Curling. The sport’s stereotypes are more famous than its top athletes.
Supposedly, it’s a sport you can play while under the influence, a sport any skinny kid or elderly person can get involved in.
In fact, the Ottawa Curling Club on O’Connor Street does have a large bar.
A few guys waiting to go on the ice have taken their pints of Molson Ex into the heated waiting area in front of the ice sheets (although not, it should be noted, on the ice).
But drinks are the furthest thing from my mind when I’m crouched, a bit like a runner, in a starting block-type contraption (“the hack”), about to try to send a big heavy 44-pound piece of granite down to the other end of the rink.
I’m off balance and it takes time and some wrist strength I didn’t know I had to get readjusted.
Successfully rebalanced, I push off with my left leg, using my right leg as a sort of lever to get more power.
I’m engaging thigh muscles that haven’t had much to do since I last did a power skating drill three years ago.
In a lunging position, stone in hand, I glide a few feet down the ice.
It’s not all that far – good curlers can go much farther.
But Earle Morris, a longtime instructor at the Ottawa Curling Club, shouts encouragement.
We’ve been doing this for half an hour, and I’m red-faced and bent over.
“Good curlers are really into fitness,” Morris later explains.
“You need to have power back there in your legs, because you need to push out of the hack. You also need flexibility, because, as you can see, you get into some pretty interesting positions.”
Morris’ son, John Morris, curled with Canada’s gold-medal-winning team at the Vancouver Olympics earlier this year.
John Morris is the co-author of a book called Fit to Curl, which aims to help improve players’ power, strength, balance and flexibility.
“Curling requires athletic, physical movements– sweeping, delivering the stone– that tax the body considerably more than playing 18 holes (of golf) does,” John Morris writes.
“And of course, you can’t use a cart when you curl.”
John Morris says players can burn 600 to 700 calories per game.
“That’s equivalent to an hour or two of soccer or an hour of tennis. It’s quite a bit more than people realize,” he told an interviewer at the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.
“You have to train your cardio because a lot of times you have long events,” Morris says.
“At the same time, you have to train for power and for strength because you’re bursting out of the hack and you’re sweeping really hard at some points.”
Curler Chris Delage agrees, even though he has not taken his own curling career as far as Morris has.
“Everyone thinks curling is stupid, that it’s shuffleboard on ice, but if you want to play with the best you have to be in shape,” says Delage, 26, who has been curling for half his life.
“You have to have that straight posture and the right leg position, and you have to have the strategy of chess.”
“It looks simple, but try it,” adds curler Mike MacKinnon.
“Especially if you’re in the front end, it’s a two-hour workout, bearing down with your back and sweating.”
“Especially if you have to curl all day in tournaments,” says MacKinnon, who plays in a recreational league.
“It’s work.”
No kidding . . . I feel like I just spent half a day at the gym.
“That’s why we have a bar,” Mackinnon quips.
“We self-medicate.”