I connected with Alex Ianculescu on Twitter about two weeks ago. After watching her tweets and sending a few DM’s to her @speed_skater, I knew we had to share her story here on the Generation Go blog.

If you need a source of motivation – this could be it.

This girl is amazing. She has been skating since the age of two. She’s currently (almost) 18 years old. She has dual citizenship and has trained with both the Canadian and Romanian Junior National Speed Skating Teams. Her love for speed skating is infectious (I want a pair of these $1,200 skates to take me flying around the Oval now!)

Alex was the Romanian Junior National Speed Skating Champion in 2007 and 2008 with first place finishes in the 500m, 1,000m and 1,500m distance races. She was also the 2007 Romanian Inline Rollerblading Champion with another spray of gold medals. Alex won silver in the Women’s 500m at the North American Speed Skating Championships this year and was a silver medalist overall at the R U FAST Short Track event this year as well.

Although she is just a young lady, this former Torontonian has quite the story.

Born in Romania, Alex came to Canada when she was ten. Her mother Sanda was a Romanian national speed skating champion in her day. She got Alex involved with the Toronto Speed Skating Club when she was the tender age of 11.

Alex skated in Toronto until about three years ago.

On a visit to Romania, Alex’s mother ran into her former speed skating coach. The coach asked Sanda to send Alex to Romania so he could assess her skating talents. He eventually offered to train her and Alex ended up on the Romanian Junior National team traveling and competing around Europe and China.

She trained with the Romanian National Team until the 2008 World Junior Speed Skating Championships in China. Although Alex was ready to compete and potentially place very well at the Worlds, the Romanian team lost their luggage on the way to the competition and were sadly unable to compete.

While she was at the World Juniors, Alex met Neil Marshall, a Canadian speed skating coach who invited her to Calgary to train long-track and later on, skate with the Canadian national team. Alex decided to return to Canada and pursue skating here. She currently attends the National Sport School in Calgary and trains at the best speed skating facility in the world, in the program just under the Canadian national speed skating team. Alex raced on the Calgary ice seven days after she arrived and dropped her best 500m time by 2.5 seconds. Impressive!

Sadly, Canada does not usually support aspiring national team athletes while they are training and therefore athletes are left to foot the expenses themselves. The costs of training in Calgary and going to school at NSS are astronomical for Alex. She is currently trying to fundraise $12,500 to cover her tuition, room and board, training, travel and racing expenses for the next year. Alex is very determined to get to the Olympics and win Canada a gold medal.

I was impressed by how well Alex was able to tell me what speed skating was like. The sound of her blades on the ice, the air rushing past her, the feeling she gets speeding around the track, the long lasting relationships she has made with her teammates are so important to this young Romanian-Canadian speed skater.

Alex wants to go to the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia and be a gold medalist in the 500m event with a time of 36.95.

She’s simply a confident and inspiring young woman.

Follow Alex on twitter @speed_skater or check out her website.

Best of luck Alex!