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All the Sundays Yet to Come: A Skater's Journey
The author looks at the professional figure skating circuit, discussing her years of training, performances with Hollywood on Ice, and the compromises she has made between her athletic ideals and the expectations of the professional world.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2003
1 person is currently reading
81 people want to read
About the author
Kathryn Bertine
9 books12 followers Kathryn Bertine is an author, athlete, activist and documentary filmmaker. She retired from professional bike racing in 2017 but remains active in advancing equity for women’s pro cycling.
Off the bike, Bertine is a filmmaker, activist, journalist and author of four nonfiction books, All the Sundays Yet to Come, As Good As Gold, The Road Less Taken and STAND.
From 2006 through 2012, Bertine was a columnist, author and senior editor for ESPN. When she pitched a documentary film on women’s pro cycling to ESPN in 2012, they rejected the proposal. So Bertine decided she would make it herself. After a two-year labor of love and crowdsourcing adventures, in 2014, HALF THE ROAD: The passion, pitfalls and power of women’s professional cycling was released. It won five film festivals, debuted in 16 nations, scored international distribution and successfully brought the hammer down on the corruption and sexism in sports. Half the Road is now available on iTunes, Vimeo, Amazon Prime and DVD. Five years later, she continues to receive royalties on a film ESPN said no one would watch.
As an advocate for equality in women’s sports, Bertine then started the social activism movement Le Tour Entier in an effort to bring parity to women’s professional road cycling, starting with the Tour de France. She and her team succeeded, and women’s field was included in 2014 with the addition of La Course by Tour de France. In 2017, she founded (and currently serves as CEO for) Homestretch Foundation, which provides free housing to female professional athletes struggling with the gender pay gap. Bertine was featured on the cover of Bicycling Magazine and profiled in Outside Magazine for her platforms of implementing change in the world.
As an activist, Bertine continues to serve as a public speaker/lecturer on equality and advocacy. She shares her journey and her message—that through passion, disruption, opportunity and focus, anything is possible and we’re all capable of effecting change—with corporations, universities and other professional outlets.
A native of Bronxville, NY she lives in Tucson, AZ. She holds a BA from Colgate University and an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD from The School of Hard Knocks. You can follow her on Twitter: @kathrynbertine @halftheroad @letourentier @HomestretchFdn FB: @KathrynBertine Insta:@Kathryn_Bertine and www.kathrynbertine.com
Off the bike, Bertine is a filmmaker, activist, journalist and author of four nonfiction books, All the Sundays Yet to Come, As Good As Gold, The Road Less Taken and STAND.
From 2006 through 2012, Bertine was a columnist, author and senior editor for ESPN. When she pitched a documentary film on women’s pro cycling to ESPN in 2012, they rejected the proposal. So Bertine decided she would make it herself. After a two-year labor of love and crowdsourcing adventures, in 2014, HALF THE ROAD: The passion, pitfalls and power of women’s professional cycling was released. It won five film festivals, debuted in 16 nations, scored international distribution and successfully brought the hammer down on the corruption and sexism in sports. Half the Road is now available on iTunes, Vimeo, Amazon Prime and DVD. Five years later, she continues to receive royalties on a film ESPN said no one would watch.
As an advocate for equality in women’s sports, Bertine then started the social activism movement Le Tour Entier in an effort to bring parity to women’s professional road cycling, starting with the Tour de France. She and her team succeeded, and women’s field was included in 2014 with the addition of La Course by Tour de France. In 2017, she founded (and currently serves as CEO for) Homestretch Foundation, which provides free housing to female professional athletes struggling with the gender pay gap. Bertine was featured on the cover of Bicycling Magazine and profiled in Outside Magazine for her platforms of implementing change in the world.
As an activist, Bertine continues to serve as a public speaker/lecturer on equality and advocacy. She shares her journey and her message—that through passion, disruption, opportunity and focus, anything is possible and we’re all capable of effecting change—with corporations, universities and other professional outlets.
A native of Bronxville, NY she lives in Tucson, AZ. She holds a BA from Colgate University and an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD from The School of Hard Knocks. You can follow her on Twitter: @kathrynbertine @halftheroad @letourentier @HomestretchFdn FB: @KathrynBertine Insta:@Kathryn_Bertine and www.kathrynbertine.com
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 8, 2015
There was a movie in the late seventies...called Ice Castles. The star...is a very good teenage skater who has a freak accident in her quest for Olympic greatness. The actress launches herself into a double axel while skating on a wall-less outdoor rink. She misses the landing and falls headlong into an entourage of patio furniture at the far end of the ice and knocks herself blind on the leg of the wrought-iron dinner table. While most viewers let go a gasp of frightened sympathy, I simply couldn't empathize. I'd rewind the movie over and over, wondering how the heck she managed to slide herself across the ice and entwine herself in a lawn chair—and on top of all that, go blind—without messing up her ponytail. Now that deserves a medal. (182)
I suspect that I would have read this much, much sooner had I realised that it was going to be funny. (Probably I should have been clued in by the pink boa, but really—the description on GR doesn't do the book justice.)
