The planet’s warming, Al Gore’s winning Oscars and Nobel prizes for his inconvenient truth film and Greenland lost 13 billion more tons of ice last summer than in any previous recorded summer,

That’s an impressive quantity of ice, but who ever skated on it. The speed skating oval at Catamount Family Center – near my house – has closed, never to reopen.

What I’ve done on that oval has never been called “speed skating” but it was exercise in the winter air and I’ll miss it.

When the oval opened in 1994, Catamount was able to log some 80 days of skating each winter. In the 2004-05 season, the oval was open just 17 days and for the last two season, it didn’t open at all.