Lucasmakowsky.com

While all of the excitement was building up for the Olympics, I was getting ready for my Olympic debut on day two of the Olympics. I couldn’t worry too much about the condo or Athlete’s Village, the Opening Ceremonies, or anything else going on in and around Vancouver; I had to get ready to race.

When I’m only getting ready for one race, as opposed to 2 or 3 in a weekend at a World Cup, the week leading up to that race is a lot more specific. I did longer sets of laps, there wasn’t a lot of speed work, and I wasn't practicing starts that often. It would only make sense that all of my training that week was 5k-oriented.

Once it came to race day, the thing that stands out is how calm and ready I was. I wasn’t thinking about the crowd and I wasn’t getting nervous about what people would think about how I did. I acknowledged the fact that I was going to race and that this was going to be like any other 5k I’ve ever skated. To be honest, I thought I would be a lot more nervous than I actually was.

When I went to the line and my name was announced, the crowd went crazy. I started the race and all I was thinking to myself was ‘keep it light and keep a good tempo’. I’ve had a couple of 5ks where I started too slow or where I was a little too static. But this was the Olympics – I wasn’t going to make that mistake! Instead, I started a little too hard haha. Whether it was the adrenaline pumping through my body or the cheers from the crowd that got me going, I was off the line in a hurry.

If you start a 5k harder than you would like, you have a decision to make pretty quickly: keep with it and hold on as long as you can, or sacrifice some speed, get your rhythm back, and maybe try to speed up a bit at the end. In this race, I went with option one because once you’ve invested the energy to get your speed, you don’t want to waste it by slowing down right away. I gradually decelerated over the next two laps and carried that speed for as long as I could. From there, it was pure grit to hold on for as long as I could.

As I came across the line I knew I was going to post a reasonably good time given the lap times I was holding. A finishing time of 6:28 was 5 seconds faster than I had ever skated in the Richmond Olympic Oval, and was a good 7 seconds faster than I skated there at the World Single Distance Championships last March. I may have finished 13th, which actually wasn’t all too bad, but I had an awesome race. For the rest of my life I will be able to look back at that race and smile.