Conversations with Clare: Marie Valentine, Speedskater

It starts from the ankles.

“Bend them as much as you can!” yells a petite, freckled Marie Valentine. “Then bend your knees, and your hips will go too. You have to get really low!”

She continues to teach me speed skating form on my USC housing carpeted living room, pushing from one foot to the other, each airborne foot weaving a strategic, hovering pattern above the pretend ice.

I copy her, and within seconds, both my lungs and quadriceps feel like they’ve been injected with lava. Apolo Ohno and romantic training montages may make it look easy, but Marie doesn’t kid around.

The rhythmic, calculated motion, the dumbed down version of the fast-paced, dangerous sport she tries to teach me is what she knows – she spent several years as an elite competitive speed skater. Though she hasn’t competed since 2006, it’s still a part of her life at USC, where she simultaneously studies policy, planning and development and works on a master’s in urban planning and economic development. She still loves the sport. which she got involved in by pure accident.

Originally a 7-year-old figure skater, Marie’s mother signed her up for a state competition by accident after she watched her daughter casually race a speed skater on the rink for fun.

“I hadn’t ever been on speed skates before that,” Marie said as she remembered the experience. “I was just going to watch. But I borrowed some guys’ speed skates and that’s how I went from there.”

The then cold and scared 7-year-old from Valencia would soon discover that racing would become her life.

On any given Monday during the training season, Marie would wake up at 3:30 a.m , get to the rink by 4:00 a.m and work. Every minute of her day had one of three purposes: training, eating or schooling. She studied videos of her and her competitors' form, trained on and off the ice, saw a nutritionist and went to class. This routine would be 6 or 7 days of her week – all with skaters going through the same thing. At that point, “Everyone’s the same,” she said. “They’re like family.” They trained together and spent summers together going to skating camp.

Her reward, though, was the thrill of skating.

“I like the air that goes through my helmet. I like feeling the wind. I loved passing through people – I’m small compared to a lot of people, and I had an advantage,” said Marie.

She watches the sport still, but with some reserve. She knows the athletes. She knows the texture of the ice, the feeling of what it’s like to smack into that metal wall at the same speed of a car.

“Of course I wanted to go to the Olympics,” she said.

She even had an opportunity to, after the 2006 Winter Youth Games, when a coach for the Russian team recruited her. She recalled the experience, which involved eating – unpleasantly — a spoonful of bright orange caviar, and, repulsed by the foreign slimy texture, downed the coach’s Gatorade to keep the eggs down.

But when a month before she was going to move to Moscow, terrorists bombed her newly leased apartment for her stay in Russia, her Olympic dreams collapsed too.

She stopped skating within a year.

“I could go [to the Olympics] in four years, but I would have to train again, quit school. I’ve lost a lot of muscle. In essence, I don’t think I would.”

“I leaned on skating for everything — good times, bad times,” she says wistfully.

But that isn’t her life anymore, and she knows that. She instead leans back in her seat and awaits my next question.

I instead ask her to show me how it’s done again.

She smiles, hops up off the couch, and starts by bending her ankles.

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Clare Sayas is a junior majoring in public relations from Glendale, California. She writes "Conversations with Clare" to share the stories of remarkable and interesting people at USC. You can contact her at sayas@usc.edu.