Canucks associate coach Rick Bowness is from a time - after the wheel but before the printing press - when the NHL consisted of first 17, then 21 teams and everyone flew commercially.

That meant the Winnipeg Jets, where Bowness played and coached, had to request the non-smoking section of the aircraft. That meant every road trip to the States started with a flight to Minneapolis or Chicago. That meant Winnipeg to L.A., was a nine-hour ordeal which was the bad news. The good news? The Jets would stay and play back-to-back games in L.A., which resulted in a five-day respite for the Manitoba winters.

Bowness was asked to compare travel then versus travel now in the NHL.

“You can't,” he said. “It's a different world. The number of teams changed everything. The lifestyle in those days was completely different and a lot of it had to do with travel.”

Which brings us around the Bowness's current employers, the Vancouver Canucks.

“You have to manage your players so much differently,” he said. “We used to land, head to the rink, and practice the day before a game. You can't do that anymore. You still have to practice to stay sharp but the intensity of the practices changes.

“We give them a lot of days off which you absolutely have to for the mental break.”

And therein lies the great conundrum travel represents to most NHL teams.

If HBO's 24/7 series exposed anything about life in the NHL, it showed that travel, while glamorous to the outside world, is a stultifying, mind-numbing exercise which, by this point in the season, is boring beyond all human endurance. Between the preseason and the regular season, the Canucks will spend approximately 134 hours in the air and, while their claims to having the NHL's most onerous travel schedule are debatable (see accompanying chart), travel and its effects have become a fixation with the organization.

“It's gruesome and it's challenging,” head coach Alain Vigneault says of his team's travel sked.

“It's a mental grind,” says backup goalie Cory Schneider. “We're in five cities in seven nights. You forget your hotel room. You have to remind yourself what city you're in. You get sick of eating out all the time and sitting around in hotel rooms. Maybe the physical toll is a little overstated. The mental side isn't.”

To that end, the Canucks employ Fatigue Science, an international company with offices in Honolulu, Vancouver and Barcelona whose clients include the United States Army, Safeway, London Drugs and United Airlines. The Canucks are a tad proprietary about their relationship with Fatigue Science – media types who travel with the team have to sign a confidentiality agreement.

Their website does, however, report the reaction time of a fatigued athlete can be 2 ∏ times slower than a well-rested one.

We can only assume Moe Lemay was seriously sleep-deprived all those years.

But sleep is just one component of the travel puzzle. To a man, the players say practice and the games aren't the issue. It's the planes, trains and automobiles existence they lead when they're not at the rink.

On the Canucks' most recent road trip, for example, they hit five cities in six days, flew just under 11,000 kilometres, changed time zones three times, played one back-to-back and stayed in four different hotels.

Keith Ballard now punches his hotel room number into his phone after more than a few instances of forgetfulness. The players also understand that travelling first-class on charters and staying in five-star hotels doesn't win them a lot of sympathy. But there's more to life on the road than fancy hotels and fancier restaurants.

“You have to break the montony,” said Ballard. “It can be something as simple as going to a movie or bowling If you don't get out and do something, you're sitting in a hotel room all day. You can stay at the nicest hotel in the world but when you're doing it as often as we do, it's all the same. It's time away from your family and your kids.”

“You've got the human element to it,” says Schneider. “Most of us are married with families or have girl friends. When you're away from them for seven, 10 days, it wears on you.”

And you can only go bowling so many times.

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