Bertine was a figure skater, good but not great; she is clear from the beginning this this is not the story of an Olympic hopeful (...that's her other book). It's worth noting that she turned down the chance to train at the National Sports Academy (142), although it is not clear how well she knew then that Olympics were not in her future. She did, however, set her sights on skating professionally—and with a successful Ice Capades audition under her belt before she went to college, she was well on her way.
Then the Ice Capades folded, and that's where the story really begins.
First in Europe and then in South America, Bertine tried to fulfill her dream. And she did, in a way: she was a professional skater, making her life on the ice. But she also shared that ice with livestock—chickens, a cow—was evaluated for potential on her weight and height and hair colour rather than her ability, and was stuck spinning in a cycle of weight loss and desperate skaters and the realisation that her dream had been built on unstable ground.
I read As Good As Gold before All the Sundays Yet to Come, and neither is your average ghostwritten athlete's memoir. Bertine says in As Good as Gold that she is athlete first and journalist second, and okay, sure—but her skill as a writer makes a tremendous difference. She also has the benefits of hindsight and of not taking herself too seriously: At age thirteen I competed in Shadow Dance and came in second place at a large Lake Placid competition. Amy and I were ecstatic to win the silver, but not so thrilled when we found out we were the only ones competing in the event. We watched the videotape later and came to agree with the judging. Our thirteen-year-old limbs flew hither and yon and our timing was completely off. Milli Vanilli had better syncopation than we did, and we were lucky the judges gave us any medal instead of outright disqualifying us on the grounds of complete incompetence in figure skating (127).
It's also a story of family. Bertine's focus is tighter in As Good as Gold, but even there there was some lingering...not bitterness, exactly, but perhaps twisted-mouth wryness with respect to her relationship with her mother. In All the Sundays, the background is much clearer. It takes some time for the purpose of the all the childhood stories and background to come to light; for a while I wasn't sure where Bertine was going. While I remain unconvinced that she needed to spend quite so much time on childhood, it really is towards the end—when Bertine returns home from South America—that it is clear why she is still angry. (Angry is probably the wrong word—it reads more to me as though Bertine is distanced but still guarded and has not fully forgiven her mother.)
Definitely a stripping-away-the-varnish kind of book.
I suspect that I would have read this much, much sooner had I realised that it was going to be funny. (Probably I should have been clued in by the pink boa, but really—the description on GR doesn't do the book justice.)
Bertine was a figure skater, good but not great; she is clear from the beginning this this is not the story of an Olympic hopeful (...that's her other book). It's worth noting that she turned down the chance to train at the National Sports Academy (142), although it is not clear how well she knew then that Olympics were not in her future. She did, however, set her sights on skating professionally—and with a successful Ice Capades audition under her belt before she went to college, she was well on her way.
Then the Ice Capades folded, and that's where the story really begins.
First in Europe and then in South America, Bertine tried to fulfill her dream. And she did, in a way: she was a professional skater, making her life on the ice. But she also shared that ice with livestock—chickens, a cow—was evaluated for potential on her weight and height and hair colour rather than her ability, and was stuck spinning in a cycle of weight loss and desperate skaters and the realisation that her dream had been built on unstable ground.
I read As Good As Gold before All the Sundays Yet to Come, and neither is your average ghostwritten athlete's memoir. Bertine says in As Good as Gold that she is athlete first and journalist second, and okay, sure—but her skill as a writer makes a tremendous difference. She also has the benefits of hindsight and of not taking herself too seriously: At age thirteen I competed in Shadow Dance and came in second place at a large Lake Placid competition. Amy and I were ecstatic to win the silver, but not so thrilled when we found out we were the only ones competing in the event. We watched the videotape later and came to agree with the judging. Our thirteen-year-old limbs flew hither and yon and our timing was completely off. Milli Vanilli had better syncopation than we did, and we were lucky the judges gave us any medal instead of outright disqualifying us on the grounds of complete incompetence in figure skating (127).
