Isabelle Weidemann took a step back to find joy before skating her way to two medals at Beijing Olympics

Opinion

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This article was published 10/02/2022 (1332 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJING For Isabelle Weidemann the suffering was real: her legs felt like concrete, and she considered throwing up. Her coach had told her not to conserve anything, to cross the finish line empty, and the towering speedskater fought to keep herself low so she could put pressure on the ice. Weidemann has always been able to apply pressure, to herself or otherwise. When she crossed the line, for a bit, she couldn’t even see her time.

The suffering was real, but different. The 26-year-old Weidemann has always been good at eating up training. Tell her to go for a two-hour bike ride and she’d do two and a half, or more. She came into the 5,000-metre final with the second-fastest time in the world this season, and after bronze in the 3,000 she hoped to have enough left for this one, the apex of women’s distance races: Dutch skater Irene Schouten was favoured to win a second gold, but after that it was anyone’s race, if you could skate it.

She could. Weidemann crossed the line in 6:48.18, which was the fastest time with two skaters to go: The six-foot-two Ottawa native had opened slow before willing herself into a rhythm through the middle part of the race, and she hadn’t cracked. Schouten had the last race, and she was unbeatable: an Olympic record 6:43.51.

But Isabelle Weidemann has silver now, and bronze. And afterwards she was asked: What are you most proud of over the last four years, since finishing sixth and seventh in Pyeongchang and taking that harder than you should? Weidemann smiled.

“I mean, the training never gets easier,” she said. “But I wanted to change my … my mentality around sport. And that’s the thing I’m most proud about, is changing how I approach training and how I approach competing. I think I wanted to focus more on growth, and more on learning every day, and not …”

Weidemann changed course.

“I wanted to be less hard on myself, and have a little bit more compassion for the work that I did. And that’s been a big learning curve. You know, I think as distance athletes we tend to be kind of our worst enemy sometimes. And I wanted to find more joy in the sport.”

She was hard on herself. Weidemann once told the CBC’s Anastasia Bucsis, her old teammate, that she would bike in her garage until she passed out, or until she cried and threw up. She said she thought there is a part of her that liked it, secretly, that digging deep. Suffering. For a young woman with a hyperactive mind, long track is a way to do that, over and over, searching for a painful sort of Zen.

But then COVID hit and the ice and her teammates were taken away, and she took a step back and told herself: I can’t keep doing this. She had fun with more creative training methods, but also dialed them back. Less suffering, to suffer better. Being grateful.

“It’s not productive to train every day, hours and hours and hours, and you do not find joy in what you’re doing,” said Weidemann.

So she was asked: Did that lack of joy translate into your life then? Does the joy you take in the work now — the daily work, being present, what you call the attitude of gratitude — bring you more happiness now? Weidemann’s cheeks were glowing at this moment.

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“Oh, yeah, that’s a great question,” she said. “Yeah, I mean, I think I recognize that a lot of things that I was doing were pretty unsustainable. And it’s that aspect, that kind of aggressive Type A personality, that trickles into sport. I think often, it’s what’s made me good.

“But I think everybody at this level trains the same way, so you can’t get away with with doing stuff like that — with overtraining, with just putting in mindless hours. So yeah, you know, as I change that in sport I really recognize that in school and in life and, you know, other things. So yeah, definitely. Yeah.”

She was so happy. She talked about wanting to skate a 10,000, which is only a distance in men’s long track. She talked about the encouragement she got from Canadian sports legend Clara Hughes, who won this race in Turin as one of her six Olympic medals and who has supported Weidemann for years, and told her before these Games to enjoy every moment, all of it. She talked about the team pursuit, in which Canada has a good chance at yet another medal, largely because she is the steam engine that drives it. She talked about her coach, Dutchman Remmelt Eldering, who is the first consistent coach she has ever had.

And Isabelle Weidemann walked off, a towering grinning woman with red cheeks cradling her second ceramic panda of the week, a silver medallist, and bronze as well. The suffering was real, but it wasn’t about punishing herself, or finding hard places. It was just joy.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur