World Champions Joey Mantia & Bart Swings | Skate Along Interview

We're gonna go do a little skating once he gets his dress zipped up. All zipped up. We all have our role in the company, okay? Talk ---- now, I'm about to get dropped. All right, so I need to remember the questions. I have my phone here. Let's see if I can bend my knees. Dude. Not great. Did you just fart? No, I was trying to get on the stroke with you and then you just stopped too. I was like, all right, what are we doing here? First question is what is the difference between your skating styles? Our styles? Well, I think your double push is more like full. Yeah. I think mine is a bit more in an efficient way. Yeah. And yours is for top speed, I guess. I would agree with that. I like to get more into like the meat of the push here and kick it. And when I watch you skate, it's more sit on it. Yeah. You grab wider. So you grab from out here. Yeah, yeah. I start quite early. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like when I was skating my best, I did something similar where I would catch it really wide and pull it in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then as the years went on, I got closer and closer to set down being underneath me. But what I like with skating to be is like have early pressure, like be early with everything. So also with my double push early. Yeah. Because I'm less comfortable at the end of the double push. Yeah. When you go the widest, I don't feel super comfortable. Like out here? Yeah. And especially when you do a marathon, it's... For sure. I think 125 is really catered to your style a bit better too. Yeah. Grabbing and kind of sitting on the wheel. Yeah. A long time. Yeah. True. Next question is how many junior medals do you each have? Oh. ****. Ah, the medals? I don't know. Yeah. I know I got four goals. I guess you did that in one championship. I got 10 in one. 10 in one. Yeah, true. Ah, ****. So. You got it also first year junior? You got a world title? Yeah. Um, yeah. I was... My first junior championship was in Oostende. Ah, yeah. Yeah. 2002. I was there. Yeah. As a spectator. Watching. Being inspired. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But yeah, for me, I don't know how many... Do you keep track of your silver and bronze and... No. I have no idea either. I only did it like one time with a journalist. Like check all my medals. Yeah. At worlds or championships. Yeah. And I came down to 107. So that was a few years ago. That's a lot. I got more now. For me, I have 12 junior gold. No idea how many. Oh, damn. But it's junior. Yeah, okay. But like now we have a kid that's dominating junior. But you did it next level. Yeah. 10 golds is... Was racing against Alexey. Yeah. Frankalini. Yeah. Strong generation, so... Yours wasn't bad either though. Against Ferra, he was... Yeah, you had a pretty good generation. All right. What's the difference between coaching ice and coaching inline? I think it's... That's one for you. I'm not a coach yet. Yeah. I would say with inline, it's much less meticulous on the technique. Yeah. We focus on some key things, keeping the basics clean. For the most part, you just train hard in general and race a bit more. Yeah, I think ice's efficiency is even much higher. You have to be efficient. Yeah. Because it's a time trial. For sure. That's what I'm saying. I feel like long track is the easiest to coach because you know what to train for. Yeah, you know exactly what's coming. That's true. Short track's harder because you have a wider skill set. You have to be good at racing. Yeah. You have to be good at three different distances. Yeah, that's true. And so trying to cover all that... I think for inline, you have to be quite all around. Yeah. Like you need to be fast because otherwise it's going to be hard to win a race. I agree. It doesn't matter which race. Yeah. Every race, you have to be fast. I think for sure inline, if you're trying to be good at everything, it's probably the hardest to train for. And it takes a long time to develop because you can't just get good at everything in one season. It's like a long-term progression. I never really... Like I had some years that I was competitive in the 500 but never at the world's level. And you came... Yeah, you did it from back in the day 300 up until marathon. Yeah, I didn't get good at the 300 really until a bit later in the career. Okay. We started doing specific sprint practices. When I was living in Colorado and it just... Yeah, you get good at what you train for. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, for sure. I usually... My point, like what I was focusing on was points race. Yeah, that makes sense. I was fully training for that. Yeah. And then with the speed, I could combine it with everything up until 1k, I guess. So you train way more specifically for the actual race. Yeah. I feel like if I look back at our inline programs, we trained intervals but it wasn't so hard where you have to sprint and keep going and sprint and keep going. Yeah, yeah. We trained a lot of sprint, stop for four laps. Okay, yeah. Just roll, sprint again. And so I really got my top speed and my acceleration strong as a result of that. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, as a... Yeah, I'm doing those things also but I also have like... You have more specificity. One lap cool, one lap easy. Right. For 10 laps, like those trainings are killing me. Yeah, that's... Five times together with Jason, yeah. I never liked that. We did it a little bit and I got better at it but I was never at your level, not even close. Points race was always my... And it was the hardest for you to win but then you could... We were able to win every other race so... I'm not. Never being close, everything under 1k, so... How do you transition so easily between ice and inline? So easily? Well, it's not easy. I mean, like coming from ice to inline is quite easy. Usually, I finish a season in March on ice and four weeks later I'm racing guys again and can be competitive, so... What do you feel like... Obviously, as the years go on and you do it more often, it becomes just second nature. Yeah, yeah. But the first few times, do you remember putting your inlines back on and being on the ice and just feeling like, I don't know how to skate anymore? Yeah. It's not only in the beginning. I still have it a lot of times that I'm feeling uncomfortable. Don't really feel like... Feel the ice or anything. Really? And that's a feeling I never have on inline. Yeah, yeah. Like skating bad doesn't happen often on inline. I feel like I lost a little bit of my finesse and my feel. I mean, I didn't race inlines for over 10 years. And so I didn't really have any need to keep looking for it to be effective and be efficient. Almost every time I put my inlines on in the last 10 years, I was just trying to stay off my double push and just skate like an ice skater and just... Like we were talking about yesterday, try to have the X knees, try to land in the inner already and just be here and create pressure and pressure. Yeah, that's ice skating. Right, right. And so I lost a bit of my ability to feel this easily. And I was talking to Farah last night. If we had a venue to skate in Salt Lake, I never would have stopped inline skating. But there's nowhere to skate. That's one thing I'm really happy that I never... I never switched sports. I just always combined it. I was so jealous of that because you were able to keep that level. And if things weren't going well for you on the ice, you could always come back home. Like if you have a bad season. You look forward to something else inline and you start winning again. And that motivates me also to go back to the ice. Exactly. All right. What is your heart rate zone while endurance training? On skates? Well, on skates, I never really do pure endurance. Like really low speed. Usually I go like 35, 36 average. Okay. Kilometers an hour. So you're more on average speed when you're on your skates. Yeah. And then... That's like heart rate 140, 150. Okay. So you still push kind of. It's not super easy. Not like on the bike where you can go for five hours. Right. That's around 130. It just costs a little more. When I'm skating inline, I feel like my heart rate is naturally a bit higher than the effort that I'm giving. Yeah, because you carry your own weight. Right. And I prefer to push it more on the inline. Not just cruise too easy. Yeah. Okay. What is your heart rate zone? Like what are your actual beats per minute for zone two? I think that's going to be 150. Okay. 160. And below? Like what's the bottom? 130, 140. Okay. Yes.