Jesse Speijers will make his World Cup debut this weekend in Obihiro, Japan. The 21-year-old skater was one of the surprises of the qualifying tournament, with the help of the document How to skate a 10k by two-time Olympic champion Nils van der Poel.
A day before his 5 kilometers at the World Cup qualifying tournament in Heerenveen, Speijers spends another two hours on the bike. “No one does that so close to a match,” says the young Rotterdammer. “But I didn’t want to turn off my engine completely. And I also thought: taking a chance is winning a prize.”
It could have been a statement by Van der Poel. The Swedish stayer overwhelmed the skating sport between 2020 and 2022 by not doing what all his competitors did. He was an avid runner, he did not do speed skating or inline skating, he cycled 33 hours a week in the summer and he skated 240 laps a week at competitive speed in the winter.
We know those precise numbers because Van der Poel changed his full training schedule one day after his Olympic title in the 10 kilometers in Beijing. made public. “I believe you may be able to surpass my achievements if you follow this program,” he writes in the foreword to How to skate a 10k …and also half a 10k.
Coach Martin ten Hove of Team IKO, the Speijers team, read the 62-page document with great interest after the Games. “We immediately said to each other that it would be stupid not to learn lessons from it,” he says. “There are some very interesting aspects to Van der Poel’s program. He has made really brave choices. And they have inspired us very much.”
Start world cup
The World Cup season for long track speed skaters starts on Friday in Obihiro, Japan. Jesse Speijers will be in action on the final day on Sunday in the 5 kilometers.
Just like Van der Poel, Speijers trains at competition speed
The spectators have only just settled into their seats in Thialf when Speijers puts in the best performance of his career in the second race of the new skating season. The number ten of last year’s National Championship distances shaved almost ten seconds off his personal record in the 5 kilometers of the World Cup qualifying tournament. His time of 6.16.46 is good for third place and a ticket for his World Cup debut.
“I didn’t think I would be able to skate for all this time,” says Speijers after his race. “But I started the race without fear. Because I knew that I had already driven these kinds of lap times many times in recent months.”
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Since last year, the South Hollander has also been completing laps in training in 29 or 30 seconds, on his own and switching from indoor to outdoor lane. That sounds logical, but in skating it is customary to do training laps in a train with teammates.
Van der Poel thought that was strange. “The core idea of my regimen is that you become good at what you train,” he writes How to skate a 10k. “That’s why I always skated at competition speed, solo and with changes at the intersection.”
It is one of the elements of the ‘Van der Poel method’ that Team IKO has adopted. “And you now notice with Jesse that it can work,” says coach Ten Hove. “In the run-up to the qualifying tournament, Jesse saw that he was continuously skating laps of 29.4 or 29.5 seconds. That gave him a lot of confidence and made him think before his race: I am going to do exactly what I had been doing for weeks in the training. And it worked.”
How many kilometers did Jesse Speijers cycle in 2023?
His teammates sometimes thought he was crazy when he left for a long cycling training session last summer. This year, Speijers’ counter stands at more than 15,000 bicycle kilometers, at least 2,000 kilometers more than last year.
That is also Van der Poel’s influence. “I have read his story completely,” says Speijers. “Nine times out of ten you can’t do anything with such a schedule, but this did trigger something in me. And fortunately my coaches were also open to changing things and applying parts of Van der Poel’s document to me .”
The emphasis is on the word “parts”, because Speijers certainly does not follow the entire schedule. “What Van der Poel did was really very extreme,” says Ten Hove. “It wouldn’t be right if we said: We’ll do that one-on-one with our drivers until we reach the limit.”
Speijers therefore cycled 20 to 25 hours a week in the long preparation for the skating season, and not 33 hours like Van der Poel. “What Van der Poel did was not human. It must remain fun,” says Speijers.
“If you really do it his way, you won’t last long. It’s not without reason that he stopped again after two years. That’s why we only took the elements from his document that work for me. And so far it has worked. turned out very well.”
Daan de Ridder is a skating reporter
Daan has been writing about skating for NU.nl since 2014. Read more of his stories here.
Dutch selection for Obihiro World Cup
Women:
500 meter: Femke Kok, Jutta Leerdam, Naomi Verkerk, Dione Voskamp and Marrit Fledderus
1.000 meter: Jutta Leerdam, Femke Kok, Antoinette Rijpma-De Jong, Marrit Fledderus and Helga Drost
1.500 meter: Esther Kiel, Antoinette Rijpma-De Jong, Joy Beune and Sanne in ‘t Hof
3.000 meter: Joy Beune, Sanne in ‘t Hof, Antoinette Rijpma-De Jong, Esther Kiel and Reina Anema
Mass start: Esther Kiel in Reina Anema
Team Pursuit: Joy Beune, Esther Kiel in Reina Anema
Men:
500 meter: Merijn Scheperkamp, Sebas Diniz, Kai Verbij, Hein Otterspeer and Janno Botman
1.000 meter: Tim Prins, Tijmen Snel, Kjeld Nuis, Jenning de Boo and Janno Botman
1.500 meter: Patrick Roest, Kjeld Nuis, Wesly Dijs, Thomas Krol and Louis Hollaar
5.000 meter: Patrick Roest, Chris Huizinga, Jesse Speijers, Marcel Bosker and Bart Hoolwerf
Mass start: Bart Hoolwerf and Marcel Bosker
Team Pursuit: Marcel Bosker, Bart Hoolwerf and Louis Hollaar
Mixed gender relay: Femke Kok and Wesly Dijs
2023-11-09 04:05:45
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