Now that he's now taken up residency in the nerve centre of Western Canada's elite short track speed skating program Tim Hempsall's fast-twitch muscle responses have never been sharper.
As part of the Olympic Oval club program in Calgary, Hempsall is cutting the same ice as Olympic and national-team skaters, and he's lapping it up. The competitive environment he lacked for so many years in isolation as the jackrabbit of the Prince George Blizzard Speed Skating Club is now an everyday way of life for the 18-year-old Hempsall.
"There's lots of competition, lots of stuff I didn't have (in Prince George) -- people to chase, people to lead laps for me, so it's really good training," said Hempsall, who returned home home last weekend to help out as a track official at the Central Interior Challenge meet at the Coliseum.
"It's a pretty big group, lots of diversity, with guys from Israel and all over the place. There are a lot of resources -- a weight room right in the oval, you can get special food just for athletes, and every day I see skaters who have been in the Olympics. It's just really inspiring."
In Calgary, he's had to push himself that much harder just to keep up the rest of the clan, a catalyst he needs to drive him to the top of his game in Halifax for the Canada Winter Games, Feb. 10-19, 2011.
"That should be a lot of fun," he said. "It's been shown that people who get medals generally are on the national team and go to the Olympics."
He's now exclusively into short track racing, after several years of combining arena workouts with long-track training on outdoor ovals to improve his endurance and straightaway technique. Hempsall is in Oval Group 2 with coach Maggie Qi, a former Chinese national short track team member.
"Maggie is an amazing technical coach and from Day 1 she came in and started coaching the coaches who taught me, stuff they'd never even heard of," said Hempsall.
"This is basically the only thing I wanted to do after high school."
Hempsall is majoring in biological sciences in his first year at the University of Calgary, which is conveniently located right next to the Olympic Oval. His weekdays start with 90-minute practices in the morning and every afternoon he has dryland training or weightroom sessions to attend.
At the season-opening Octoberfest meet Oct. 8-10 in Calgary he placed fourth overall among junior skaters, where he shaved off a tenth of a second from his best with a time of 2:19.77 in the 1,500-metre event. He was just off his personal best of 43.55 in the 500m event. He went on to place first overall in the Canada Winter Games trials in Abbotsford, Nov. 6-7, to earn a spot on the B.C. team.
Hempsall has two seasons left as a junior skater and he's looking ahead to the Canadian junior national championships, Dec. 11-12 in Saguenay, Que. At stake is a chance to skate for Canada in the ISU world junior short track championships in Aosta, Italy, Feb. 18-20.
Last March as a 17-year-old, he finished 10th overall at the junior national championships in Edmonton. He won three bronze medals, including an unexpected podium result in the relay for the B.C. team of Hempsall, Mitch Kupchenko (Fort St. John, Jordan Rosborough (Kelowna) and Thomas McClennan (Ridge Meadows).
"Finishing 10th last year was awesome, I got pretty lucky in a lot of races," he said. "Our relay team didn't make it to the A-final, but two of the teams fell and one of the teams was disqualified and one of the guys who fell got hurt, so that took two of the teams out, so whoever got first in the B-final got the bronze medal.
"We started the B-final and we were in first, and on the first exchange I pushed and looked back, and all of the other teams fell. We were laughing inside; we couldn't believe our luck."
Hempsall's next meet is a Western Canada Cup event in Medicine Hat next weekend.
n Two other Blizzard alumni, Phillip Shrimpton, 19, and Sarah Pousette, 18, are currently part of the Olympic Oval long track program in Calgary.
