rockstaryuzu

World's next year are in Europe so maybe there's a chance!

What kind of visa problems? Because the first thing that springs to mind is to try and see him in a country where it's easier for you to get a visa...

I called it, I thought this might happen. Now that it has, it seems so very fitting.

It's not 2020 for another 12 hours yet on my side of the world, but why not start early Happy New Year!!! May the best Yuzu win in 2020!! All GOLD All YEAR!

Actually, it looks like it's supposed to be a Happy New Year from Pooh! Yuzu's making Pooh 'talk'!

Me! 

Me too. I don't like that they said he cries when he loses though. He's more likely to cry when he wins! About the Ashita no Joe reference: I know Yuzu freaked people out when he said that, but come on, do you really think he meant it literally? I think he just meant that he's gone beyond what he ever thought he would do, and it's harder than expected, but he isn't giving up because he's determined to win.

My guess is the 4S.

At this point, I'm wishing that it was a proper criminal investigation and not just by a sports-related body. It does seem like a criminal matter now that these emails have come to light. A proper police investigation would be able to determine that for certain and if charges need to be laid.

Welcome to the Planet!!

I think I understand part of what you're trying to say. You seem to be saying that you think that Yuzuru, by pointing out the weak places in his skating during press conferences, is giving the judges ammunition to justify scoring him poorly. I can see why you'd think that way, but I don't agree with your opinion.

IMO a lot of the self-criticisms Yuzu makes are more like analyses of his performance. He might sound like he's beating himself up but I'm not convinced he means it in that way. It's "I did this, this, and this wrong", not "I'm such a terrible failure". Most of the time anyway.

Oh, you're so brave. I watched that once and could never bring myself to do it a second time. It upsets me so much seeing him get so injured and lying there on the ice gasping, trying to catch his breath. He was very brave to skate after that, but also it was a mad thing to do. On a related note, I'm really glad Skate Canada has introduced a new rule that allows a referee to stop a skate in the middle in order to examine a skater for concussion if they have a bad fall and hit their head, and decide whether or not to let the skater continue. It's about time, and I hope other feds follow suit.

Google probably wants to advertise to all the New Year's crowd anyway, so I bet it will stay up. We should try to spot the Yuzu billboard while watching the NYE Countdown from Times' Square on TV.

That's the most a mom can ask for, really.

But this is the important thing that all our non-FS-fan loved ones don't seem to grasp: we're all so happy in our madness.

Maybe if your son tried learning to do a superflexible Ina Bauer?

Yes! I feel this. When I watch him skate, I strongly feel that he is trying to communicate something important with all his might. All great artists do this.

"Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" - although I am of the opinion that time watching Yuzuru is never wasted. There's just something electric about him. When I watch him skate, I feel strangely connected to a much bigger reality than my own. @Jenny_Crux I think most of us here feel that way to some extent.

I know. Terrible, isn't it? One would think that brilliance of that level would be immediately obvious to all. Although in all fairness to my friends, I only showed them still photographs because I was on data instead of wifi. But still, Yuzu's beauty should have been obvious! Edited to add: I noticed Yuzu with Sochi PW, but I didn't fall in love until I saw SC'16 LGC. His performance was so spot on...like he was born to channel Prince on the ice...and I just couldn't look away after that. I probably should have showed them LGC, data costs be damned.

So, have to share this: I'm out with friends for drinks and somehow the conversation has turned to Hanyu. Clearly something is wrong with my friends - I have shown them Masquerade AND H&L '17 and they still think I'm the crazy one.

Open water racing - now there's a fitness challenge! Hats off to you! I left competitive swimming because it became important for me to earn money for university, and I became a lifeguard/swim instructor/ coach instead. Coaching was really fun. There's definitely an effect in swimming that, once you get efficient at it, training feels easier than it would on land. You're not overheating, you might be sweating but the water washes it away, and you don't have to carry you own bodyweight throughout the work. But you quickly realize how demanding those workouts are if you try to replicate them on land. If you think about the amount of stamina needed, and what kinds of energy systems you're engaging, during a 5 quad free skate, it actually becomes really complex. It's a 4 minute duration, so you're definitely using the base level aerobic capacity just to last through the whole tjing. But for jumps and maybe for spins, you're engaging the anaerobic and ATP-ADP systems. So you have to train all 3. But drilling jumps, for example, only trains the second two. If all you do on the ice is short bursts of activity interspersed with leisurely skating, you're not going to train the right energy systems. Someone mentioned in one of these posts that Yuzu's first coach used to give him exercises to improve his stamina like skating continuously for an hour...and that's probably the way for a skater to build that base-level stamina. Doesn't sound like much fun. Round and round in ovals for an hour...almost as bad as up and down the pool following the black line on the bottom of the lane.

It only feels easy because you get used to it! But the easy stuff is really only at the start of the season when you're building your aerobic base. When you start into training for specific events, you're rarely swimming below 60% of max HR. I used to specialize in 200 I.M, 100 &200 breaststroke, and 200-400 free. At those racing distances, you're never training easy. You might do some long slow distance sets, but you're pushing all the time. Maybe I should explain that when I say 'overtrain' in this sense, I don't mean 'the athlete overdoes it and pushes themselves too far'. I mean specifically that the athlete does many times more physical work (either distance covered, or weight lifted, or whatever) in training than they would ever do in competition. The opposite of this would be something like a marathon runner. They don't go out and run 3 marathons every time they practice for their event. But a swimmer who races the 200m distance will go to practice and do a 4000m practice in the morning, and then do another 3 or 4 thousand meters in the evening on the same day, and do dryland training in between, if they're elite-level. And then do the same thing the next day or the day after, lather, rinse, repeat. Now I don't know what kind of training approach is taken for figure skating usually, but it would seem to me that doing tons of run-throughs is a kind of 'overtraining' approach. BUT because of what jumping does to the body, this will lead to injury. So what is the answer for a figure skater? I'm not sure.

The reason there's even a stamina narrative at all is because Yuzu himself keeps mentioning it. But the physical reality, if you look at athletes across various disciplines and especially those in sports that place a high cardiovascular demand on the body, is that stamina tends to peak in the late 20's - early 30's. (Take a look at cross-country skiing, for example. The winning guys aren't the baby skiers, they're the uncles). So my opinion, taking into account that I have no direct personal knowledge of Yuzu specifically, is that Yuzu still hasn't reached his peak stamina as an adult man but is getting closer to it. Maybe he also is aware of this, and maybe that's where all his comments about stamina are coming from. Either way, of course his stamina is going to give the appearance that it's getting worse if you were to compare his performance 5 years ago in a two-quad program with his performance now in a 5 - quad program. How do you even build stamina for a 5-quad program to begin with? I mean, do you have to invent an entirely new way of training, or what? But I think it's clear that he has gotten better and stronger since his teens

The difficulty is that increasing stamina is done mainly by increasing the amount of work you do, which directly increases the risk of injury. Maybe the answer to this question for Yuzu doesn't lie on the ice but in some other area. For example, stamina can be increased by doing basic cardio like running or biking, and lots of it. He mentioned in an interview that swimmers can perform multiple disciplines and races in one competition without loss of stamina. Well that's because swimmers overtrain - for every meter a swimmer races at competitions, they've swum hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers in training, and trained every single energy system the body has, many times over. If Yuzu wants that kind of stamina, he's probably going to have to try something completely new to what he's done before.