who looks dangerous as he races around accomplishing little.

The problem was that I lacked the puck-handling skills and the confidence required to maintain puck possession when challenged by an opponent, so whenever I had the puck I got rid of it at the first sign of pressure, either passing it to the nearest teammate or just dumping it to a safe area.

This spring, when I decided to train seriously for the upcoming season, one of the deciding factors was the realization that I could take my training beyond conditioning by also working on hockey skills like stickhandling, shooting and skating.

All these skills can be improved in a dryland setting and I’m in the process of either doing that or getting set up to do it. This is taking some doing because, in order to take a solid run at these issues, I’ve concluded that I need to acquire some equipment.

A quick Internet search will turn up a plethora of stuff that’s available to help hockey players improve their game, not to mention empty their wallets. (This site is one I’ve consulted on numerous occasions: http://www.hockeyshot.ca/). Navigating the hockey training marketplace to distinguish the useful from the frivolous has been a time-consuming chore, but I’m close to completing a list of select items that I believe will help me develop my skills. Soon it will be time to crack open the wallet and go on a bit of a spending spree.

This will be a direct violation of my hockey training rule No. 1 but I’ve done a serious rethink of this rule given that I’m dedicating this summer to taking this hobby to another level. 

And besides, what good is a hobby if it doesn’t involve buying stuff?

At the crossroads – To Margueritaville or Beerton?

The arrival of the off-season at the end of March was a shock, so focused was I on delivering a peak playoff performance that I wasn’t prepared for what came next.

As I dealt with life without my weekly hockey game, I felt like I was at a crossroads and neither of the two choices before me were palatable. The first choice was to keep putting myself through the physical rigours that are involved in competing against 20-somethings as a 44-year-old. The upside of this option was that it contains beer. The second choice was to retire to a leisure life of golf and pinnocle, lubricated by some sort of out-to-pasture beverage like pina coladas or margueritas or something. Those were my options as I saw them – either waste away in Margueritaville, as the song says, or toil away in Beerton, as it were.

Part of me felt it was time to retire. But another part recognized that I was staring at a glorious six-month window of opportunity, a chance to take my training to new heights and “awesome-ize” myself in time for next season. After all, last fall’s three-week cram session of training had produced some improvement, hadn’t it? (Yes, it had.) I was curious what six months of focused work could achieve.

As I considered my options, I jumped right into exercising, to start tuning my body just in case I decided not to retire. Within a couple weeks of my last game I was devoting time every evening to performing leg-strengthening exercises in the form of jumps and lunges, all in the comfort of our living room as the NHL playoffs unfolded on the TV.

My daily regimen quickly had my legs feeling firm and sprightly. At work I’d bound up the stairs two at a time and displayed tremendous first-step quickness whenever word spread that doughnuts were waiting by the coffee maker.

Around this time I also began twice-weekly physiotherapy sessions to address a knee that complained whenever its routine was interrupted by any type of bump and a hip that launched darts of torment with my every move. The therapist zeroed in on some muscle weakness that was contributing to my woes and taught me some exercises to shore up those areas. The exercises became part of my daily routine.

After a while I started to take my workouts outside. This gave me a slap-in-the-face dose of reality. Here I’d thought I was getting in pretty good shape but it turned out that, when it came to propelling me around in a sustained fashion, my legs were still as weak as wet noodles and my lungs had the air exchange capacity of solid wood duck decoys. I spent more time doubled over trying to catch my breath than I did moving my feet and legs.

By the end of April the aggressive kneadings of the physiotherapist, coupled with the improved strength that she was injecting into my body (figuratively speaking), caused my hip pain to subside. This in turn relaxed my angst about my physical condition and swayed my decision.

I would not retire. No, I would train full bore this off-season so I could give ‘er in beer league next season.

This decision necessitated a reassessment of where I was with my training, given my laboured attempts at shuttling my body around. A careful review of my training book (Complete Conditioning for Hockey by Peter Twist) revealed the importance of a high level of aerobic fitness as a base for the later development of strength, agility and quickness. With this as my focus, I sat down and charted a plan.

It’s been going well. With July now here, I’ve put in a fairly solid first half of the off-season and have a plan for the rest of the way. I’m turning in solid, focused workouts almost every day. I can engage in sustained effort without losing my breath. My legs are feeling strong and are getting stronger every week, gaining the strength required to produce quick, powerful bursts of movement. With more than two months to go until the season starts, my physical abilities are taking shape and my hopes are high.

But so too are my antennae of caution. My greatest fear is that I’ll somehow fall off the wagon or miscalculate in my planning or execution, thereby failing to take full advantage of this precious time, arriving at next season in semi-decent shape but basically the same as before – just a slow, unskilled plugger toiling away in Beerton.

With all the work I’m putting into it, if I fall flat with my attempts to transcend my age and skill level, I may yet wish I had chosen Margueritaville. At least then I could claim that there was a woman to blame, as the song goes. Something to keep in mind next time I’m at the crossroads.