It's also a story of family. Bertine's focus is tighter in As Good as Gold, but even there there was some lingering...not bitterness, exactly, but perhaps twisted-mouth wryness with respect to her relationship with her mother. In All the Sundays, the background is much clearer. It takes some time for the purpose of the all the childhood stories and background to come to light; for a while I wasn't sure where Bertine was going. While I remain unconvinced that she needed to spend quite so much time on childhood, it really is towards the end—when Bertine returns home from South America—that it is clear why she is still angry. (Angry is probably the wrong word—it reads more to me as though Bertine is distanced but still guarded and has not fully forgiven her mother.)
Definitely a stripping-away-the-varnish kind of book.
January 6, 2013
Remember MySpace?
Ah, the good old days. MySpace (is MySpace still around?) introduced me to the art of trolling (w00t!). Back in the day my Friends and I were amongst the nastiest people I had ever met....and it was a blast!
We were seek and destroy trolls - when we would actively search for groups ripe with stupid people that we could flame while laughing hysterically at our own cleverness. I remember this one time, we decided to go see what was up with the white supremacists. We couldn't believe our luck! These people were hilarious! One of them had posted that virile post...you know...the one that lists all the standard complaints about black celebrations. The one that includes in its list of complaints the existence of BET television stations, the fact that Martin Luther King Jr has a national holiday, and the fact that there is a Black History Month. This young man was going on and on about how he wanted WET (White Entertainment Television), complained about not having national holidays for white people, and wanting a White History Month too. After engaging in the obvious intellectual traps, I asked, truly curious, what would be celebrated on White History Day. His response: the fact that the white man survived the Ice Age. !!! My troll friends and I were in hysterics for days on this one. This poor guy could not shake us from that moment on. Being the MySpace hacking trolls that we were, we mercilessly followed him wherever he went on MySpace. He could not visit an ice cream discussion group without us popping in and linking back to the stupidest of his comments.
How did I (virtually) meet these people? Well, MySpace hadn't only introduced me to trolling; it had introduced me to a whole world of anorexidom. In those days MySpace was chock-full of ana/mia (anorexia/bulimia) Groups. Oh, these sites did not give me an eating disorder. Oh, no, my eating disorder had me happily in its bony, cold choke-hold for years before there was even a term 'social media'. I'd been cold-blue starved, sitting alone in a corner counting and re-counting spinach leaves for a long time before I met my troll-buds.
But what I didn't know was that there was an eating disorder culture out there. Really. There really was. There were Groups of girls telling each other to stay strong and 'fast' for 5 pounds. I mean, these girls were posting collages of stick-thin models and calling it 'thinspiration', and compiling lists of tips & tricks for how to distract yourself from eating when hungry. Then they would go on and on about how hard it was to be anorexic, and...um....well... they were ...normal. It baffled my mind, after reading all the sob stories of how hungry they were, but nothing tastes as good as being thin, and how their anorexia was all because they didn't feel in control of their lives, and how their disease was ruining their lives, and blah blah blah.
And yet their before and after pictures were...normal. Some of them were, dare I say it,....fat. And not fat from anoretic's perspective. Really and truly fat. Not that there's anything wrong with being fat, but there is if you're claiming you have anorexia.
While sifting through all this bullshit and getting angrier and angrier at these silly girls, I naturally did come across others who were...like me. Skinny. And mad. And discovering the perfect target for our angers and frustrations: the wannarexic.
Oh, we had a love/hate relationship with the wannarexic. While we hated them for their stupidity and whininess and complete misunderstanding and misinterpretation of our particular diseases (my Friends included bulimics, compulsive exercisers, and this one eater who craved -and ate- chalk), we loved them for their entertainment value. And their entertainment value was predicated on their lack of ability to shake us trolls.
Eventually, our trolling affected a pendulum effect in anorexidom. Our trolling was so severe and so widespread that it became obvious which statements you could make that would reward you with a troll treatment. So there came a time when everyone acted like starving trolls. Everyone learned to say the right things (You collect thinspiration? You're a wanna), learned to attack others at the first sign of insincerity (you're "writing a research paper" on anorexia and want us to expose our tips & tricks? Fuck you), learned to cover their tracks. And so it just wasn't fun anymore.
When I reflect on my trolling era, I recognize it for what it was: an outlet for my anger and frustrations. There were the side benefits of being able to come up with a razor sharp come-back on a dime (which I think I'm starting to lose with misuse) and having a community to be a part of in a time in my life when IRL I was utterly alone.
But I also recognize some of the hypocrisy of my troll Friends. They (we) tried to justify their nastiness as being a public service: they humiliated wannarexics for their own and others' good. Wannarexics spread around tips & tricks, and encouraged young teenage girls to develop anorexia. This, of course, is ludicrous, and a gross misunderstanding of the disease by the diseased. I don't really know how or why one develops anorexia, but it's not by following an anoretic's tips & tricks, I know that much. I do, however, know some of the symptoms of prolonged self-starvation: a general feeling of injustice, jealousy toward 'normal' people, and an intense urge to be the best at the only thing you apparently do well: be skinny.
Eventually anorexidom on MySpace became a ghost town, and I eased (thundered? crumbled? white-knuckled? crept?) out of my disease (one not having anything to do with the other).
Anyway, my point with all this is that there was one part of this book, when Kathryn slips in, very non-chalantly, that she was starving herslef, but that she wouldn't go into details, lest she give away 'tips & tricks'. I almost gagged. I mean, even some author that I have no idea where she came from bought into this whole twisted anoretic logic (never help someone else succeed in losing weight lest she win, oops I mean, get a big old meany disease).
I liked the book in general. The glimpse into the world of figure-skating kept my interest well enough. It wasn't boring or anything like that.
But, really, I was disappointed and sad at her treatment of her anorexia.
Ah, the good old days. MySpace (is MySpace still around?) introduced me to the art of trolling (w00t!). Back in the day my Friends and I were amongst the nastiest people I had ever met....and it was a blast!
We were seek and destroy trolls - when we would actively search for groups ripe with stupid people that we could flame while laughing hysterically at our own cleverness. I remember this one time, we decided to go see what was up with the white supremacists. We couldn't believe our luck! These people were hilarious! One of them had posted that virile post...you know...the one that lists all the standard complaints about black celebrations. The one that includes in its list of complaints the existence of BET television stations, the fact that Martin Luther King Jr has a national holiday, and the fact that there is a Black History Month. This young man was going on and on about how he wanted WET (White Entertainment Television), complained about not having national holidays for white people, and wanting a White History Month too. After engaging in the obvious intellectual traps, I asked, truly curious, what would be celebrated on White History Day. His response: the fact that the white man survived the Ice Age. !!! My troll friends and I were in hysterics for days on this one. This poor guy could not shake us from that moment on. Being the MySpace hacking trolls that we were, we mercilessly followed him wherever he went on MySpace. He could not visit an ice cream discussion group without us popping in and linking back to the stupidest of his comments.
How did I (virtually) meet these people? Well, MySpace hadn't only introduced me to trolling; it had introduced me to a whole world of anorexidom. In those days MySpace was chock-full of ana/mia (anorexia/bulimia) Groups. Oh, these sites did not give me an eating disorder. Oh, no, my eating disorder had me happily in its bony, cold choke-hold for years before there was even a term 'social media'. I'd been cold-blue starved, sitting alone in a corner counting and re-counting spinach leaves for a long time before I met my troll-buds.
But what I didn't know was that there was an eating disorder culture out there. Really. There really was. There were Groups of girls telling each other to stay strong and 'fast' for 5 pounds. I mean, these girls were posting collages of stick-thin models and calling it 'thinspiration', and compiling lists of tips & tricks for how to distract yourself from eating when hungry. Then they would go on and on about how hard it was to be anorexic, and...um....well... they were ...normal. It baffled my mind, after reading all the sob stories of how hungry they were, but nothing tastes as good as being thin, and how their anorexia was all because they didn't feel in control of their lives, and how their disease was ruining their lives, and blah blah blah.
And yet their before and after pictures were...normal. Some of them were, dare I say it,....fat. And not fat from anoretic's perspective. Really and truly fat. Not that there's anything wrong with being fat, but there is if you're claiming you have anorexia.
While sifting through all this bullshit and getting angrier and angrier at these silly girls, I naturally did come across others who were...like me. Skinny. And mad. And discovering the perfect target for our angers and frustrations: the wannarexic.
Oh, we had a love/hate relationship with the wannarexic. While we hated them for their stupidity and whininess and complete misunderstanding and misinterpretation of our particular diseases (my Friends included bulimics, compulsive exercisers, and this one eater who craved -and ate- chalk), we loved them for their entertainment value. And their entertainment value was predicated on their lack of ability to shake us trolls.
Eventually, our trolling affected a pendulum effect in anorexidom. Our trolling was so severe and so widespread that it became obvious which statements you could make that would reward you with a troll treatment. So there came a time when everyone acted like starving trolls. Everyone learned to say the right things (You collect thinspiration? You're a wanna), learned to attack others at the first sign of insincerity (you're "writing a research paper" on anorexia and want us to expose our tips & tricks? Fuck you), learned to cover their tracks. And so it just wasn't fun anymore.
When I reflect on my trolling era, I recognize it for what it was: an outlet for my anger and frustrations. There were the side benefits of being able to come up with a razor sharp come-back on a dime (which I think I'm starting to lose with misuse) and having a community to be a part of in a time in my life when IRL I was utterly alone.
But I also recognize some of the hypocrisy of my troll Friends. They (we) tried to justify their nastiness as being a public service: they humiliated wannarexics for their own and others' good. Wannarexics spread around tips & tricks, and encouraged young teenage girls to develop anorexia. This, of course, is ludicrous, and a gross misunderstanding of the disease by the diseased. I don't really know how or why one develops anorexia, but it's not by following an anoretic's tips & tricks, I know that much. I do, however, know some of the symptoms of prolonged self-starvation: a general feeling of injustice, jealousy toward 'normal' people, and an intense urge to be the best at the only thing you apparently do well: be skinny.
Eventually anorexidom on MySpace became a ghost town, and I eased (thundered? crumbled? white-knuckled? crept?) out of my disease (one not having anything to do with the other).
Anyway, my point with all this is that there was one part of this book, when Kathryn slips in, very non-chalantly, that she was starving herslef, but that she wouldn't go into details, lest she give away 'tips & tricks'. I almost gagged. I mean, even some author that I have no idea where she came from bought into this whole twisted anoretic logic (never help someone else succeed in losing weight lest she win, oops I mean, get a big old meany disease).
I liked the book in general. The glimpse into the world of figure-skating kept my interest well enough. It wasn't boring or anything like that.
But, really, I was disappointed and sad at her treatment of her anorexia.
April 10, 2008
Both humorous and sad, this book about the absurd world of professional ice skating is consistently entertaining. Bertine brings a great sense of humor to her writing, even when describing the worst moments of her Hollywood-on-Ice-induced eating disorder (for example, eating wrappers because they have no carbs). Still, the way Bertine's eating disorder takes over her life as the managers of the tour and her prestige-craving mother commend her for her anoxeric behavior, is heartbreaking, regardless of the sometimes light way she tells the story. The sheer craziness of the tour is equal parts disturbing and funny. Skating cows and chickens (yes, both costumed and real ones), Bertine's tenure as a gigantic skating elephant, and a drunken Dino from the Flinstones are among the highlights. Worth reading, both as a cautionary tale about eating disorders and as a comedic look at the bizarre world of characters on ice, both in and out of costume.
May 24, 2007
It's a really interesting topic (being physically and emotionally broken down by the profesional skating industry), but I wish Bertine had done a couple more rounds of serious editing before this was published to weed out some of the tedious reminiscences of the "good old days" and to give the story a more defined direction.
March 14, 2009
Any figure skaing fan has heard of tours such as Stars on Ice where National and World medalists spend most of thier professional careers, but most don't know about what goes on behind the scenes for those professional skaters who are not household names. Kathryn Bertine gives us a look into the relatively unknown world of these skaters.
I found this subject very intriguing.
I found this subject very intriguing.
October 27, 2008
This is a memoir written by a former skater who tells her story of her harsh (or it sure sounds harsh) growing up conditions and the challenges of being a professional figure skater.
Very nicely written, though some parts are just horrible, it all seems to work out! This is a true story, and quite inspiring at that.
Very nicely written, though some parts are just horrible, it all seems to work out! This is a true story, and quite inspiring at that.
March 22, 2015
Eye-opening look behind-the-scenes on one figure skater's journey. Kathryn Bertine relates her struggles as a skater, a daughter, a woman and an athlete as she tried to reconcile all those things in one body. This story is shocking and very sad in parts but it is a story that needs to be told and all young athletes should read.
August 13, 2018
"As Good As Gold" is better, but this is an eye-opening book. Bertine was the youngest author that Harper Collins has ever published. Much of this book comes from her work in graduate school. One need not be a figure-skating fan to enjoy this book.
December 26, 2007
Hysterically funny and heartbreaking memoir about the world of professional figure skating. Ice shows aren't the glamour they appear to be! A must for any figure skating fan.
April 22, 2009
This memoir of an ice skater who "failed" while sinking into anorexia was not the book I was expecting from the description. I wound up skimming a lot of it because it was just boring.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews