Roller Derby: Week 2

Yesterday, I had my third Roller Derby Boot Camp practice, which also started our second week of training. We practice twice a week on Sunday and Thursday evenings.

Thursday was kind of a rough day for me. Partly I think it was that I was missing flyball practice to be there, which messed with my mental game a bit. Since the Thursday practices for both of these sports overlap, I will be juggling between the two for a while. Also hard was that I decided to try borrowing some of the loaner skates they have available at the training building. I've been skating in my mom's old rink skates that she is letting me borrow, which aren't ideal for derby. But trying on all those other skates did nothing but hurt my feet in all variety of ways, until I finally switched back to the rink skates.

My rink skates

On my way to practice yesterday I was feeling a little hesitant. I also fell a lot on Thursday, partly because of the different skates we were trying. I know I will fall a lot in derby. It is part of the game. There will never be a point where I will never fall. But it was a little discouraging. Last night's practice totally made up for it though!

The first thing we really learned was crossovers. This is basically where you pick up your outside foot when turning, bring it over in front of your other foot, set it down, and push out with the foot that stayed in place. It helps you corner faster and picks up a LOT more speed than just leaning into the turn or pushing a bit with the outside foot. It is also hard to get coordinated enough to do. It felt like the kneepads were in the way, my feet were huge and awkward, and like I was about to fall over the entire time. But, after a few rounds of the track, I was starting to get it, and when I did it right for the first time, it felt amazing.

Practicing stepping to the side doing crossovers before hitting the track with them

I think learning the crossovers was the biggest thing in practice for me yesterday. We also practiced T-stops, which I got way better at, and plow stops, which I haven't had much problem with because of my experience skiing and skijoring, where you use a lot of plow stops for slowing down and controlling your speed on hills or behind dogs. Then, as we were about to practice two knee slides/stops, my skate broke. The pivot cup (a piece that holds the skate wheels steady in place) snapped, making my skates unstable and unsafe to skate on. I quickly walked on my knees to the chairs, got those skates off, grabbed a random pair from the wall that looked like roughly the right size, and got back into practice as soon as I could.

Getting instructions before one of the drills

I don't know if it was my confidence or if the skates were just a better pair than I tried last time, but I felt pretty okay in them the rest of practice. We didn't have a whole lot left at that point. We made a pace line again (spaced 1 arm length apart behind another skater, all in a line, the goal being to keep the same speed, distance, and spacing) and then practiced weaving up the line between the skaters, while maintaining spacing. It was really hard to do the weaving because when going to the inside of the line, it was easy to skate too fast and get ahead of them. And then going to the outside of the line, it was super easy to skate too slow and get left behind. But everyone did really awesome with it.

Practicing stepping side to side and front to back without rolling

I think the best single thing in practice was doing the 25 in 5 again. We did it last Sunday as well. Basically, the point is to skate laps for 5 minutes, with a goal of being able to skate a minimum of 25 laps in that time. Last week, I skated 14. This week, I made it up to 19! If nothing else, that shows me how much faster doing crossovers is. And I can't wait until I am in better shape and get better at crossovers, because I know my speed is going to pick up a lot more the better I get.

Water break!

Mischief Monday: New Sports

I am sore this morning. Kind of an all over muscle soreness with a few concentrated areas that hurt worse- my hip, my elbow, and the portion of my foot with the blister. All of this, because I joined a new sport. We had practice for the first time last night. And the mischief part of that? It doesn't involve the dogs. The new sport is Roller Derby.

Geared up but afraid to stand up

I don't normally post my non-dog stuff on the blog, I know. But, this new sport will be practices two or more times per week for at least the next seven weeks, so will be taking up a lot of my time, and I think I might want to have something to look back on and see how far we've come. So far, it is a lot of fun, but I kind of feel like the trainers are trying to kill us and have us melt into the ground. First, we skated in circles (once we got the courage to stand up on skates for the first time in years!). Then, we did falling and stopping drills where we were introduced to some of the basic ways to stop yourself when moving- three of which involve deliberately falling- knee stops, using left, right, or both knees. What falling on your knees repeatedly means is that you have to get up off your knees over and over and over again, and my thighs are telling me about it this morning!

First attempt at 25 laps in 5 minutes. No, I got no where close!

After we got the hang of the basic ways to stop, including T-stops and plow stops as well as the knee stops, the real torture began. (By this point, by the way, I had fallen once on accident, landing on my not-padded hip and my elbow, both of which are also telling me about it this morning.) We did a time trial of how many laps we could finish in 5 minutes. Man, I started off pretty strong, but by that point, my legs were killing me and I'd developed a blister on my foot, and it was all I could do to keep going after a few laps. To pass Boot Camp, you need to skate 25 laps minimum in the five minutes given. I made it to 14 and felt dead at the end. I'm confident that by the end of Boot Camp I'll have a hard time believing I could only make 14 laps and that I thought it was hard!

Being pushed by a partner around the track.

We also did a bunch of different drills. One of them involved being pushed and pushing a partner around the track. It sounds like it would be easy to be pushed, but staying in a deep enough crouch to not fall over but not actually moving your own legs for momentum really makes the thighs burn deep. And pushing a partner was surprisingly easy in comparison. We switched back and forth who was pushed and who was the pushee to help spread the pain more evenly.

Equal spacing and speed practice, with extra crazy mixed in

We also did a line drill to practice even spacing and speed. The spacing and speed part wasn't too hard until some of the trainers and more experienced girls started weaving back and forth up the moving spaced line! Thinking about where the weaving skater was, looking back for her, and not freaking out when she passed within inches of me, all that made the equal spacing a lot more difficult.

To throw in a little more torture, we were introduced to burpees on skates (which I now need to seriously practice without skates, along with my lunges, because ouch) as well as a "Simon says" type game on skates.  Basically, torture.

But in the end, it was so much fun. I can't wait for the next class.