Lucasmakowsky.com

Ok, so I don’t know where the last two months have gone but it’s already mid-October and the season is well under way. I’ve had a bit of extra time off the ice for the last week and a half because of a foot infection, so with the extra time I wanted to fill everyone in on how things have been.

First thing’s first - the ‘foot infection’. Sometime last week I got cellulitis on my left foot, which according to Wikipedia is a diffuse inflammation of the connective tissue with severe inflammation of dermal and subcutaneous layers of the skin. It’s not some disgusting infection on your foot that you can see (other than the redness); rather, it’s more of an intense swelling under your skin. However I actually contracted the bacteria though, it let me know pretty quickly. Within a few days, my foot swelled up to the point where I could barely walk, and because of that I was immediately put on antibiotics to bring the swelling down. Since last Monday my foot’s been looking more normal day by day, but because of the potential severity of the infection I haven’t been able to train at all since I had the first signs of it last Thursday.

Trying to see the positives out of not being able to train for a week and a half, maybe this was meant to be to give me some extra time off if my body was carrying any fatigue from summer training. Whether or not that’s true, the timing couldn’t have been any worse with World Cup Trials starting this Thursday. My hope is that regardless of the bye-request I had to submit for the upcoming Trials (in which case I would be granted a spot in the 1500m and/or 5000m for the Fall World Cups without racing next weekend, based on previous performance history, etc.), I will be able to ease back into my boots starting tomorrow morning and get back up to speed within the week. If things go well, I’ll have 3 solid weeks of training to top up the systems before the first World Cup in November.

With that out of the way, I have some better news on the sponsorship front. If you’ve clicked on the ‘Sponsors’ tab recently, you should have noticed a new sponsor – Birchcliff Energy Ltd. They are an intermediate oil and gas exploration, development, and production company based here in Calgary and the people who run the show over there are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met - I’m really happy to be associated with a company like Birchcliff Energy. If you want to know more about them as a company, check out their website! www.birchcliffenergy.com

Continuing on the topic of sponsorship, I’m also excited to say that Carmen Coccimiglio from Superior Sports Management is my new agent. We had a couple of meetings throughout the summer, I got to know him quite well, and I decided that he was the one I wanted to work with. We have similar philosophies on life and on business, and to add to that, we get along really well. I’m really looking forward to be working with him.

Now onto school. Well, it’s not like I became a slacker last year only taking 1 course in the fall because all of my focus and energy was consumed by skating and the Olympics; however, getting back into the grind with 3 engineering courses this semester took a little bit of getting used to. If you really want to know, the courses I’m taking this semester are ‘Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics’, ‘Introduction to Reservoir Engineering’, and ‘Applied Chemistry and Chemical Pathways for Engineers’. It sounds like a lot to handle while training fulltime, but what’s allowing me to do it without missing any training is my very “training-accommodating” schedule. One of my classes is before morning ice 2 days of the week, and the other two classes are in the evenings 4 days of the week. So aside from the long days (which they definitely can be), I can’t really complain.

Last thing on my list for updates is how training has been up until I got the foot infection. If you’ve been on the website at all since mid-September, I’ve done a few Saturday morning races since then. My first 500m of the year went a lot better than I thought it would, and my first 1500m was a very solid race as well. The approach this year was to be a lot more gradual getting into ‘racing-form’, so some of these first races gave me my first taste of speed this year. It’s really promising when I have already tied my season best from last year in only my second 500m this year.

As for the 5k, that also went quite well given that up until that race I hadn’t done any longer 5k-specific training either. Not that I haven’t trained for a 5k yet, but being able to mentally push through the longer races is probably the hardest part and is exactly what that first 5k gave me – the feeling of how much pain you really can push yourself through if you want to. Unfortunately, that was the only race-specific training I have been able to do this year. Hopefully I’ll be back to training at 100% capacity in the next few days and be able to get right back at it.

That pretty well wraps things up for the time being, so regardless of whether or not I’m able to keep updating my blog on a regular basis the race results will always be updated no matter what. Check back every so often for those and keep posting your messages in the guestbook and comment sections throughout the site!

Take care,